Egerton is a notable historian of and from the Soutn. He's written some entirely serious, scholarly books that cover areas that some wannabe Southerners don't appreciate. But Egerton has also written brilliantly of southern food and culture. It's not exactly at arm's length. It's up close, affectionate and famly to him.
Egerton is someone who has lived and eaten in the South all of his live. He is not one of the nouveau Southerners who come down waving their Confederate flas and wearing cowboy boots in the deep south. You'e got to be a native or close to it to know this stuff. Which isn't to say that they won't be glad you're there. Just don't talking like you know more about our good than us..
Not that it's simple. What the South eats varies on location, past economics and all sorts of things. Some argue about Barbecue. I'm from the part that just eats it. Egerton appreciates the difference. This is a gook with a fine helping of recipes as most Egerton books about food do -- but it's not a cookbook.
Food and family were my culture in the deep South. When we sit down to eat, we eat. Nothing wrong with fried, but it's a libel that everything is. Most of us don't put flour in our cornbread -- in my family if you put flour and sugar into cornbread you were making a cake.
When I read Egerton on food, I get the urge to make some of my momma's cornbread or my grandmother's peach cobbler made from fruit grown in the back yard. That's what this one does to me -- although I might try another reminder of home.
This is a fine addition to Egerton's compiled works. Just thinking about it, aside from wanting to eat some fine home cooking from the South, it makes me miss the days when the Purefoy was still open and the floods hadn't reached the Acme Oyster House in New Orleans.
But more than anything it reminds me of all te fine cooks in my family and when a meal in a big group of family was a fine experience unlike any dinner party most folks today know about.
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