Cornbread Nation 1: The Best of Southern Food Writing (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Egerton is a journalist and author whose books include the award-winning Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History and Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee. General editor John T. Edge is executive director of the Southern Foodways Alliance in Oxford, Mississippi. Founded in 1999, the SFA works to celebrate, preserve, promote, and nurture the diverse food cultures of the American South. Its members include scholars, chefs, cookbook authors, journalists, and farmers.

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Introduction
At some point in the course of the Southern Foodways Symposium in Oxford, Mississippi, a couple of years ago--it could have been while we were scarfing up some of Leah Chase's bodacious gumbo, or when we were out in the little hamlet of Taylor wolfing down a ton of fried catfish and hushpuppies at an old grocery store, or even as we listened attentively to Dick Pillsbury's treatise on barbecue belts and grits lines and other landmarks of culinary geography--somewhere along in there, a rich and mellow idea seemed to hatch full-grown and muscular in several minds at once. This immaculate and spontaneous conception bounced up on the table in the shank of an after-dinner talkfest. It proceeded, as I recall, more or less like this:

"You know, what we oughta do is put together a book full of all this good stuff." (That must have been Ronni Lundy; she has a way of dreaming things up and then letting others think they discovered them.)

"Yeah, that's just what I've been thinking," someone else said. "Food is so central to the South we all like?the Good South of conviviality and generosity and sweet communion. What we've got here is a little band of food lovers who'll make any excuse to get together and cook, eat, talk . . . "

" . . . and write about it. At least half of us are writers of one stripe or another."

"That's probably because we don't know how to cook."

"The chefs are wannabe writers, and the writers are wannabe chefs?and when the twain meet to eat, the stories come rolling out like Cajun popcorn."

"So let's quit talking about it and do it."

"Do what?"

"A book. A collection of great food stories from the South."

And that, you might say, was the birth of a notion, more or less. We named it Cornbread Nation, a title the Southern Foodways Alliance previously used on its newsletter (which, henceforth, will be given another name to avoid confusion). Cornbread Nation is not a term freighted with any profound or universal meaning; it's just a catchy little phrase that calls to mind, for some of us, a timeless South where corn has been the staff of life forever, and cornbread in myriad forms has held a central place in the cookery of the region since the original people hunkered down to bake and break bread together.

Read the complete introduction.