Catch up on your reading with the UGA Press Summer Sale and get 40% off all books during the month of June! Today we’re highlighting food. Take a look at some of our best food titles below, and use code 08JUNE40 at checkout to get 40% off. You can buy books that are out now or pre-order forthcoming titles. We’ve also included links to similar books in the same subject areas, so feel free to branch out beyond this list. Happy shopping!
Smokelore: A Short History of Barbecue in America by Jim Auchmutey is a guided tour into the colorful past of the Great American Food, with vintage art and recipes. Jim Auchmutey follows the delicious and contentious history of barbecue in America from the ox roast that celebrated the groundbreaking for the U.S. Capitol building to the first barbecue launched into space almost two hundred years later. It’s a spicy story that involves noted Americans from George Washington and Abraham Lincoln to Louis Armstrong, Elvis Presley, Martin Luther King Jr., and Barack Obama.
“Smokelore is a feast for the eyes, extensively illustrated with color photographs, menus, and advertisements that capture the vibrant history of American barbecue.”
—Robert Moss, Southern Living
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Preserving Family Recipes: How to Save and Celebrate Your Food Traditions by Valerie J. Frey is a step-by-step guide for the family food genealogist. This book is a guide for gathering, adjusting, supplementing, and safely preserving family recipes and for interviewing relatives, collecting oral histories, and conducting kitchen visits to document family food traditions from the everyday to special occasions. Whether you simply want to save a few accurate recipes, help yesterday’s foodways evolve so they are relevant for today’s table, or create an extensive family cookbook, this guidebook will help you to savor your memories.
“There is certainly more in this book than can be described here, so if you are a cookbook collector, family food historian, someone who likes old recipes, or you enjoy the history of cooking, especially Southern cooking, this book is for you. It would be a great last-minute gift as well.”
—Kenneth H. Thomas, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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The Southern Foodways Alliance Guide to Cocktails by Sara Camp Milam and Jerry Slater is a fun and fabulous SFA cocktail recipe book for the love of entertaining. Nearly one hundred easy-to-follow recipes instruct the home bartender how to create memorable drinks, whether they be light tipples or potent bell ringers.
“The Southern Foodways Alliance Guide to Cocktails is full of tantalizing recipes, beautiful photographs, and wonderful stories of the people and places that helped cocktails flourish in the American South. . . . Though this book is filled with tempting recipes, it is the history of the South, and the stories about how various cocktails came to be, that make this book so fascinating and a pleasure to read. Information on prohibition dance caves, the association between the mint julep and the Antebellum South, or why New Orleans can be considered the center of Southern cocktail making fill the pages of this luscious book.”
—ForeWord Reviews (starred)
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Shortlisted for the 2019 James Beard Foundation Award in Reference, History, and Scholarship
Catfish Dream: Ed Scott’s Fight for His Family Farm and Racial Justice in the Mississippi Delta by Julian Rankin centers around the experiences, family, and struggles of Ed Scott Jr. (born in 1922), a prolific farmer in the Mississippi Delta and the first ever nonwhite owner and operator of a catfish plant in the nation. Julian Rankin provides a fascinating portrait of a place through his intimate biography of Scott, a hero at once so typical and so exceptional in his community.
“Ed Scott Jr. is perhaps not a name familiar to many Americans, but it should be. His experience and struggles with racism are the focus of . . . an intimate portrait of the first nonwhite owner and operator of an American catfish plant. . . . Part of the Southern Foodways Alliance’s Studies in Culture, People, and Place series, Catfish Dream presents an emblem for African American success even in the face of tremendous obstacles.”
—Smithsonian Magazine
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Shortlisted for the 2019 James Beard Foundation Award in Reference, History, and Scholarship
In Creole Italian, Justin A. Nystrom explores the influence Sicilian immigrants have had on New Orleans foodways. His culinary journey follows these immigrants from their first impressions on Louisiana food culture in the mid-1830s and along their path until the 1970s. Creole Italian chronicles how the business of food, broadly conceived, dictated the reasoning, means, and outcomes for a large portion of the nearly forty thousand Sicilian immigrants who entered America through the port of New Orleans in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and how their actions and those of their descendants helped shape the food town we know today.
