Food Writing Review    

 

Cornbread Nation 1:

The Best of Southern Food Writing

Edited by John Edgerton

Published by the University of North Carolina Press in association with the Southern Foodways Alliance, Center for Southern Culture, and University of Mississippi, 2002

Trade paper, $16.95

ISBN: 0-8078-5419-0

 

John Egerton, editor of the first of what's intended to be a yearly anthology of writing about Southern food, explains, "Collectively, (these works) buttress our conviction that nothing else the South has to offer to the nation and the world -- with the possible exception of its music – is more eternally satisfying, heartwarming, reconciling, and memorable than its food." 

In fifty-one entries, some original features and others originally published in magazines and journals, contributors as diverse as Nikki Giovanni, Fred Chappell, Robert Morgan, James Villa, Roy Blount Jr., and Rick Bragg express and celebrate the tastes, foods, traditions, and cooks of the South. 

Taken together, this collection of essays, short stories, articles, and poems describes how integral good food and conversation are to the "Southern way of life." 

Journalist and author Edgerton's books include Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History and Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Pam Kingsbury

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