Southern Provisions: The Creation and Revival of a Cuisine by David S. Shields (review)

Southern Provisions is the closest thing to a food studies manifesto that readers will find written in the last decade. In this book, David Shields urges collaboration between scholars, chefs, and farmers, and argues that activists can neither study nor revive southern cuisine without knowing what varieties of flora and fauna people ate in the past—or how those provisions tasted. This broad exploration of the "age of experiment in American agriculture" from 1820 to 1885 delineates the cooking, then the selling, and finally the planting and rearing of southern meat and vegetables (277). Homing in on New Orleans, the Chesapeake, and the Low-country—"that region of the south Atlantic coast of North America that ranges from Wilmington, North Carolina, to the St. Johns River region in Florida"—Shields charts the rise of multifaceted, regional southern cuisine(s) (xi). His base of published sources reveals more than readers might expect about the people who did not belong to the "articulate power elite," and consists of advertising handbills, agricultural journals, newspaper advertisements, seed catalogs, seed broker records, and accounts of cookhouses, fields, and gardens (28). The book's first part examines the appearance of professional caterers and expatriate chefs. The second studies truck farming and markets, such as Charleston's Centre Market. And the last describes the processes of hybridization, crossbreeding, and seed selection that produced the sturdier yet blander foodstuffs that we eat today. This structure innovatively reverses the usual pattern that focuses first on production, and then on sale, preparation, and consumption. Plants and animal flesh feature last but not least, because produce is at the heart of Shields's platform.

Shields makes a complex and persuasive argument about the need to taste older varieties of ingredients because, as he reminds the reader, "you can't bring back a cuisine if you don't know what it was that you are restoring" (xi). This passion for revival and taste extends from the personal to the historical. The monograph is partly invested in trying to define southern cuisines and their inherently regional—rather than national—influences. The book's emphasis upon regionalism implicitly pushes back against anthropologists like Arjun Appadurai, whose 1988 article in Comparative Studies in Society and History, "How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India," was a critical contemplation on the value of theorizing national cuisine. Southern Provisions is more in line with the work of Sidney Mintz, who in his essay "Eating American" in Carole M. Counihan's edited volume Food in the USA: A Reader (Routledge, 2002) opined that "he did not think that there is such a thing as an American cuisine" (23).

There is nevertheless a tension in this book between regionalism and nationalism. Southern cuisine, according to Shields, is constituted by ingredients (many of them unusual and unexpected), the taste of terroir, the soil, and a mix of more transnational English, French Huguenot, West African, and Native American influences. The cuisine of antebellum Charleston, for example, depended much less upon fish and game than we might expect, because the rural countryside of the Lowcountry was not yet capable of provisioning the city. At the same time, many of the influences in Lowcountry, Chesapeake, and New Orleans cuisine came from further afield. At the Maryland Club Feasts of the late 1850s, diners were served Virginian oysters because the ones from Maryland were not salty enough. For these celebratory meals, flavor motivated a push beyond the local: "taste trumped locality," Shields notes (96). Sometimes these influences were quite the opposite of local: "The seed market was transatlantic until the 1830s," Shields reminds the reader (40). In some respects it is unclear how much Shields actually cares about defining these cuisines; indeed, he seems more interested in developing the book's other interventions.

While thinking through the value of delimiting regional food cultures, Southern Provisions makes multiple other invaluable contributions. Shields usefully reminds readers that changes to foodstuffs can be...