“Justin A. Nystrom tells how Sicilians and other Italian immigrants have shaped New Orleans’ food culture-and how ‘creole cultural’ hegemony has obfuscated those contributions. Nystrom’s writing has a fluent style, vigor, and level of detail that makes Creole Italian a terrific read. The book makes a substantial contribution to food studies and immigration history by providing specificity and detail to broader histories of immigrant-run businesses selling produce and cooked food. It nicely complements studies by Donna Gabaccia, Hasia Diner, and Simone Cinotto on Italian immigrants and food cultures.”
—Krishnendu Ray, author of The Ethnic Restaurateur
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Cornbread Nation 7: The Best of Southern Food Writing, edited by Francis Lam, brings together the best Southern food writing from recent years, including well-known food writers such as Sara Roahen and Brett Anderson, a couple of classic writers such as Langston Hughes, and some newcomers. The collection, divided into five sections (“Come In and Stay Awhile,” “Provisions and Providers,” “Five Ways of Looking at Southern Food,” “The South, Stepping Out,” and “Southerners Going Home”), tells the stories both of Southerners as they move through the world and of those who ended up in the South. It explores from where and from whom food comes, and it looks at what food means to culture and how it relates to home.
“Cornbread Nation 7 is American regionalism at its finest. It’s a splendid collection of tales of Southerners traveling abroad, immigrants journeying to the South, and children of immigrants living in the South and then reflecting on their heritage. Through the meticulous efforts of guest editor Francis Lam, on behalf of the Southern Foodways Alliance and general editor John T. Edge, we have been bestowed with this gem.”
—Shyam K. Sriram, PopMatters
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A High Low Tide: The Revival of a Southern Oyster by André Joseph Gallant asks: will Georgia’s wild oystermen adapt with the rise of aquaculture? The dawn of aquaculture in Georgia promises a sea change in the livelihoods of wild-harvest shellfishermen, should they choose to adapt to new methods. Gallant documents how these traditional harvesters are affected by innovation and uncertain tides and asks how threatened they really are.
“Gallant’s ability to explain the biology/ecology of the Georgia seacoast oyster is remarkable for both its depth and understandability. Likewise, his introduction of a cast of strongly individualistic characters involved in this unique coastal culture is key to creating a rich and compelling story of place. Moreover, his descriptions of the physical power and beauty of the region create a fascinating world that is a pleasure for any reader to enter.”
—Ronni Lundy, James Beard Award–winning author of Victuals
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Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning by Rafia Zafar explores how foodways writing influenced African American culture in the United States. Beginning in the early nineteenth century and continuing nearly to the present day, African Americans have often been stereotyped as illiterate kitchen geniuses. Rafia Zafar addresses this error, highlighting the long history of accomplished African Americans within our culinary traditions, as well as the literary and entrepreneurial strategies for civil rights and respectability woven into the written records of dining, cooking, and serving.
“In the academy, scholarship on food and literary culture constitutes a growing river within literary and cultural studies, but writing on African American food and dining remains a tributary. Recipes for Respect bridges this gap, illuminating the role of foodways in African American culture as well as the contributions of Black cooks and chefs to what has been considered the mainstream.”
—Texas Institute for the Preservation of History & Culture Newsletter
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We Want Land to Live: Making Political Space for Food Sovereignty by Amy Trauger explores the current boundaries of radical approaches to food sovereignty. First coined by La Via Campesina (a global movement whose name means “the peasant’s way”), food sovereignty is a concept that expresses the universal right to food. Amy Trauger uses research combining ethnography, participant observation, field notes, and interviews to help us understand the material and definitional struggles surrounding the decommodification of food and the transformation of the global food system’s political-economic foundations.
