Southern Food is a feast of a book—a tribute to his native region’s traditional foodways and the generations of creative cooks who invented and refined them by an accomplished researcher and writer of history. John Egerton is also a Southern boy who knows good catfish or barbecue when he tastes it, and Southern Food spotlights some 200 restaurants where loving hands still cook it up right. And as the title promises, it also offers a wealth of home-tested recipes for those who want to preserve some of these traditions on their own. Part travelogue, part cookbook, part history, Southern Food is delicious reading, whether devoured all at once or sampled again and again.

Watch the program [requires RealPlayer®].

Card catalog entry from the Library of Congress

Blurbs from the book cover

Info/purchase pages: Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble

Book review by John Thorne, from the Outlaw Cook

This Month’s Specials: recipes from our panel and a viewer’s family food memories

For further reading:

• The Southern Foodways Alliance was created to “celebrate, preserve, promote, and nurture the traditional and developing diverse food cultures of the American South.”
• Dixie Dining offers recipes, restaurant listings, glossaries, and links.
• BBQ: A Southern Cultural Icon—an essay by Laura Dove

See also: Shuck Beans, Stack Cakes, and Honest Fried Chicken by Ronni Lundy, our November 1999 selection

Profile from a Virginia Tech course description

Telephone interview by bookclub host Bill Goodman, from October 2003 (15:23; in RealAudio®)

The John Egerton Papers, housed at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, include boxes of research materials from Southern Food, Generations, Speak Now Against the Day, and other works.

Bibliography from the Tennessee Writers Project

Audio interviews: January 2002 and February 2003 from Nashville Public Radio’s The Fine Print

Listen to John Egerton!—an appreciation by Pete McCommons, written for Flagpole magazine on the occasion of a speaking engagement by Egerton at the University of Georgia