What is Southern food?

New book challenges the assumptions

- AARON HUTCHERSON

SHRIMP Pilau.

(LAUREN BULBIN The Washington Post)

SOUTHERN food is a rich and varied cuisine, full of complexities that make it nearly impossible to confine to a single cookbook. But that is precisely the challenge culinary historian Michael W Twitty took on in his latest cookbook, Recipes From the American South.

“The South is not the Confederacy,” Twitty told the audience while we were in conversation at a Washington bookstore.

“How do you take a place that has been settled by human beings for 13000 years and reduce it to four years of white supremacy rule?” There is no strict border separating distinct worlds in the United States. “There is no such thing as you leap over a border and all of a sudden everything’s different,” Twitty said. “There is no sweet tea line. There is no grits line.”

Although geographical boundaries can help to get a sense of the region, when it comes to looking at the scope of Southern food, as with the food of any region or culture, you need to take into account the movement of people. As people voluntarily and forcefully come and go, culinary knowledge and traditions move with them, mixing and mingling with whatever's already present. “Like Southern culture, Southern food is a product of fortunate collisions, cooperation, and sometimes chaos or confusion,” Twitty writes in the book’s introduction.