Published July 27, 2000

Southern history, as told through its cuisine

By Jerry Shriver, USA TODAY

 

DORA, Ala. - As a little shaver growing up in small-town Georgia in the 1970s, John T. Edge often raced his Schwinn five-speed the half-mile from his house to the grandest joint on his horizon, Old Clinton Barbecue.

He'd order an Orange Crush and a chopped pork sandwich with peppery sauce from kind, old Mittie Coulter and charge it to his family's account, and, for the rest of the day, he'd chew on the certainty that this was life at its finest.


Good companion: Edge's wife, Blair Hobbs, illustrated his 'Southern Belly', which arrives in stores early in August.(By Blair Hobbs, Hill Street Press)

Edge hasn't evolved much in that regard. Which explains why this 37-year-old writer, lecturer and studious chowhound is the country's brightest young proponent of Southern food.

On a recent afternoon, Edge is gunning for barbecue again, this time in a Ford Escort on the outskirts of Birmingham, Ala. He's on a "business" trip with a famished passenger whom he is torturing with a tantalizing, nuanced description of the awaiting sandwich and sauce.

But before Edge can even think about pulling up at the old cinder-block bunker that is Leo and Susie's Green Top Café, he has to put the place "in context" by expounding on the juxtaposition of the surrounding strip joints and Baptist church.

He's a deep thinker, bless his heart, working out of the University of Mississippi, and he's incapable of wolfing down without "context." That's why his new Southern Belly: The Ultimate Food Lover's Companion to the South (Hill Street Press, $24.95), conceived as a guidebook, inevitably grew to be as much about civil rights history, immigrant migrations and working-class ways as it is about homespun places to swill sweet tea.

The 288-page Southern Belly may not fit comfortably in a glove compartment. But no serious seeker of regional flavors should omit it. The same might be said of Edge's 1999 book, A Gracious Plenty (Putnam, $30), a loving look at community and church cookbooks that was nominated for a James Beard Award.

Just listen to him as we follow the hickory smoke inside to a booth at Leo's: "This is a stereotypical Southern roadhouse that is fast vanishing. They sprang up on the outskirts of town as places where you could do what you wanted without the prying eyes of your neighbors. Some of these places had motor courts behind them, so you could have the assignation, the beer and the barbecue. It's a part of Southern culture, and it's eccentric, but not in a quaint way."

At last, knowing the where and why and what of this sandwich, we eat it. And it tastes all the better for knowing.

Later, after a two-day ramble to visit a few of the 200-plus places and people profiled in Southern Belly, it becomes clear that Edge's distaste for "quaint condescension" and cursory observations set him apart from the "we jes' luv our grits" crowd.

"Food writers have a chip on their shoulder," Edge says. "People say, 'You just write about food?' Hell, yes! And it matters in substantial ways!"

Edge believes that food reveals as much about a culture as pottery shards or sermons. Particularly Southern culture.

Many of his regular articles for John Grisham's Oxford American magazine and his speaking engagements postulate that food can heal, enlighten and empower.

A stirring recent example from The Oxford American (excerpted in Southern Belly) tells of little-known Georgia Gilmore of Montgomery, Ala., who cooked thousands of meals for civil rights workers and staged bake sales that raised precious dollars to support the bus boycott. Whites discreetly channeled contributions through her. And Martin Luther King Jr. was fond of her pineapple upside-down cake.

"I try to use food to understand what Faulkner called the great verities: race, class and gender, and all the other stuff that matters," Edge says.

He notes that the esteemed food writers/historians John Egerton, John Martin Taylor and Jessica B. Harris helped shape his approach and inspired him to create his own undergraduate and graduate programs in culinary anthropology at the University of Mississippi.

That led to him becoming director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, whose mission is to preach the gospel of Southern food to the public.

"We have a cuisine we're devoted to," he says.

"The South has been defined by poverty and plenty over the course of its history. It's the idea that there may be abject poverty in front of you, but if you go out back to the garden, you'll see the bounty of Southern vegetables. Those countervailing influences stamped something on our psyches."

Sounds a bit heavy. And sometimes it is. But Edge - John T. to his friends - also cackles a lot. He writes cheerily about pickled pigs' lips and, in the current issue of The Oxford American, about the soul food restaurant in Macon, Ga., that nourished the struggling Allman Brothers band. He can warble There Are Raisins in My Toast, a song that plays on the jukebox at every Waffle House outlet.

He wears a Maynard G. Krebs tuft of hair beneath his lower lip to remind himself never to return to the corporate world (he spent nine years as a salesman for a financial news service).

His love of food is both crazy and pure.

"I don't want to bludgeon people over the head with these ideas," he says. "I want them to eat their way through these ideas, and when the meal is over, I want them to have a sated mind and belly."

 

Accompanying article, Published July 27, 2000

Get a bellyful of authentic eats

John T. Edge, author of the new Southern Belly: The Ultimate Food Lover's Companion to the South, says he has spent most of his life seeking out the people and places that represent the full flavor of Southern food. A few of his favorites, also profiled in the book:

parrow.gif (64 bytes)Ollie's World's Best Bar-B-Q, Hoover, Ala. "I like Ollie's for two reasons. First, the sauce is distinctive: vinegary in a region that's noted for sweeter, ketchupy sauces. Second, Ollie's is an entree to understanding civil rights history. Ollie McClung, the complainant in one of the seminal Supreme Court cases, is still behind the counter." (1880 S. Park Dr.; 205-989-9009)

parrow.gif (64 bytes)Corner Pool & Lunch, Burkesville, Ky. "This is a lark, a place where I've eaten chocolate gravy on a number of occasions. It's a milk- or water-based gravy, served on biscuits. Corner Pool is a place where you can find a curious food that you don't often encounter and also soak up small-town life you don't often find." (500 Court House Square; 270-864-5977)

parrow.gif (64 bytes)Georgia Gilmore, Montgomery, Ala. The late cook "is representative of why food matters in society. She used her skills as a cook to fuel the civil rights movement, literally and figuratively. She baked and sold cakes and pies that put gas in cars that transported people to work during the bus boycott beginning in 1955. She's kind of an unsung hero of the movement who also was a good Southern cook."

parrow.gif (64 bytes)Old Clinton Barbecue, Clinton, Ga. "My first barbecue and still my sentimental favorite. It proves that Southerners never stray too far from home. I grew up a half-mile from it. Tip O'Neill said all politics is local; I think all barbecue is local. You can't be objective." (4214 Gray Hwy.; 912-986-3225)

parrow.gif (64 bytes)Duncan Hines, Bowling Green, Ky. "This fellow was kind of the first scout of regional cuisine . He was a printing salesman, and in the 1930s he became known as someone who knew where to eat good food. Hines wrote a guide called Adventures in Good Eating, which sold more than 100,000 copies a year. Later he lent his name to a line of cookware and foods, which Procter & Gamble bought . . .and that's why we now have Duncan Hines cake mixes."

parrow.gif (64 bytes)Arnold's Country Kitchen, Nashville. "This is a modern-day version of the groaning board that would have fueled the plowhand 50, 60 years ago. Now, it's for factory workers and people who are pushing paper instead of plowing the back 40. But the food is very similar to what we would have eaten two generations ago, an archetype of the meat and three" (a main and three side dishes). (605 Eighth Ave. S.; 615-256-4455)

By Jerry Shriver