Chowing Down on the Southland Cuisine

It’s a rainy Friday morning, and the 50 or so campers who climb off the bus into the hillside graveyard grumble a bit as they seek the tombstone of Tennessee’s most famous son. A few hundred yards up the path, they spy the granite marker, flanked by a pair of white chairs, under which whiskey maker Jack Daniel has lain for the past 95 years.

It’s not yet 10 a.m., so no one dares take a pull from a bottle of Old No. 7 or pour an offering on Mr. Jack’s grave. Instead—with bellies still full from a greasy breakfast at Silver Sands, one of Nashville’s soul-food mainstays—they trudge on to Lynchburg where, an hour from now, they’ll eat again.

Members of the Southern Foodways Alliance—the organization behind this weekend foray—don’t merely dine: They feast, they gorge and they gobble down food, savoring every mouthful as if on death row, indulging in that final meal. If they’re not lifting forks to their lips, or chewing, or swallowing, or politely swabbing their chins with a napkin so they can begin the ritual again, they’re discussing food. Meals past, present and future are fair game, as are chefs, cookbooks, infinite sources of bacon and heirloom tomatoes, and the whereabouts of the region’s best barbecue shacks, which—if you’re taking notes—exist on only the most out-of-the-way gravel roads.

The group on this Camp Nashville excursion is a cultured bunch, encompassing food writers, chefs and a ragtag cloche of college professors, cooking enthusiasts, Southern-culture buffs and hardcore foodies. They’re all tuned in to one man—SFA director John T. Edge, who happily leads his fellow campers into battle, delivering mouthwatering edicts on fried chicken, pulled pork shoulder and “meat-and-three” restaurants with the aplomb of a true believer. Winsome, erudite, and as doggedly dedicated as late food writer M.F.K. fisher, Edge seems to spend every spare moment stomping the back roads of the American South, searching for that perfectly seasoned catfish filet or freshly shucked oyster that beckons from just beyond the horizon.

The translation of this quest—which surfaces in his work at the SFA, and in his essays (published in Gourmet, the Oxford American and The New York Times, and heard on NPR’s All Things Considered)—is revolutionizing the nation’s restaurant industry as well as its kitchen tables.

“Like music, food is a big part of how we define ourselves,” says Edge, who launched a Southern-food symposium at the University of Mississippi while a graduate student in Southern studies during the late 1990s. “Our mission [at SFA],” he proclaims “is really straightforward: To document and celebrate the diverse food cultures of the American South.”

Culinary Consciousness-Raising
Under Edge’s leadership—and with the assistance of associate director Mary Beth Lasseter, oral historian Amy Evans and approximately 600 individual and corporate members—the SFA, which operates under the aegis of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, has evolved into a program that expands not only waistlines but social consciousness, as well.

“People who come to our events quickly realize that we’re offering an entrée to bigger issues, whether it’s volunteer work or discussions of race,” Edge proudly notes, highlighting projects like the rebuilding of Willie Mae’s Scotch House, a New Orleans landmark destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

“What makes southern food so distinctive is that interplay between black and white,” he continues. “America’s interest in regional food is spiking. In the future, I think other distinctive foodways—like New England, and the Tex-Mex border—will likely develop.”

Although the SFA has recently turned its discerning eye on Athens, Ga.; Apalachicola, Fla.; and the tamale trails of the Mississippi Delta, the focus currently is on Middle Tennessee. After spending an afternoon touring Lynchburg’s Jack Daniel’s distillery, it’s back to Nashville, where an endless bounty awaits.

First, campers meet at a small local gallery, site of a kickoff party for East Nashville’s Tomato Art Festival, where they’re feted with catfish BLTs, kegs of Yazoo beer, and pureéd tomato popsicles. Next they splinter into smaller groups, cheering on The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Nick Marino (who’s participating in a Bloody Mary-making contest at 3 Crow Bar) or making reservations for a sit-down dinner at Margot Café.

Saturday morning, everyone reconvenes at the Station Inn—where the sounds of last night’s bluegrass jam still hang in the air—to celebrate the artistry of local fried-sweet-potato-pie king E.W. Mayo. Hangovers are plentiful, but the starchy, crumbly goodness that falls from Mayo’s worn fingers into the fryer is the perfect cure. Filmmaker Joe York screens a documentary short detailing the pie man’s life, and then Edge bestows Mayo with a Tabasco Guardian of the Tradition Award which, along with the Keeper of the flame award, is SFA’s highest honor.

Hold the Pretense
“The things we do have an academic backbone,” Edge explains, “but we’re committed to producing events and scholarship that are a pleasure to be a part of. While I’m deeply and profoundly dedicated to the people we celebrate, like Mr. Mayo, I don’t give a damn about the pretense and pomp that goes along with so much of the food world.”

“We honor Southern foodways by recording oral histories, by making documentary films and by staging events at which people learn about Southern food, and drink and eat the hell out of it!”

Part threat, part promise, Edge’s declaration rings true on Saturday afternoon. Sluggish campers barely have time to digest the double-whammy of fried pies and a Music City Meat-and-Three panel discussion before it’s time for lunch—a nouvelle spread of barbecue sandwiches, corn-tortilla BLTs and plates of pimento cheese and sausage—at the Yazoo Brewery.

Long after sundown, a carload of campers treks across town to the humble Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack on Ewing Drive. It’s more than an hour wait for a plateful of skillet-fried spicy white meat served atop a slice of Wonder bread, but the company is good, and there’s nothing more exciting than reminiscing about recent repasts when your next meal is just moments away. Keeping one eye peeled for Prince’s celebrity devotees (count Gillian Welch and Lorrie Moore in that group), they check their watches and inhale the aroma that roils like smoke signals into the air.

Wearing grease on their shirts and dried hot sauce under their fingernails like badges of honor, they’ll eventually fall into the deep, sated slumber of triumphant warriors, confident that, come Sunday, they’ll awaken, refreshed and ready to eat again.

SIDEBAR: Books You Can Eat
Southern food is hot off the presses, too. University of Maryland American studies professor Psyche Williams-Forson combines her interest in fried chicken and race relations in Building Houses out of Chicken Legs (University of North Carolina Press), which examines poultry’s role as a cultural lodestone of African-American history.

Last October, popular New York Times food columnists Matt and Ted Lee published The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook: Stories and Recipes for Southerners and Would-be Southerners (W.W. Norton), an indispensable, 600-plus-page guide.

And this April, SFA director John T. Edge’s iconic Southern Belly: The Ultimate Food Lover’s Companion to the American South will be published in a revised edition.