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Beyond the Kale: Urban Agriculture and Social Justice Activism in New York City by Kristin Reynolds and Nevin Cohen argues that urban agricultural projects focused explicitly on dismantling oppressive systems have the greatest potential to achieve substantive social change. Through in-depth interviews and public forums with some of New York City’s most prominent urban agriculture activists and supporters, Kristin Reynolds and Nevin Cohen illustrate how some urban farmers and gardeners not only grow healthy food for their communities but also use their activities and spaces to disrupt the dynamics of power and privilege that perpetuate inequity.
“Challenging the increasingly mainstream view of urban agriculture as an extension of the new food movement that consists of young, middle-class white “homesteaders” and “pioneers,” Nevin Cohen and Kristin Reynolds identify how communities of color have their own rich history and contemporary forms of an urban agriculture directly linked to a deeper desire to bring about community change and social justice. The authors do more than provide an account of this alternative view of urban agriculture; rather, they critically yet constructively engage the movement while trying to energize its efforts to achieve food system change and environmental, economic, and social justice.”
—Robert Gottlieb, coauthor of Food Justice
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Southern Cooking by S.R. Dull is an iconic collection of southern home-cooking recipes. No southern food enthusiast should be without this gathering of 1,300 flavorful recipes for such classic dishes as fried chicken, cornbread, pickled watermelon rinds, and sweet potato pie. Southern Cooking had its origins in Henrietta Dull’s immensely popular cooking column in the Atlanta Journal, whose readers faithfully clipped its recipes. The demand for reprints of perennial favorites or early, hard-to-find dishes prompted Mrs. Dull to compile them into her now-famous book. Not only does it include individual recipes, but it also suggests menus for various occasions and holidays.
“Many Southerners will fondly remember Henrietta Dull’s Southern Cooking as the other sacred book in their childhood homes. I’ve long thought it is one of the most important Southern cookbooks of the twentieth century. This new edition of Mrs. Dull’s classic work should inspire a new generation of Southern cooks.”
—Nathalie Dupree, author of New Southern Cooking
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Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance edited by Sandra Beasley is a rich collection of poetry grown and harvested from foodways studies. With Vinegar and Char the Southern Foodways Alliance celebrates twenty years of symposia by offering a collection of poems that are by turns as sophisticated and complex, as vivid and funny, and as buoyant and poignant as any SFA gathering. Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance edited by Sandra Beasley is a rich collection of poetry grown and harvested from foodways studies.
“Some say opposable thumbs are what make humans people; some say it’s the use of tools; some say it’s that we cook our food; and some say that it’s the fact that we use words. I don’t know much about evolutionary biology and thumbs, but I can tell you that this collection of words about food is also a collection of tools-of useful things for making meaning of our lives and the world and the places we call home. It’s full of what people need.”
—Francis Lam, host of The Splendid Table, produced by American Public Media, former Eat columnist for the New York Times Magazine, and editor-at-large at Clarkson Potter
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Eat Drink Delta: A Hungry Traveler’s Journey through the Soul of the South by veteran food journalist Susan Puckett reveals a region shaped by slavery, civil rights, amazing wealth, abject deprivation, the Civil War, a flood of biblical proportions, and-above all-an overarching urge to get down and party with a full table and an open bar.
“Eat Drink Delta eloquently tells the story of the deepest south of the Deep South, the land where black and white can have sharp contrasts, and yet many of the food traditions are blended into a rich, smooth mélange, much like the soil itself. Puckett immerses the reader in a tale that shares how the dark, fertile soil of the Delta nurtures crops as well as American food and culture. The land that produced King Cotton also produced the King of Rock and Roll. And the land that produced catfish and BBQ now produces kibbee and Chinese collard greens. Puckett’s artful storytelling creates a vivid scene-not mere guidebook information-revealing a true culinary journey through one of the largely unknown areas of the country.”
—Virginia Willis, author of Bon Appetit, Y’all: Recipes and Stories from Three Generations of Southern Cooking
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