You come to the Black Panthers, for whom feeding the masses was a radical act. “And if you think about one of the propulsive moments of the movement, you come to the Montgomery bus boycotts.”Īnd you come to Georgia Gilmore, an indefatigable mother of six who literally nourished the movement from her own kitchen. “ I recognized along the way that I’m definitively disinterested in the Civil War, and that the South I embrace, love and am also angry with begins to take shape as the Civil Rights movement comes into focus. “I initially thought I was going to write a book that was the post-Civil War South,” Edge told the Los Angeles Times in an interview. He begins with the Civil Rights movement, one that centered in part on the right to sit at a counter and eat, and one that was certainly fueled by home kitchens and underground restaurants. “For me, this book was an attempt to boil down, distill down 60 years of Southern history and offer voice to all those cooks who express themselves through a kind of subversive creativity in the kitchen and the fields and at tables,” Edge told NPR in a recent interview.

The PotLikker Papers grew out of Edge’s 2002 masters dissertation, written during a career curve that found him abandoning the corporate world for an academic career that would earn him a James Beard Award for his writing and a position heading up the Southern Foodways Alliance project at the University of Mississippi. Edge sketches a brief history of modern Southern culture through what was eaten and who cooked it in his new book, The Potlikker Papers. Using this as a metaphor and a title, food journalist John T. The bottom of the pan holds the best part of the meal. When the meat and greens are scooped from the pan to be placed on the plates of the privileged, the fat and vitamins stay behind for the bowls of the poor. The longer the greens stew with the meat, the richer the pot likker.

The Potlikker Papers by John T. Edge