About Flagpole. (Athens, Ga.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 4, 2000)
* OCTOBER 4, DON’T WAIT! Everything for Halloween • Costume Rental • •Masks * Wigs » » And 2000 J ohn T. Edge is a Macon native who enjoyed UGA too much to graduate, became a successful salesman in Atlanta, chucked it all to go back to school, moved to Oxford, MS, where he is now a food writer for Oxford American Magazine and runs the Southern Foodways Alliance at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. He comments on food for National Public Radio and is the author of A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American South. Edge was in Athens last week for a book-signing at Tasty World sponsored by Athens' Hill Street Press, publishers of Southern Belly. Pete McCommons caught up with the affable author and recorded this interview. Afterwards at the book-signing, all enjoyed a sumptuous feast of pork skins. Varsity-dog hors d'oeu- vres, sliced tomatoes, pimiento cheese and chicken salad, with a light dessert of Moon Pie quarters, all compliments of Hill Street Press and catered by Marti Schimmel. [The book jacket of Southern Belly is adapted by Anne Richmond Boston from the painting by Edge's wife, Blair Hobbs, which appears on the cover of this issue of Flagpole. Blair Hobbs also provided the pen and ink illustrations that sparkle throughout the book. She is a poet who teaches in the English department at the University of Mississippi, and she also, obviously, draws and paints.] Flagpole: When you were researching and writing the book, what was your method of working? Why don’t you weigh 300 pounds? How do you do this? John T. Edge: I was trying to use food as an entree to think about bigger issues in the South. Some of the stuff I've been doing ongoing for the Oxford American Magazine—they've allowed me great latitude in what I write about. I write about food, but only incidentally about food. It's about bigger issues, and I wanted to try that in kind of a larger look at the South. When I first talked to Tom Payton and Judy Long [of Hill Street Press] about this, it was a guidebook, and I realized about two months into writing and thinking about this that it shouldn't be a guide book. I wanted it to be something that was a little fuller. I wanted it to include portraits of people and it had nothing to do with places you go visit. And I wanted to use food as an entree to race and class and all that it is. FP: Food is so central to our lives. JTE: It is, and the way I'm starting to think about this as I talk to people about it, this book provides you a way to eat your way through Southern culture, to understand those issues that have vexed us for so long. It's a book I expect people to travel with, but I don't expect it to tell them exactly what to get off the menu. FP: Yes. For example with Paul's Barbecue you don’t get into the debates about what kind of sauce is best. You generally mention whether it’s a vmegar-based sauce or ketchup-based, but you're not really writing about the food. You write enough about Paul's so that you know that you're by God going to get the real thing if you go there. But the whole question of the way Southerners use food is so central to the way we live: the food politics that mothers use for control... JTE: Aggressive Southern hospitality: "You really need another drumstick." I'm really interested in politics and food, too: how they tie together. In Georgia you think about Lester Maddox, and he started The Pickrick. In South Carolina there’s Maurice Bessinger. He got his start at Maurice Bessinger Piggy Park and ran for Governor of South Carolina. In Mobile, Alabama, there's Oliver Wintzell. He has his oyster house, but would run for governor, for mayor. Some of those sort of riffed off of the tradition of the stump speech and the political rally. They're tied together. Remember that William Price Fox story about Eugene Talmadge in Southern Fried, where he has Talmadge barnstorming across Georgia and the crowds of farmers and somebody says... FP: By God, he’s weanng red galluses! JTE: Exactly. That's a part of the fabric of the culture. FP: There's also that story in the diner, where they're... JTE: That's my next Oxford American column. I've written about the influence of that story on my writing. My heroes are grill cooks. That story is everything I want to write about: race, class and food. It's all right there, with the grill cook quoting Kant and the young white boy learning from him. Beautiful story. FP: You don't write about any Athens restaurants. JTE: Actually, I had written the beginnings of a piece on the Chase Street Cafe, which closed. I remembered it so fondly from my time here in college. Of course I talk about some places in here that closed 20 years ago just because I think they matter. Georgia was the state I knew best because I grew up here, and it was the most difficult to whittle down. I like Weaver 0's, too. I like Wilson's. There's a lot of places I like around here, and yet I figured as long as I had Paul's in Lexington, I was close enough. FP: The inimitable Morgan R. Red wine, Jr. says you can't make good barbecue and serve catfish and fried chicken and everything else. A good barbecue joint con centrates on barbecue. JTE: There are no absolutes, but I think that's as close to one as you can get. I don't think barbecue and catfish should be on the same menu. That's really the one for me. I want to go to a fish house or I want to go to a barbecue place. I don't think the two should mix. FP: Just thinking about what it would take to winnow through the possible restaurants in Georgia alone: how in the hell did you do that for the entire Southeast? JTE: I kept coming back to the question, can I make the story of this place somehow tell a larger story about the South? Can I relate it to something that talks about some larger issue in the South? FP: how did you identify all the places? JTE: Well, a lot of friends. I've still got a crumpled up piece of paper that Ort gave me one time. It's a Euclid Avenue Yacht Club bar tab with a list of about 25 places, and it's in my files back at home. Things like that. Also books by friends. John Edgerton's book. Southern Food, is to me still the best. That and Eugene Waiteds American Cooking Southern Style are the two best books about Southern food that have been written to date. But after compiling all these... in the town I live in, Oxford, Mississippi, people stop me on the street. "I read about this," "I heard about this..." Whittling it down was just taking this mass of information, trying to find the stories behind the food and whether I could make some larger point than just how good the food turned out to be. I visited every place I wrote about, usually more than once, in the course of two or three years spent wan dering around. FP: Well, all that hard work certainly paid off with a beautiful book that's a pleasure to read. It's the kind of book you want to keep around after you've read it, to consult as you need it. JTE: Thanks; I hope so. Pete McCommons
