New on bookstore shelves this fall from G. P. Putnam's Sons is A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American South. Conceived by Ellen Rolfes, a longtime book packager, and written by John T. Edge, director of the Center's Southern Foodways Alliance, the cookbook features an introduction by Center Director Charles Reagan Wilson.

"Southerners still show their regional identity through the books they write, the music they sing, the jokes they laugh at, and yes, the food they eat, suggesting that they retain a distinctive style and a recognizable way of viewing life," Wilson writes in his introduction. "Dinner on the grounds brings together a church community in a symbol of wholeness. Sunday dinner at home has been a shared ritual of different Southerners for generations, reinforcing family ties over chicken and gravy. Breaking cornbread together and drinking sweet tea have been Southern sacraments, outward symbols of a deeper communion."

From left: John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, Charles Reagan Wilson, director of the Center, and Ellen Rolfes, a longtime cookbook packager who now works for University Development, display the cookbook A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American South, which was unveiled during the second Southern Foodways Symposium on October 29.
Photograph by Joe Ellis

Scattered throughout A Gracious Plenty are excerpts from the Federal Works Project's unpublished America Eats collection, for which writers compiled remembrances of "family reunions, political barbecues, fish fries, box supper socials, coon hunt suppers, cemetery cleaning picnics, chittlin' feasts at hog-killin' time," among others. Also enriching the new cookbook are 57 archival photographs--of children sharing a bucket lunch on the playground, of cooks tending pots of burbling oil at a church fish fry, of a clutch of aged Confederate veterans sharing a mint julep on a summer afternoon, and of many other scenes.

At the core of the cookbook, of course, are recipes--more than 400 Southern favorites like okra fritters and butterbeans, salmon croquettes and leather britches, country captain and casserole of possum. The recipes are culled, for the most part, from community cookbooks, those gravy-splattered, spiral-bound compilations written not by one but by many, not by chefs but by cooks.

Recipes in A Gracious Plenty come from more than 130 community cookbooks. Many are old favorites like Charleston Receipts, The Picayune's Creole Cook Book, and River Road Recipes. Newer collections include the National Council of Negro Women's Celebrating Our Mother's Kitchen; Food for Body and Soul, from the Highway Five Church for Body and Soul, of Nauvoo, Alabama; True Grits, from the Junior League of Atlanta; and Cookin in the Little Easy, compiled by the Humane Society of Oxford, Mississippi.

These collections are significant in the history of the South. Edge points out that "the first community cookbooks (also called compiled cookbooks, fundraising cookbooks, or regional cookbooks) were published during the Civil War as a means of raising funds for the treatment of wounded soldiers and the support of families who lost sons, fathers--and farms--to the ravages of battle. In the years following the war," Edge continues, "the compilation and sale of such cookbooks spread," involving "seemingly every charitable organization from the United Daughters of the Confederacy to Tuskegee Institute. By the end of the 19th century, more than two thousand community cookbooks were in print."

The strength of the book lies as much in documenting the communal draw of the meal table as in showing the curious cook how to bake a gravity-defying biscuit or stir up a tasty kettle of Brunswick stew. A Gracious Plenty offers Southern memories of meals past, of dinner on the grounds after a morning in church, of bombast and barbecue as savored at a political picnic, of snacking on fruitcake and coffee on a cold winter afternoon. Edge describes the meal memories as "recollections from people you know, like bluesman B. B. King, and people you should know, like barbecue pitmaster Lawrence Craig."

Among the dozens of meal memories in the book, humorist Roy Blount talks of his mother's giblet and red-eye gravies, chef Edna Lewis praises dandelion greens and poke sallet, bookseller Richard Howorth remembers a family dinner with Eudora Welty as a guest, and novelist Shelby Foote tells of buying tamales from a street vendor. "Many evenings before supper, sitting in the shade of the front porch of our home in Greenville, Mississippi," Foote recalls, "we waited on the hot tamale man to make his way through the neighborhood. You could hear him cry out 'Hot Tamale Man, hot-tamales, get your 'mollies!' You would whistle him over and get, say, a dozen or so. They were a sort of hors d'oeuvre, I guess, though we didn't even know that word then."

In retelling these tales and sharing these recipes A Gracious Plenty offers readers a taste of what it means to live beneath that Mason-Dixon divide, what it means to be a Southerner.

A Gracious Plenty is now available in bookstores everywhere.

"There have been many, many cookbooks about the food of the former Confederacy. But A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American South by John T. Edge trumps them all. . . .

"This very complete and moving book is an anthology of spiral-bound community cookbooks from all over the South. So it has its feet on the ground and speaks for all kinds of people, white and black, plain and fancy.

It also has some remarkable testimonials from Southern writers and other notables about Southern food. . . .

Best of all are the period photos of Southerners eating. . . . And there are rich tidbits culed from a never-finished Depression-era Federal Writers Project book known as 'America Eats.' The Mississippi novelist Eudra Welty worked on it, and now you can make the beaten biscuits she learned about from Mrs. C. L. Lubb of Aberdeen, Miss."

--Raymond Sokolov, Wall Street Journal