What draws us to seek pleasure and solace in places often referred to as joints and shacks? Is this about time travel? Are they portals to a Southern past? Is it rooted in rooted in class difference, and a want to span that chasm?
In his new book, Michael Twitty shares the contributions that enslaved African-Americans and their descendants have made to southern cuisine. In the book’s pages, woven alongside recipes for meals like West African Brisket (which requires paprika, black pepper, cinnamon, cayenne pepper and kosher salt, among other seasonings), he unearths tales of resilience, like how individuals once used mattress frames to barbecue deer, bear, hog, goat and sheep.
In the South, America has identified food-system problems and developed solutions. Today, as Americans agitate for food sovereignty, the bold agricultural ideas conceived in the late 1960s by Fannie Lou Hamer and other radical Southerners suggest paths for us to follow out of our food deserts.
The author of The Potlikker Papers discusses paying down a debt to the black and immigrant cooks of the South, and what it means to be an active Southerner.
Celebrating a progressive South means supporting the whole economy of practices that enabled our traditions in the first place. That means supporting the actual communities and the actual restaurants that have been here—that made this place a here in to begin with.
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