With the help of our amazing board of advisors and scholars, we dug into the scholarship related to each of our episode themes. In each newsletter, we’ll share a short list of some of the most helpful books and essays we found that helped shape our understanding of the evolution of Southern foodways.
Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South by Marcie Cohen Ferris
(UNC Press 2010)
This beautiful collection of oral histories and extensive research details the Jewish culinary traditions and history found only in the South.
Buttermilk Graffiti: A Chef's Journey to Discover America's New Melting-Pot Cuisine by Edward Lee
(Artisan 2019)
Sixteen essays and forty recipes round out this culinary journey by Kentucky chef Edward Lee (who features in “Dumpling Dilemma”).
Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader Edited by Robert Ji-Song Ku , Martin F. Manalansan and Anita Mannur
(NYU Press 2013)
A collection of food scholarship that examines the way food imagery and contentious notions of ethnic authenticity are connected to Asian American culture.
At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943 By Erika Lee
(UNC Press 2004)
This is the first book to offer comprehensive analysis of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the subsequent laws that affected Chinese immigration to the U.S.
“Traveling to Opal” from the book The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee by Paisley Rekdal
(Penguin Random House 2002)
In this amusing and poignant essay, the writer travels to Natchez, Mississippi to learn more about her great-aunt Opal and her own Chinese-Southern identity.
