NEW ON THE SHELVES
A Gracious Plenty: RECIPES AND RECOLLECTIONS FROM THE AMERICAN
SOUTH
ew on bookstore shelves this fall from G. P. Putnam's Sons is A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American South. Conceived by Ellen Rolfes, a longtime book packager, and written by John T. Edge, director of the Center's Southern Foodways Alliance, the cookbook features an introduction by Center Director Charles Reagan Wilson. "Southerners still show their regional identity through the books they write, the music they sing, the jokes they laugh at, and yes, the food they eat, suggesting that they retain a distinctive style and a recognizable way of viewing life," Wilson writes in his introduction. "Dinner on the grounds brings together a church community in a symbol of wholeness.
From left: John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, Charles Reagan Wilson, director of the Center, and Ellen Rolfes, a longtime cookbook packager who now works for University Development, display the cookbook A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American South, which was unveiled during the second Southern Foodways Symposium on October 29.
Sunday dinner at home has been a shared ritual of different Southerners for generations, reinforcing family ties over chicken and gravy. Breaking cornbread together and drinking sweet tea have been Southern sacraments, outward symbols of a deeper communion." Scattered throughout A Gracious Plenty are excerpts from the Federal Works Project's unpublished America Eats collection, for which writers compiled remembrances of "family reunions, political barbecues, fish fries, box supper socials, coon hunt suppers, cemetery cleaning picnics, chittlin' feasts at hog-killin' time," among others. Also enriching the new cookbook are 57 archival photographs-of children sharing a bucket lunch on
the playground, of cooks tending pots of burbling oil at a church fish fry, of a clutch of aged Confederate veterans sharing a mint julep on a summer afternoon, and of many other scenes. At the core of the cookbook, of course, are recipes-more than 400 Southern favorites like okra fritters and butterbeans, salmon croquettes and leather britches, country captain and casserole of possum. The recipes are culled, for the most part, from community cookbooks, those gravy-splattered, spiral(continued on page 19)
See page 16 for details about the newly formed Southern Foodways Alliance and a report on the second Southern Foodways Symposium.