“The one food book you must read this year." —Southern Living One of Christopher Kimball’s Six Favorite Books About Food A people’s history that reveals how Southerners shaped American culinary identity and how race relations impacted Southern food culture over six revolutionary decades Like great provincial dishes around the world, potlikker is a salvage food. During the antebellum era, slave owners ate the greens from the pot and set aside the leftover potlikker broth for the enslaved, unaware that the broth, not the greens, was nutrient rich. After slavery, potlikker sustained the working poor, both black and white. In the South of today, potlikker has taken on new meanings as chefs have reclaimed it. Potlikker is a quintessential Southern dish, and The Potlikker Papers is a people’s history of the modern South, told through its food. Beginning with the pivotal role cooks and waiters played in the civil rights movement, noted authority John T. Edge narrates the South’s fitful journey from a hive of racism to a hotbed of American immigration. He shows why working-class Southern food has become a vital driver of contemporary American cuisine. Food access was a battleground issue during the 1950s and 1960s. Ownership of culinary traditions has remained a central contention on the long march toward equality. The Potlikker Papers tracks pivotal moments in Southern history, from the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s to the rise of fast and convenience foods modeled on rural staples. Edge narrates the gentrification that gained traction in the restaurants of the 1980s and the artisanal renaissance that began to reconnect farmers and cooks in the 1990s. He reports as a newer South came into focus in the 2000s and 2010s, enriched by the arrival of immigrants from Mexico to Vietnam and many points in between. Along the way, Edge profiles extraordinary figures in Southern food, including Fannie Lou Hamer, Colonel Sanders, Mahalia Jackson, Edna Lewis, Paul Prudhomme, Craig Claiborne, and Sean Brock. Over the last three generations, wrenching changes have transformed the South. The Potlikker Papers tells the story of that dynamism—and reveals how Southern food has become a shared culinary language for the nation.

Everybody has one in their collection. You know—one of those old, spiral- or plastic-tooth-bound cookbooks sold to support a high school marching band, a church, or the local chapter of the Junior League. These recipe collections reflect, with unimpeachable authenticity, the dishes that define communities: chicken and dumplings, macaroni and cheese, chess pie. When the Southern Foodways Alliance began curating a cookbook, it was to these spiral-bound, sauce-splattered pages that they turned for their model. Including more than 170 tested recipes, this cookbook is a true reflection of southern foodways and the people, regardless of residence or birthplace, who claim this food as their own. Traditional and adapted, fancy and unapologetically plain, these recipes are powerful expressions of collective identity. There is something from—and something for—everyone. The recipes and the stories that accompany them came from academics, writers, catfish farmers, ham curers, attorneys, toqued chefs, and people who just like to cook—spiritual Southerners of myriad ethnicities, origins, and culinary skill levels. Edited by Sara Roahen and John T. Edge, written, collaboratively, by Sheri Castle, Timothy C. Davis, April McGreger, Angie Mosier, and Fred Sauceman, the book is divided into chapters that represent the region’s iconic foods: Gravy, Garden Goods, Roots, Greens, Rice, Grist, Yardbird, Pig, The Hook, The Hunt, Put Up, and Cane. Therein you’ll find recipes for pimento cheese, country ham with redeye gravy, tomato pie, oyster stew, gumbo z’herbes, and apple stack cake. You’ll learn traditional ways of preserving green beans, and you’ll come to love refried black-eyed peas. Are you hungry yet?

This lively, handsomely illustrated, first-of-its-kind book celebrates the food of the American South in all its glorious variety—yesterday, today, at home, on the road, in history. It brings us the story of Southern cooking; a guide for more than 200 restaurants in eleven Southern states; a compilation of more than 150 time-honored Southern foods; a wonderfully useful annotated bibliography of more than 250 Southern cookbooks; and a collection of more than 200 opinionated, funny, nostalgic, or mouth-watering short selections (from George Washington Carver on sweet potatoes to Flannery O’Connor on collard greens). Here, in sum, is the flavor and feel of what it has meant for Southerners, over the generations, to gather at the table—in a book that’s for reading, for cooking, for eating (in or out), for referring to, for browsing in, and, above all, for enjoying.

Acclaimed food writer and cultural historian John T. Edge conjures nostalgia by revealing portions of our history through our most cherished foods. Donuts is the cap on a scrumptious series toting comfort food, belying calorie-counting, and embracing those cornerstone, iconic dishes that have come to define American cuisine and customs over the years. In Donuts, Edge walks us though the donut's inception as Dutch fare, the Salvation Army's wartime donuts, the invention of the donut machine, the 1950s donut-shop craze, the Krispy Kreme revolution, the appropriation by other ethnicities, and the fanatical chefs that take donuts to a new art form. Nothing encourages our sweet-tooth cravings like the donut. It is honest. It is satisfying. It is a national symbol that has survived the low carb-diet dogma and the death of the local donut shop, and it is making a comeback into the hearts of Americans.

