In this issue:

Religion and the American Civil War

Hot Peppers: The Story of Cajuns and Caspicum,

Louis Osteen's Charleston Cuisine:Recipes from a Lowcountry Chef.

Religion and the American Civil War.
Edited by Randall Miller, Harry Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson.
Oxford University Press, 1998. 448 pages.
$60.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Oxford University Press has published Religion and the American Civil War, edited by Randall Miller, Harry Stout, and Center Director Charles Reagan Wilson. This collection of essays is the first extended treatment of the relationship between American religious life and the Civil War. It is the culmination of a four-year project sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

In October 1994, the Center cosponsored, with the Louisville Institute of the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, a symposium on religion and the Civil War. The papers from that meeting formed the basis for this volume. Authors revised their symposium papers, and the editors added chapters to insure full coverage of the topic, which turned out to be a sweeping one indeed. "Like William Faulkner's imaginary Yoknapatawpha County," write the editors, "we had discovered a world that had been but dimly perceived."

In illuminating the complex relationship of religion and the Civil War, the editors bring together a stellar group of scholars. Phillip Shaw Paludan provides an overview to introduce readers to major themes, and James McPherson later adds an afterword that reviews the volume as a whole from his perspective as a leading military historian of the war. Eugene D. Genovese and Bertram Wyatt-Brown have complementary interpretations of the coming of the war, continuing their ongoing debate about its origins. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Drew Gilpin Faust examine the effects of the war on women, North and South.

The volume includes articles focusing on issues of leadership. George M. Fredrickson's piece shows how Northern Protestant ministers used their leadership role in the sectional crisis to augment their status, while Paul Harvey's article on Southern Baptist ministers similarly shows how issues of professionalization came out of the wartime experience. Daniel W. Stowell provides a close study of the death of one key leader, Stonewall Jackson, and ways the Southern reaction to his death foreshadowed the region's response to the later end of the war. Ronald C. White uses a close textual and ritual reading to unravel meanings of Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address.

Randall Miller's article on Roman Catholicism and ethnicity offers a substantial probing of how Catholics were centrally involved in the war effort and ways that involvement affected their social and religious status in the United States. Harry Stout and Christopher Grasso offer a fresh interpretation of ideological issues of wartime by examining the Confederate press, portraying the process of how a civil religion developed in Richmond in the course of fighting the war.

The volume also includes essays by Kurt O. Berends on the Confederate religious military press, Mark Noll on the differing interpretations of the Bible in the mid-19th century, Reid Mitchell on the Confederate soldier's religion, and Charles Reagan Wilson on the comparison of the American Civil War to those in Puritan England and modern Spain. Samuel Hill provides insights on the results of the war on a variety of American religious groups.

The editors conclude that religion appeared everywhere the war itself was found, from the armies, to the farms and plantations, to the minds and souls of the men and women, black and white, whom the war affected. In the end, "religion cut to the marrow of Americans' identity and interests" in the crucial era of the Civil War.

This new book opens new scholarly perspectives on the Civil War and shows how religious issues occupied center stage of the conflict that rested on fundamental issues of American self-definition and the emergence of a modern nation.

Hot Peppers: The Story of Cajuns and Caspicum, revised edition.
By Richard Schweid.
Chapel Hill: Univerity of North Carolina Press, 1999.
171 pages. $15.95 paper.

During the early 1980s journalist Richard Schweid wrote two community-focused foodways studies that set the standard for all that might follow, Hot Peppers: Cajuns and Caspicum in New Iberia, Louisiana and Catfish and the Delta: Confederate Fish Farming in the Mississippi Delta.

The former is not so much a food book as a long, anthropological essay on people and place as glimpsed through the lens of an observer with a keen taste for caspicum frutescens, the pepper folks down New Iberia way know as a tabasco. Schweid is a fine writer, blessed with keen powers of observation (his portrait of Cajun Country amidst the oil boom would make a compelling set piece on modernity's encroachment), but his true forte is in telling the stories of New Iberia's working-class Cajuns, many of whom, when Schweid meets up with them in the late 1970s, are still eking out a living from the land, picking hot peppers come harvest time.

“When we picked those tabasco peppers, we would burn our hands,” Stella Larson tells Schweid. “And I do mean burn, cher. Have to lay 'em down in a bowl of cool milk at night. When I was a child I'd cry all night after pickin' 'em during the day, but I could pick more than anybody else.” Hers is a story as old as the South, one Schweid tells with compassion and grace. This fall, the University of North Carolina Press brings Hot Peppers back into print. It is a publishing event to celebrate.

John T. Edge

Louis Osteen's Charleston Cuisine:
Recipes from a Lowcountry Chef.
Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 1999.
320 pages. $24.95.

A celebration of the new Southern larder--one where duck breasts are swaddled in an espresso infused sauce and catfish is roasted with saffron--this cookbook from Louis Osteen, chef-owner of Louis's Restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina, will leave some Southerners screaming foul and scrambling for their dog-eared copy of Charleston Receipts, that venerable Lowcountry cookbook of the old school.

But give this Anderson, South Carolina, native a chance and he'll win you over with dishes that don't so much reinvent Lowcountry cooking as reinterpret it. In Osteen's capable hands, shad roe is soaked in milk laced with hot pepper sauce, dredged in seasoned flour, and fried in a mix of bacon fat and butter before the being served in a pan garvy highlighted by capers. The addition of capers is a modern fillip, a tip of the hat to culinary creativity, and, dare I say it, an improvement upon the traditional method of preparation.

And so it goes with this delightful collection of recipes: Louis adds Clemson blue cheese to a sweet potato casserole, poblano peppers to a corn pudding, a bottle of ale to a mess of collards. The results make for stimulating culinary voyeurism and oh-so-good eating.

John T. Edge