The Potlikker Papers by John T. Edge

Author:John T. Edge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-04-14T10:30:53+00:00

When Dupree thought it useful, she played the Old South card. She spoke to white, privileged, and recalcitrant readers when she wrote in New Southern Cooking, her 1986 breakout book, “The poverty and humiliation resulting from the War Between the States and the Great Depression fixed us in time. Our desire to preserve, hold on to, and remain set in our ways is reflected in our politics and customs and in the soul food that became a trademark and mainstay of Southern cooking. Much of it came from former slaves who were our cooks.”

But she didn’t limit her work to romanticism. To research that book, she dug into the archives at the Atlanta History Center and traveled to Mount Vernon to sift through the papers of Martha Washington. For a crab pie recipe, spiked with Madeira, she traced the history of that beverage in Savannah. In the headnote for grilled chicken kabobs basted with soy sauce, Dupree documented the lives of Chinese immigrants who arrived in Augusta, Georgia, in the 1870s to build canals and stayed to operate laundries and grocery stores.

Dupree found her voice when talking class and gender. Inspired by her working-class mother, and by a grandfather who edited a union newspaper, Dupree spoke out for women’s rights, agitating for better pay and honest attribution. After speaking to a men’s group one night, Dupree sat down the next morning to reflect. The person who decides what and when and where food will be eaten wields power, she wrote. “I know this because I’m a Southern woman and for us the only place to wield power was in the home—more specifically in the kitchen. Blacks knew this too. Keep a white man happy, be you slave or woman, and your lot in life will be better—you may even be able to get some of what you want.”

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