From the Southern Table

Well, after Angela’s chicken article in the Memphis Flyer, the cat is out of the bag.

For the past three years, we’ve been working on a project that a few of you have known about. We’ve been conducting interviews and gathering stories and recipes from first-generation immigrants who are working with food in the South. These stories and recipes will appear in a book that will be published by the University of North Carolina Press in Fall 2011.

As Southerners, we already have a great and rich food tradition, but over the past 40 years, immigrants have poured into the South in ever-increasing numbers. As these people have brought food traditions of their own, they have enriched the variety of foods available to us.

Working with food is always a hard job, and for an immigrant cook serving a cuisine that is unfamiliar to the residents in their new home towns, it can be a risky business to enter. And yet, many immigrants find serving their traditional foods to be a natural fit in their new communities.

Writing this book has been hard work, but we have loved it. We have traveled over 10,000 miles to meet with people. Back at home from our travels, we have done our best to present these stories well. We have edited text, cleaned up photos, tested recipes, and all of it has been a joy.

What has been painful is to think about all the great people out there that won’t make it into the book. Fortunately, we have this blog. We will be talking to some of those people and bringing their stories to you here. It’s really amazing to meet all of the fascinating people who live in our own backyard.

We’ll also be bringing you recipes that didn’t make it into the book. Some of these are recipes of our own creation, while others were contributed by some of the great ethnic chefs we’ve had the pleasure of getting to know.

While we’ve finished our manuscript, we know that we have an interesting and challenging year ahead of us. But we’re looking forward to sharing it and to introducing you to new flavors and faces along the way.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 12th, 2010 at 10:44 pm and is filed under Foodie media, The World in a Skillet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.