The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South

Like provincial dishes around the world, potlikker is a salvage food. During the antebellum era, slave owners ate the greens and set aside the leftover broth for the enslaved, unaware that the potlikker, not the greens, was nutrient rich. Today, potlikker has taken on new meanings as cooks reclaim and reinterpret the dish. Beginning with the pivotal role of cooks in the civil rights movement, noted authority John T. Edge narrates the region’s journey from a hive of racism to a hotbed of American immigration. In the process, he traces how the food of working class Southerners has become a signature of American cuisine. Restaurants were battlegrounds during the civil rights movement. Access to food and ownership of traditions were key contentions on the long and fitful march toward racial equality. The Potlikker Papers begins in 1955 as black cooks and maids fuelled the Montgomery bus boycott and it concludes in 2015 as a newer South came into focus, enriched by the arrival of im