Writing in the Kitchen

Essays on Southern Literature and Foodways

David A. Davis, Tara Powell

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781626742109
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria norteamericana

Scarlett O'Hara munched on a radish and vowed never to go hungry again. Vardaman Bundren ate bananas in Faulkner's Jefferson, and the Invisible Man dined on a sweet potato in Harlem. Although food and stories may be two of the most prominent cultural products associated with the South, the connections between them have not been thoroughly explored until now.

Southern food has become the subject of increasingly self-conscious intellectual consideration. The Southern Foodways Alliance, the Southern Food and Beverage Museum, food-themed issues of Oxford American and Southern Cultures, and a spate of new scholarly and popular books demonstrate this interest. Writing in the Kitchen explores the relationship between food and literature and makes a major contribution to the study of both southern literature and of southern foodways and culture more widely.

This collection examines food writing in a range of literary expressions, including cookbooks, agricultural journals, novels, stories, and poems. Contributors interpret how authors use food to explore the changing South, considering the ways race, ethnicity, class, gender, and region affect how and what people eat. They describe foods from specific southern places such as New Orleans and Appalachia, engage both the historical and contemporary South, and study the food traditions of ethnicities as they manifest through the written word.

Chapter One

READING SOUTHERN FOOD

DAVID A. DAVIS AND TARA POWELL

This book began in New Orleans. We put together a panel on southern literature and foodways for the biennial meeting of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature in 2010. Because we were meeting in a city famous for its collision of ethnicities, its culture of excess, and its profusion of distinctive foodways, we felt a session to discuss the role of food in southern literature was appropriate, and the conversation in that session was heady and exciting. We moved a group of interested parties to the Southern Food and Beverage Museum to expand the discussion, and we soon knew from the energy in the ensuing dialogue that food had a special resonance in southern literature. It seems obvious. Examples of food abound in southern writing, lending their sweet, smoky, greasy redolence to stories about life in the South. Later, as we enjoyed oysters and bourbon at a restaurant in the French Quarter, Jessica Harris suggested that the time would be right for a collection of essays that formally opened a conversation about southern literature and foodways, and she asked us if we might be interested in putting one together. With our mouths full, we nodded our heads to agree.

We are both native southerners, raised on grits and greens. We have participated in many of the rituals of southern food—pig pickins, dinner on the grounds, fish fries, and funeral potlucks. We have both become scholars of southern literature and taught in interdisciplinary southern studies programs. David has taught courses about southern food, and Tara has written poems about southern food, so we both have a personal, vested interest in this topic. We understand that the phrase “southern food” covers a complex of microregional and ethnic identities, historical problems and contradictions, and disparities of poverty and plenty. The prevailing trend in American popular culture, extending from nineteenth-century accounts of plantation groaning tables overloaded with regional delicacies to Paula Deen’s much-mocked obsession with butter, has been to associate southern food with abundance and extravagance, but the reality of southern food is that it is based more on ingenuity born of privation and necessity. Southern foodways originated through the use of available ingredients, typically whatever could grow locally, prepared with simple, sometimes primitive, techniques. It has these characteristics of locality, simplicity, and necessity in common with many of the great ethnic cuisines of the world.

Southern foodways have figured in American popular culture for a long time, but they have become the subject of increasing scholarly attention recently. John Egerton’s pioneering 1987 book Southern Food established a baseline of traditions, recipes, and restaurants, and a special edition of Southern Quarterly Peggy Prenshaw edited in 1992 focused attention on southern food and literature with classic essays by Minrose Gwin, Patricia Yaeger, and others. The Southern Foodways Alliance, directed by John T. Edge, was founded in 1999 to connect chefs and scholars with vernacular traditions and create a vibrant forum for discussion of both traditions and innovations. Southern foodways scholarship has expanded quickly in the past few years with the publication of such books as Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (2006) by Psyche Williams-Forson, The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Volume 7: Foodways (2007), edited by John T. Edge, Stirring the Pot: The Kitchen and Domesticity in the Fiction of Southern Women (2008) by Laura Sloan Patterson, Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America (2008) by Frederick Douglass Opie, Savage Barbecue: Race, Culture, and the Invention of America’s First Food (2008) by Andrew Warnes, Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865–1960 (2010) by Rebecca Sharpless, High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America (2011) by Jessica Harris, and A Mess of Greens: Southern Gender and Southern Food (2011) by Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt.

