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| Cornbread Nation 4: The Best of Southern Food Writing (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) | 
 enlarge | Author: Contributors
Creators: Dale Volberg Reed And John Shelton Reed. John T. Edge, General Editor
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Category: Book
List Price: $17.95
Buy New: $8.00
You Save: $9.95 (55%)
New (33) Used (7) from $8.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 300569
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9 x 5.9 x 0.6
ISBN: 0820330892
Dewey Decimal Number: 394.120975
EAN: 9780820330891
ASIN: 0820330892
Publication Date: April 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: brand new
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| Customer Reviews:
Cornbread Nation ... I ate it up! August 15, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Being Southern, I enjoy reading stories and accounts of the Southern experience ... especially as it relates to food. Cornbread Nation Vol. IV (with an emphasis on Louisiana foods) is a delightful compilation of food stories from and about the South. I recommend it to non-Southerners as well so they can come to know us beyond the stereotypical "hillbilly" image.
This Yankee loves Southern cooking April 18, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The Southern Foodways Alliance was founded to celebrate, teach, preserve, and promote the food cultures of the American South. Cornbread Nation 4: The Best of Southern Food Writing is a collection of stories, poems, and essays about the foodways of the mountain South. It is one of a continuing series which includes Cornbread Nation 1: The Best of Southern Food Writing, Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue, and Cornbread Nation 3: Foods of the Mountain South. Don't set your calendar by their appearance (four have appeared in six years), but each edition will whet you appetite and your sense of adventure.
The editors have taken these offerings from symposiums held by the Southern Foodways Alliance and newspapers, magazines, journals, and books. Like its predecessors, the book is something of a homemade quilt, with contents of varying levels of content.
The opening essay is from the wonderful Edna Lewis and sets a very high standard. She writes of her love for the wonders of spring: baby calves, pigs and lambs; a breakfast of shad, skillet potatoes, and batter bread; wild greens and lettuce salads; wild strawberries and cream. If this book does nothing else, gaining an introduction to Edna Lewis is worth the full purchase price.
There's an order of sorts based on themes, but I enjoyed jumping around more. Highlights include:
The history of Tabasco--invented in Louisiana after the Civil War.
Boudin (sausage made of pork, rice and gravy) accompanied by coffee "black as Louisiana sweet crude oil".
Rick Brooks on ordinary people seeking family recipes lost in the floodwaters of Katrina, recipes for bread pudding, sweet-potato casserole, jambalaya, and doberge cake, an eight-layer yellow cake, filled with dark-chocolate frosting and encased in chocolate ganache.
The Colleton family of South Carolina and their for 40 of red rice, she-crab soup, butter beans, chicken purloo (a baked rice dish), fried blue crab, garlic crab, oysters and grits. Buckshot Colleton is asked about the yellow gunk inside crab -- "It's the fat of the crab." And in Gullah? "Buckshot's trademark smile curls onto his face. `We call that the fat of the crab'".
A North Carolinian on cornmeal dumplings: "My grandma made'm when the thrashers came. She would pat'm out and lay'm in the pot and when she took'm out and put'm on your plate they had her fingerprints on top".
I've taken my title from Jessica B. Harris's "Living North/Eating South": "My passport may be stamped Yankee, but there's no denying that my stomach and culinary soul and those of many others like me are pure Dixie."
The editors write: "We've closed the book with a benediction. By a preacher. Very Southern, to be sure. Maybe it should have come at the beginning, and we could have called it grace". Starting with Edna Lewis was graceful enough for this reader; the entire series is well worth seeking out and savoring and this volume is no exception.
Robert C. Ross 2008
PS: If you you haven't met Edna Lewis, it's my great pleasure to introduce you. Bob
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