Cornbread Nation 1:  The Best of Southern Food Writing. Edited by John Egerton for the Southern Foodways Alliance. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.  260 pages. $16.95.

 
     I told Ann Abadie I wanted to review this volume the moment it showed up at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, in part because I’ve long taken pride in my family’s cornbread recipe‑‑passed down from my Iowa‑born grandmother to my California‑born mother to me‑‑and in part because, as a longtime Manhattanite recently relocated to Oxford, Mississippi, and deliriously in love with down‑home cooking (cornmeal‑fried catfish, pulled pork barbecue, overcooked green beans, etc.), I figured I’d learn a few things that needed learning. Indeed I did. I learned, among other things, that my mother, a self‑described “foodie” whose SUV tags read “BROCCOLI” and whose fingernails are rimmed with dirt most summer mornings, deserves to be classed as an honorary Southerner. Sort of.

     A renegade professor of nutrition education at Columbia University’s Teacher’s College, a member of the Chef’s Collaborative and the so‑called Slow Food movement, a fierce advocate for regionally grown organic produce and an unreconstructed foe of agribusiness, a woman who makes most of her meals off the onions, tomatoes, potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, broccoli, green beans, zucchini, summer squash, blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries that she grows in her cherished plot fronting the Hudson River, a woman who chortles every time we speak by phone about the vacuum‑packed Mason jars she’s either just “put up” in her larder or just made a no‑cost feast out of, my mother is part upcountry Rebel and part gourmandizing sensualist‑‑qualities that place her smack in the middle of the Cornbread Nation inventoried by John Egerton. Of course, she likes her green beans steamed and crisp, not ham‑flavored and mushy, and that is a big disqualifier, as I’ve also learned.  

     My mama would certainly like this book, although I suspect she’d find the parts about back‑country distilleries less compelling than I do; she’s a beer drinker, not a bourbon drinker. “A collection of great food stories from the South” is the apocryphal phrase, uttered at a Southern Foodways Symposium in Oxford several years ago, that led Egerton to pull together this memorable, moving, and occasionally hilarious assortment of character studies, travelogues, elegies to all‑but‑forgotten culinary arts and endangered modes of agrarian life, and epic catalogues of cherished meals. Although agribusiness occasionally rears its head here, most notably in Amanda Hesser’s sympathetic portrait of South Carolina’s Coosaw Farms cartel entitled “The Watermelon Market,” most of these food stories are odes not to processes but to personalities‑‑quirky, stubborn, resourceful personalities, inflected by regional predilection (and sometimes inflamed by regional prejudice) but rooted in the irreplaceably local.

     In “The Legendary Coe Dupuis, Moonshiner,” Craig LaBan makes a convincing claim for his 96‑year‑old, cigar‑chomping Cajun subject as “a wizard of whiskey, a Stravinsky at the still, a maestro of the mash. He has done for outlaw liquor what Robert Johnson did for the Delta blues, instinctively elevating a folk tradition into golden, liquid art.” LaBan is wonderfully attuned to both the distant history that helped produce Dupuis‑‑Prohibition evaded via Louisiana’s “swampy maze of a coastline”‑‑and the microenvironment that inspires and reflects his alchemist’s art, an art to which LaBan is also deliciously responsive. “My tour of Coe’s empire is over, and we are back where we began, sitting in the beautiful heat of his dark kitchen, savoring a last cup of moonshine. It is just barely on the sweet side of a man’s drink. Dark with wild cherry, charred with a bourbony oak that makes my gums tingle.‘I will miss this taste. You can’t be in too much of a hurry to make something like that,’ he tells me.” 

     There is a fair bit of nostalgia in these pages for a character‑driven Southern pastoral being progressively displaced by the fast‑food rhythms of the New South, a region now defined in the national mind by “its Wal‑Marts, nationally televised golf classics, and gated communities.” Slow food is the rule here: planted, harvested, and prepared by hand, often by Mama, with quiet pride, no pretensions, and enough saturated fat to fell a small elephant. Roast turkey swimming in butter, corn simmered with butter, green beans cooked with pork, mashed potatoes creamed with butter and a teaspoon of mayonnaise, macaroni and cheese, a big pot of pinto beans with a massive ham bone swimming in the middle, cole slaw, cranberry sauce, and of course dessert:  pumpkin pies, pecan pies, coconut cakes, strawberry shortcake. “This is not magazine‑cover food,” writes Rick Bragg of his family’s Alabama Thanksgiving in “Dinner Rites,” making up for his mama’s modesty with his own bluntly lyrical boosterism. “It is the food of my youth, my life. I guess I would live longer if I didn’t eat it, but the life would be so bland. I would rather eat the pages of the magazines.”

        It is surely true, as Lolis Eric Elie argues in his paean to Dooky Chase, a legendary black‑run all‑night eatery in New Orleans, that “food in the South has always built bridges across political and social chasms virtually impassable by any other medium,” although one might also argue that jazz and blues music have functioned in much the same way. (“You’re really cooking now” remains a term of high praise, intriguingly, for any group of musicians in performance.) But this volume also offers a scattering of provocative counterexamples, places in which Southern foodways have bred familial bickering, regional chauvinism, and racial divisiveness. One of these stories, exemplifying all three dynamics, is a low‑comic masterpiece by South Carolina native Jack Hitt. “A Confederacy of Sauces,” first published in the New York Times Magazine, details the rise, apotheosis, and fall of Maurice Bessinger, elder of a feuding quartet of Bessinger brothers, whose mustard‑based sauce (which comes in four slightly different sibling variations) has gotten them all embroiled in a big fat racial mess.