From Gene Hamer and Bill Smith of Crook's Corner in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, comes word of the Southern Foodways Alliance.
Headquartered at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, the organization's website describes their mission: The SFA documents and celebrates the diverse food cultures of the American South. We set a common table where black and white, rich and poor -- all who gather -- may consider our history and our future in a spirit of reconciliation.
Bill told me a while back about going down to New Orleans to lend a hand to a restaurateur in the wake of Katrina. I believe it was through the Southern Foodways Alliance, who helped 91-year-old Willie Mae Seaton reopen the doors of the James Beard Award-winning Willie Mae's Scotch House in New Orleans this past April. (Click on the video to the right to see more about Willie Mae and her cooking.)
The SFA is also the home of the Southern BBQ Trail, which has already gathered oral histories of barbecue throughout Alabama, Texas, and Tennessee, and is now at work in North Carolina.
Meanwhile, Crook's Corner is co-hosting the SFA's Camp Carolina Sept. 7-9.
Good eating, y'all!
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Good food, good stories from Bill Smith, renowned chef at Crook's Corner in Chapel Hill, NC.
Published by Algonquin Press.
Crook's Corner says you can order your autographed copy directly from the restaurant.
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Southern = a state of mind?
Jason Sheehan grew up in Rochester and lives in Denver. So what does this restaurant critic for Westword yearn for?
"When I'm feeling good," says Sheehan, "I want barbecue. And when I'm feeling bad, I just want barbecue more."
In fact, he claims in his piece for NPR's "This I Believe," "There's No Such Thing as Too Much Barbecue." Which just goes to show that Southern is sometimes more a state of mind than geography.
