A Gracious Plenty Book

There is a calmness to this book, and it comes from an assured knowledge rising out of the kind of scholarship that sets aside popular mythology in favor of the ways things actually are and have been. No U.S. region suffers more from popular mythology, some of it benign, much of it mocking and cruel, than the South. Author-editor John T. Edge encourages the reader of A Gracious Plenty to taste the South for what it is and has been. The book has the backing of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. In his introduction, Center director Charles Reagan Wilson points to the Southern Thanksgiving of his father-in-law, a native Mississippian who happens to be Lebanese. Both deep-fried turkey and kibbe are served, with stuffed grape and cabbage leaves as well as oyster dressing and sweet potato casserole. The heritage, he writes, is strictly Southern. The recipes are drawn from community cookbooks--"those clunky, spiral-bound, gravy-spattered volumes." While they get little respect, these volumes are an important part of the Southern kitchen and food tradition. The earliest ones date back to the Civil War and then as now were published to raise funds for a cause. Apparently, by the close of the 19th century, more than 2,000 community cookbooks were in print. Edge rightly points out that recipes gathered into a community cookbook are never authored by one, but by many. In effect, he encourages the reader to pull a seat up to the Southern table. Many of the voices heard in A Gracious Plenty come from material gathered by writers and journalists between 1935 and 1942 working for the Federal Writers Project. The recipes are divided into sections that include appetizers, beverages, breads, salads and dressings, sides and vegetables, soups and stews, meats, poultry, fish and seafood, sauces, preserves, jellies and pickles, desserts, and a final section on menus. These are home recipes, church-basement recipes, proud recipes. They taste like reality made up of pain and hospitality and careless laughter. A Gracious Plenty is a wonderful book and an important addition to anyone's cookbook library. --Schuyler IngleRead More