The Edible South: The Power of Food and the Making of an American Region by Marcie Cohen Ferris (review)

The Edible South is a historical and cultural survey of the culinary practices of American southerners. The southerners in this book are tenants, sharecroppers, small farmers, and plantation owners. They are black and white, or slave and slaveholder, with the different life chances of the races coming through on page after page. The content is within the context of the southern states, the South as a region, the United States, and to a lesser extent, the world.

While on the one hand this is a food history, it is also a history of slavery, segregation, and white domination. The author, Marcie Cohen Ferris, successfully describes the contribution of blacks to southern food. Her work comes across as both an apology and a thank you to African Americans. And she clearly achieves her goal of describing southern food and the place of food in southern life. She discusses food traditions at farm homes, settlement schools, dinners on the grounds, and plantation mansions. She presents southern brands and labels: Martha White (flour), Piggly Wiggly (grocery chain), Coca-Cola, Dukes Mayonnaise, and Aunt Jemima.

Starting in about 13,000 BC and continuing to the present, Ferris guides readers through the region’s culinary history, without presenting a single recipe. A professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, what she lacks in recipes, she makes up in excellent footnotes and a detailed index. They take up 142 of the 477 pages. Her use of almost 100 “old” black-and-white pictures and the generous amount of white space given by the publisher make this large format text a pleasant, but academic, read. For a recipe-driven approach, one might read An Irresistible History of Southern Food: Four Centuries of Black-Eyed Peas, Collard Greens, and Whole Hog Barbecue by Rick McDaniel (2011). McDaniel presents food history of the same region through 150 recipes. With McDaniel, readers might cook their way through history. Ferris, on the other hand, guides readers through the region, both its history and people.

With all those references, about 1000, as well as the fairly complex writing style, this book would be ideal for a graduate class in food history. It includes a history of the dominant crops, cotton and tobacco, and farm tenants. Those tenants, Ferris says, lived on a diet of corn and salt pork—23 percent corn and 40 percent salt pork—according to her footnoted sources on page 101.

Ferris completes the book with a discussion of communes, intentional communities, and cooperative farms (or co-op farms) that thrived from the 1970s to the present. She presents the impact of feminism, and she features feminists who established communes. She brings the food co-op movement and food-buying clubs up to the present. Finally, she ends the book with a chapter on New Southern Cuisine, as it developed soon after the French movement, nouvelle cuisine, came to the fore.

So, yes, Ferris successfully describes the development of southern food and its social history. But if you are looking for a recipe of any kind or a description of collards, you won’t find it here. Ferris puts grits and gravy in context, but she does not tell you how to make them.