Overview

In The Edible South, Marcie Cohen Ferris presents food as a new way to chronicle the American South's larger history. Ferris tells a richly illustrated story of southern food and the struggles of whites, blacks, Native Americans, and other people of the region to control the nourishment of their bodies and minds, livelihoods, lands, and citizenship. The experience of food serves as an evocative lens onto colonial settlements and antebellum plantations, New South cities and Civil Rights-era lunch counters, chronic hunger and agricultural reform, counterculture communes and iconic restaurants as Ferris reveals how food - as cuisine and as commodity - has expressed and shaped southern identity to the present day. The region in which European settlers were greeted with unimaginable natural abundance was simultaneously the place where enslaved Africans vigilantly preserved cultural memory in cuisine and Native Americans held tight to kinship and food traditions despite mass expulsions. Southern food, Ferris argues, is intimately connected to the politics of power. The contradiction between the realities of fulsomeness and deprivation, privilege and poverty, in southern history resonates in the region's food traditions, both beloved and maligned.

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9781469629957

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Reviews

Certain to become an indispensable reference tool for scholars of U.S. food studies and of southern culture.--The Journal of Southern History A monumental book, which examines the relationship between Southern culture and cuisine at watershed moments in the region's history. --Charleston Post and Courier A weighty, well-researched study of what are nowadays called 'foodways.' --Colman Andrews, The Wall Street Journal Contains a myriad of interesting stories and anecdotes.--Arkansas Historical Quarterly Everything you need to know about a cherished but endangered foodway. -- The Pilot Ferris reveals a fraught culinary world that struck some as idyllic, pastoral, and bountiful, others as sumptuous and decadent, and still others as barbaric and repressive. --Journal of Folklore Research For anyone wishing to pursue a study of the South through comestibles, [The Edible South] is probably the best place to start. . . . I implore you: Dig in! --Southern Register Impressive. --Daily Beast Not only does Ferris pinpoint and chronicle evocative moments throughout the South's larger history, but she manages to eloquently express how this history shaped southern cuisine and, to a greater extent, southern identity. --Oxford American This is a landmark study, thoroughly researched, clearly conveyed, and packed with illustrations. Ferris provides scholars and general readers much to savor.--American Historical Review Folklorists will find The Edible South useful and enlightening. . . . Will provide much 'food for thought.'--Journal of American Folklore Profound in its recognition of the multiple ways in which food builds and separates a society, creating social boundaries, nutritional harms, and everyday routines.--Folklore Required reading of any serious student of the South and its foodways.--Journal of Mississippi History [A] very readable survey--Brown Alumni Magazine A book whose value will likely increase with time.--Tennessee Libraries A lively, informative exploration of southern history . . . Belongs in all academic library collections.--CHOICE Demonstrates how power dynamics shaped Southern identity throughout its history and that food played a crucial part in its negotiation.--Southern Historian Extensively researched, The Edible South takes a new perspective on the American region and its rich, tumultuous history.--A Saveur September 2014 Best Food and Drink Release Ferris clearly knows her subject. . . .A must read.--Journal of American History Ferris has exhaustively traced the origins of southern cooking. . . . [She] delves into the South's most significant foods. . . [and] performs a particularly important job by painstakingly explaining just how slave culture and subsequent Jim Crow laws and segregation made southern cooking unique.--Booklist Ferris uses the lens of food to step into a vast and complex search of southern history.--Jackson Free Press In the new and expanding field of food studies, [The Edible South] is a monumental book against which others shall be judged.--Clarion-Ledger In this colorful and well-researched history, [Ferris] shows persuasively how food has shaped and nourished Southern identity.--Kirkus It's clear from Ferris' research, her scouring of diaries and documents, that other people see food too. Thanks to her research, their voices resonate and fill a historical context with personality and flavor.--CHoW Line Of tremendous use, not only for historians of the South and food historians, who will welcome this spur to incorporate the sometimes neglected South in their own national accounts, but also as a sampler of sources and methodologies for food history.--North Carolina Historical Review Show[s] that southern foodways is more than the food on the table. 'Food stands at the center of southern history and culture' (333), [Ferris] writes in her conclusion, and after reading this book, one would have to agree.--49th Parallel Successfully describes the development of southern food and its social history.--West Virginia History Well researched and integrates a wide array of food scholarship. . . . Excellent in convincing its readers of the importance of food in writing and understanding history.--American Studies

Certain to become an indispensable reference tool for scholars of U.S. food studies and of southern culture.-- The Journal of Southern History

Author Information

Marcie Cohen Ferris, associate professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA is the author of Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South.

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