Authentic southern cooking is as diverse and multicultural as the regions in the South and the families who live there. Southern cooks have always creatively drawn upon the mix of cultures that compose the South, starting with Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans. Sure, southerners tend to like what granny made, but those grannies didn’t come from the same place, so they didn’t cook the same way, even when presented with the same ingredients. If what we see as southern depends on where we stand, then what we eat as southern depends on who stirs the pot. A universal southern dish is more often just a universal southern idea. Each community or family can have its own convictions about what a certain dish should contain and how it should be made. And each is darn sure its way is the best way. But go ffty miles in any direction and there will be another set of equally heartfelt convictions that its version is better. A bite of a dish in each place is a culinary gps—one taste and you’ll know where you are. Context and pride of place are as crucial to the integrity and authenticity of a southern dish as any recipe or cast-iron skillet. If there is no there there, it will never taste right. Loyalty to local customs remains a southern culinary cornerstone. At the same time, southern cooking is a dynamic art, with each generation making its own contributions and adaptations. Southern food has a threshold for the familiar that must be crossed, but the ways to do that are everexpanding. We can fnd exquisite southern food in the humblest of home kitchens, in no-frills meat-and-three eateries, in white linen restaurants, and passed through the window of a street food truck. It’s possible to get passionate, immutable, authentic southern food in kitchens that aren’t even in the South, prepared by cooks who were neither raised in the South nor versed in that tradition. Southern food can embrace ethnicity and ethnic cooks can embrace southern ingredients. That’s why we can fnd tamales in the Delta, sauerkraut in a Smoky Mountain hollow, and collards cooked in
a wok. Southern food is a balance of enduring and evolving foodways. Southern food is also evocative. It makes us southerners talk because it makes us remember. Before we tell you how a thing tastes, we need to tell you how it makes us feel and what it reminds us of. We cannot tell of the
food without telling of the people who made it for us, and why, and how well they did or didn’t do. Southern is on the tip of our tongues. This isn’t to say that all southern food memories are good because, of course, not all southern food and cooking are good. On the other hand,
some southern meals are so exalted that we are sure it’s what the angels eat on Sunday. Whether good or bad, food memories are hard to shake. There is no more tenacious nostalgia. One bite of food or one whiff of an aroma from our past is swift transport to somewhere. The persuasion of a food memory is association, not accuracy. Memories are rarely drawn to scale.
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