It’s the best of street food: bold, delicious, surprising, over-the-top goodness to eat on the run. And the best part is now you can make it at home. Obsessively researched by food authority John T. Edge, The Truck Food Cookbook delivers 150 recipes from America’s best restaurants on wheels, from L.A. and New York to the truck food scenes in Portland, Austin, Minneapolis, and more. John T. Edge shares the recipes, special tips, and techniques. And what a menu-board: Tamarind-Glazed Fried Chicken Drummettes. Kalbi Beef Sliders. Porchetta. The lily-gilding Grilled Cheese Cheeseburger. A whole chapter’s worth of tacos—Mexican, Korean, Chinese fusion. Plus sweets, from Sweet Potato Cupcakes to an easy-to-make Cheater Soft-Serve Ice Cream. Hundreds of full-color photographs capture the lively street food gestalt and its hip and funky aesthetic, making this both an insider’s cookbook and a document of the hottest trend in American food.

Fried chicken, rice and gravy, sweet potatoes, collard greens and spoon bread - all good old fashioned, down-home southern foods, right? Wrong. The fried chicken and collard greens are African, the rice is from Madagascar, the sweet potatoes came to Virginia from the Peruvian Andes via Spain, and the spoon bread is a marriage of Native American corn with the French souffl technique thought up by skilled African American cooks. Food historian Rick McDaniel takes 150 of the South's best-loved and most delicious recipes and tells how to make them and the history behind them. From fried chicken to gumbo to Robert E. Lee Cake, it's a history lesson that will make your mouth water. What southerners today consider traditional southern cooking was really one of the world's first international cuisines, a mlange of European, Native American and African foods and influences brought together to form one of the world's most unique and recognizable cuisines.

What could be a more fun and delicious way to celebrate American culture than through the lore of our favorite foods? That's what John T. Edge does in his smart, witty, and compulsively readable new series on the dishes everyone thinks their mom made best. If these are the best-loved American foods-ones so popular they've come to represent us-what does that tell us about ourselves? And what do the history of the dish and the regional variations reveal? There are few aspects of life that carry more emotional weight and symbolism than food, and in writing about our food icons, Edge gives us a warm and wonderful portrait of America -by way of our taste buds. After all, "What is patriotism, but nostalgia for the foods of our youth?" as a Chinese philosopher once asked.

What could be a more fun and delicious way to celebrate American culture than through the lore of our favorite foods? That's what John T. Edge does in his smart, witty, and compulsively readable new series on the dishes everyone thinks their mom made best. If these are the best-loved American foods-ones so popular they've come to represent us-what does that tell us about ourselves? And what do the history of the dish and the regional variations reveal? There are few aspects of life that carry more emotional weight and symbolism than food, and in writing about our food icons, Edge gives us a warm and wonderful portrait of America -by way of our taste buds. After all, "What is patriotism, but nostalgia for the foods of our youth?" as a Chinese philosopher once asked. In Fried Chicken, Edge tells an immensely entertaining tale of a beloved dish with a rich history. Freed slaves cooked it to sell through the windows of train cars from railroad platforms in whistle-stop towns. Children carried it in shoe boxes on long journeys. A picnic basket isn't complete without it. It is a dish that is deeply Southern, and yet it is cooked passionately across the country. And what about the variations? John T. Edge weaves a beguiling tapestry of food and culture as he takes us from a Jersey Shore hotel to a Kansas City roadhouse, from the original Buffalo wings to KFC, from Nashville Hot Chicken to haute fried chicken at a genteel Southern inn. And, best of all, he gives us fifteen of the ultimate recipes along the way.

Winner, 2019 James Beard Award for Best Book of the Year in Writing Finalist, 2019 IACP Award, Literary Food Writing Named a Best Food Book of the Year by the Boston Globe, Smithsonian, BookRiot, and more Semifinalist, Goodreads Choice Awards “Thoughtful, well researched, and truly moving. Shines a light on what it means to cook and eat American food, in all its infinitely nuanced and ever-evolving glory.” —Anthony Bourdain American food is the story of mash-ups. Immigrants arrive, cultures collide, and out of the push-pull come exciting new dishes and flavors. But for Edward Lee, who, like Anthony Bourdain or Gabrielle Hamilton, is as much a writer as he is a chef, that first surprising bite is just the beginning. What about the people behind the food? What about the traditions, the innovations, the memories? A natural-born storyteller, Lee decided to hit the road and spent two years uncovering fascinating narratives from every corner of the country. There’s a Cambodian couple in Lowell, Massachusetts, and their efforts to re-create the flavors of their lost country. A Uyghur café in New York’s Brighton Beach serves a noodle soup that seems so very familiar and yet so very exotic—one unexpected ingredient opens a window onto an entirely unique culture. A beignet from Café du Monde in New Orleans, as potent as Proust’s madeleine, inspires a narrative that tunnels through time, back to the first Creole cooks, then forward to a Korean rice-flour hoedduck and a beignet dusted with matcha. Sixteen adventures, sixteen vibrant new chapters in the great evolving story of American cuisine. And forty recipes, created by Lee, that bring these new dishes into our own kitchens.

The author continues his celebration of American cuisine with a history of backyard barbecues, fast-food restaurants, and gourmet burgers, in a volume complemented by fifteen recipes.