This outpouring of scholarly interest in southern food signals that southern food is a revealing area of inquiry. Food is a text upon which the history and values of the southern people are written. Foodways reveal, for example, how Native American, African, and European cultures blended to yield a distinctive, synthetic culture. Cornbread is made from maize, a native New World ingredient, and it has developed a totemic significance as the food on which southerners survived for centuries. This coarse, humble bread, which can be baked directly over a fire, signifies the defining characteristics of southern food: blending of cultures, resourcefulness in the face of poverty, and the persistence of tradition. In the past generation, however, modern advances in global food distribution, industrialized agriculture, and international flows of population have threatened to displace southern food traditions, leading some people to fear that southern food will become a cultural atavism. This worry may be valid, but southern food has so far proved to be highly dynamic. It has absorbed even more cultural influences, penetrated popular culture, and retained its reputation as America’s major contribution to global cuisine.

Reading southern literature with an awareness of food reveals how integral it is across a broad range of texts, new and old. It is seemingly everywhere. Food in southern literature often has a symbolic value: food in kitchens often signifies domesticity, the struggle for food symbolizes poverty, abundance of food indicates wealth, preparation of food may reflect gender roles, food labor can mark racial hierarchy, sharing food often represents social or community bonds, raising food can symbolize agrarianism or connection to land, and eating traditional southern food reinforces southern identity. Although food can be highly significant in a text, it is often inconspicuous. Yet, if we consider the number of texts depicting poverty near the point of starvation, such as Tobacco Road or Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; novels that feature the kitchen as a crucial setting, such as To Kill a Mockingbird or The Member of the Wedding; and books that focus on a major social event centered on food, such as Delta Wedding, then the vital role that food plays in these texts becomes more evident.

We do not mean to suggest, though, that food has an established or defined set of meanings in a text. Often, it is delightfully ambiguous, nuanced, or subtle, and sometimes food can unlock a critical reading of a text. At the end of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, for example, Vardaman and Dewey Dell, both of whom had been disappointed by not getting what they wanted from their arduous journey to Jefferson, console themselves by eating bananas while they wait for the father to join them. Their “mouths half open and half-et bananas in their hands” indicate their surprise at meeting the new Mrs. Bundren, but the bananas signify more than just surprise (260). Bananas are a perishable tropical fruit that, while commonplace in grocery stores now, were difficult to acquire in the rural South during the Great Depression. The bananas, which were grown on plantations owned by Americans in quasicolonial states—banana republics of Central America—demonstrate both America’s imperialism in the early twentieth century and the development of modern systems of transportation and distribution. United Fruit Company, headquartered in New Orleans, dominated the international banana trade and, in a paradigm that spans from colonialism through globalism, exploited workers in one country and created millionaires in another. This reference to bananas in Jefferson indirectly connects Faulkner’s novel to the works of many Latin American writers who depicted the labor of banana workers, such as Pablo Neruda’s poem “United Fruit Co.,” which indicates the hemispheric connections of southern culture.

Not all southern food references are this subtle, though. One of the most obvious examples of food in southern literature is the image of Scarlett O’Hara in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind ravenously devouring a radish, the only food remaining on the devastated Tara plantation after Sherman’s soldiers marched through. After she eats it, “her empty stomach revolted and she lay in the soft dirt and vomited tiredly” (592). This moment is her nadir, but she heroically gathers her strength and vows, “As God is my witness, I’m never going to be hungry again” (593). This scene, which in the film version takes place just before intermission, resonated in the imaginations of Depression-era southerners, many of whom had gone hungry, who may have seen the fact that Scarlett embraced industrialization to rebuild her family’s fortunes as a model for revitalizing the southern economy, which, like Reconstruction-era Tara, still depended on cotton production. In this case, the humble radish symbolizes the depths of destitution and privation southerners suffered both during Reconstruction and during the Great Depression.

