Driven by consumers’ desire for slow and local food, craft breweries, traditional butchers, cheese makers and bakeries have been popping up across the US in the last twenty years. Typically urban and staffed predominantly by white middle class men, these industries are perceived as a departure from tradition and mainstream lifestyles. But this image obscures the diverse communities that have supported artisanal foods for centuries. Using the oral histories of over 100 people, this book brings to light the voices, experiences, and histories of marginalized groups who keep Southern foodways alive. The larger than life stories of these individuals reveal the complex reality behind the movement and show how they are the backbone of the so-called new explosion of craft food.

Driven by consumers’ desire for slow and local food, craft breweries, traditional butchers, cheese makers and bakeries have been popping up across the US in the last twenty years. Typically urban and staffed predominantly by white middle class men, these industries are perceived as a departure from tradition and mainstream lifestyles. But this image obscures the diverse communities that have supported artisanal foods for centuries. Using the oral histories of over 100 people, this book brings to light the voices, experiences, and histories of marginalized groups who keep Southern foodways alive. The larger than life stories of these individuals reveal the complex reality behind the movement and show how they are the backbone of the so-called new explosion of craft food.

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?

Is culture brokered like stocks, real estate, or marriage? In this engaging book, Richard Kurin shows that cultures are also mediated and indeed brokered by countries, organizations, communities, and individuals -- all with their own vision of the truth and varying abilities to impose it on others. Drawing on his diverse experiences in producing exhibitions and public programs, Kurin challenges culture brokers -- defined broadly to include museum professionals, film-makers, journalists, festival producers, and scholars of many disciplines -- to reveal more clearly the nature of their interpretations, to envision the ways in which their messages can "play" to different audiences, and to better understand the relationship between knowledge, art, politics, and entertainment. The book documents a variety of cases in which the Smithsonian has brokered culture for the American public: a planned exhibit on Jerusalem had to balance both Israeli and Palestinian agendas; debates over the 1996 Olympic Arts Festival presented differing visions of the American South; and the National Air and Space Museum's controversial display of the Enola Gay prompted the Smithsonian to re-examine the role of national museums. Arguing that cultural exhibits reflect a series of decisions about representing someone, someplace, and something, Reflections of a Culture Broker discusses the ethical and technical problems faced by not only those who practice in a museum setting but also anyone charged with representing culture in a public forum.