While this is one of the most famous examples of food in southern literature, perhaps the most important example is in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Finding a yam vendor on the streets of Harlem selling bubbly baked sweet potatoes leads the Invisible Man to reflect on southern food and black identity. He notes that the black bourgeoisie in the South would be ashamed to be seen eating chitterlings, mustard greens, pigs’ ears, pork chops, and black-eyed peas in public (265). In the city, however, he enjoys the freedom to eat yams on the street without shame. “But not yams,” he thinks, “I had no problem concerning them and I would eat them whenever and wherever I took the notion. Continue on the yam level and life would be sweet—though somewhat yellowish. Yet the freedom to eat yams on the street was far less than I had expected upon coming to the city” (267). His disillusionment over the limits of his freedom indicates the false promise of social equality in the North that propelled the Great Migration, but this scene also demonstrates the power of food to excite memory and to reinforce identity. As African Americans left the South, they transported traditional foodways with them. Food is one of the most resilient markers of ethnicity, which is why immigrant communities often maintain food traditions even as other practices assimilate into the mainstream.

Eating is a means of performing identity, so eating traditional southern foods allows people to perform southern identity, whether they are southern or not. This has led to a concern about the future of traditional southern foodways that may be called the fried chicken paradox. Since the emergence of the interstate highway system and the networks of fast food franchises that feed America’s long-distance drivers and daily commuters, fried chicken has surpassed cornbread in popular culture as the totemic southern food. Served at Kentucky Fried Chicken, Popeyes, Church’s, and Chick-fil-A, mass-produced chicken has been exported out of the South, even globally, as a commodified version of traditional southern food. The result is a version of southern foodways based on marketing hokum that worries traditionalists who lament the inauthenticity of culinary exports. The ascendency of mass-marketed southern food in popular culture has sent many southern chefs back into the pantry to recover presumably authentic recipes and ingredients, partly as a means of preserving southern identity. While this preservation is good for both scholars and gourmands, it also creates its own false condition of consumption. Southern foodways, like all vernacular cuisines, developed from the use of available ingredients prepared with available methods, so in the conditions of modern life, fast-food fried chicken—in addition to the enormous influx of ethnic foods and mass-marketed products available in modern grocery stores—is southern food. The self-conscious act of preparing or eating traditional southern food, therefore, is a deliberate act of performing southern identity.

Let us not, though, dismiss southern foodways as an imaginary construct. Southern foodways constitute a distinctive cuisine, and their development mirrors southern history. The earliest southern foodways were Native American foods, which blended elements of village agriculture, growing primarily corn with some other indigenous vegetables, with hunting and gathering. European colonists introduced new ingredients, including the essential pig, along with new techniques, a preference for baking, and a palate for heavily salted food. The African slave trade brought ingredients from Africa, such as okra, and from the New World tropics, particularly sugarcane in its botanical form and as processed products—sugar, molasses, and rum. African slaves added more techniques and tastes, especially an affinity for rice, and incorporated new spices and peppers. The blending of these cultures and methods over several decades produced a recognizable cuisine, and that system of foodways has continued to develop into the twentieth century, yielding some famous dishes, such as smoked pork barbecue, black-eyed peas simmered with hog jowl, cracklin’ cornbread, and sweet potatoes candied with molasses, plus modern industrial foods such as heavily sweetened carbonated beverages, including Coca-Cola, Pepsi, a rainbow of fruit-inspired drinks, and manufactured treats such as MoonPies and pecan logs.

Southern food is often a revealing lens into southern history, but one could legitimately worry that the image of southern food in contemporary popular culture distorts the long history of food as a social problem in the South. Recent cookbooks such as The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook by Matt and Ted Lee, Screen Doors and Sweet Tea by Martha Foose, and A New Turn in the South by Hugh Acheson celebrate and reinvent vernacular southern foodways, but one could come away from these books assuming that food has always been abundant and delicious in the South. This is a myth that needs to be debunked. In truth, for many southerners, food security has been and continues to be a serious issue. For most of the South’s history, its laborers working in the plantation system, including slaves and sharecroppers, survived on the famous three Ms: small rations of meat, meal, and molasses. Small farmers who depended on cotton and tobacco, inedible staple crops, for their income, could often not afford to raise enough of their own food for subsistence. Ironically, although the South had a primarily agricultural economy through the second half of the twentieth century, it imported a significant percentage of its food, and serious issues of food inequality continue to reflect the region’s troubling history of race and class divisions.

The southern diet has also led to multiple epidemics of nutritional diseases. Hunger and starvation have followed periods of drought, flood, and economic instability, and outbreaks of cholera and other food-borne illnesses have occurred. Perhaps the most unsettling nutritional disorder in southern history is the epidemic of pellagra, a niacin deficiency, that affected thousands of southerners in the early twentieth century. Poor southerners ate a diet heavily based in corn, but the corn was often ground. It was not treated with lye in the process called nixtamalization developed by the Aztecs to create hominy. Corn contains niacin, but it is not nutritionally available in unprocessed corn, and many poor southerners did not have access to other vegetable sources of niacin. Pellagra sufferers developed dermatitis, diarrhea, and dementia, and, if untreated, could die; the problem was so pervasive that Congress established a hospital for pellagra in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in 1914. The epidemic subsided by the late 1930s, and resulted in an increased use of hominy, often ground as grits, in the southern diet. But the southern diet continues to be a nutritional problem. Now, more than 30 percent of the population of most southern states is obese, and diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension rates have increased, prompting public health officials to propose changes in the way southerners eat.

Southern food involves a mass of contradictions. One of the clearest illustrations of the historical and cultural paradoxes of southern food is the rise and fall of Paula Deen. Divorced and broke with two small children in 1989, Deen began preparing sack lunches for businesses in Savannah—a venture she would eventually parlay into a successful restaurant. With entrepreneurial zeal and infectious charisma, she grew a southern food empire with several shows on the Food Network, a popular restaurant in Savannah, a chain of buffets at Harrah’s casinos, and multiple endorsement deals with culinary products such as cooking pans, ham, and butter. She became America’s surrogate southern grandmother, embodying comfort and a bit of naughty self-indulgence. This stage of her meteoric career appeared to come to a public end in 2013, when a deposition in which she admitted to making racist comments was released to the press. In the subsequent fallout, she lost her contract with Food Network and most of her endorsements. She shifted quickly into a symbol for the South’s latent, casual racism, and a poorly coordinated public relations response made matters worse, leaving some people to defend her as a victim of persecution and others to denounce her as a fraud. Either way, her public persona signifies the inherent contradictions of southern food, in which a legacy of racism and exploitation lingers just beneath a veneer of hospitality and nostalgia.

The way southerners eat is a text. Southern food reveals history, social values, and social problems; it maintains community and identity; and it contributes to the development and maintenance of southern culture. We can read and interpret southern food in several modes—as artifact, as ritual, as daily practice, as representation, and as symbol. The essays in this collection offer interpretations of southern foodways that employ all of these methods to focus attention on the role food plays in southern literature and to broaden the discourse about foodways. Literal food has meaning, and literary food does, too: often in ways that decipher the complex cultural coding embedded in literal foodways. The following essays cover a long period of history to represent several microregions and distinct ethnicities, and they draw on multiple critical methodologies to examine different textual forms and discuss a cross-section of specific foodways. Variety is one of the features of this collection as a whole, but within this variety we identify a set of important themes that are crucial to the study of southern literature and foodways, including looking at how a consideration of foodways illuminates literary qualities in nontraditional texts, complicates the imaginative representation of domestic spaces, destabilizes the constricting notion of binary black and white Souths, and enriches the special symbolic possibilities in foods across a range of familiar and unfamiliar literary texts.

Some of the essays in this collection expand our notions of texts about food by offering interpretations of food as a signifier in works that are outside the literary mainstream. David Shields explains that print culture in the early republic focused primarily on agriculture because growing crops was crucial to the young nation’s economic viability. America’s foremost thinkers, including Thomas Jefferson, obsessed over the development of new farming methods and the introduction of new crops, and the southern plantation before the invention of the cotton gin tended to be a highly diversified, innovative agricultural laboratory. The advent of the cotton plantation divided the southern economy from the northern economy, and Marcie Cohen Ferris analyzes the descriptions of distinctively southern food in the personal writings of northern visitors and of some southerners. She reveals that the traditions of southern food developed in a dynamic, sometimes contentious, social milieu, and that southern food was not universally a...