House of Smoke: A Southerner Goes Searching for Home

In 1999 John Edge was a founder of the Southern Foodways Alliance, under the auspices of the Center for Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. He served as the director of SFA until 2021, when he officially "retired", but seems to have been shown the door after some public criticism by black chefs who felt he had been serving himself more than his subjects in recent articles and symposium presentations. Edge was born in Georgia, raised in a house once owned by a Confederate General, and fed what he now calls "clap-trap" about lost causes and the rise of a new south by an alcoholic, frustrated mother who bought and furnished her home with "heirlooms" from a heritage she could not legitimately claim. He spent his college years show more trying to shed one false identity, only to take on another -- that of the partying frat boy, and then years later to be accused of appropriating the stories of others to give himself a name. Before what he calls "the wreck", he had become a highly regarded food writer, with several books to his credit. He currently serves the writing programs at Ole Miss and the University of Georgia, and writes a restaurant column for Garden & Gun magazine.

My reaction to this book is somewhat ambivalent; I enjoyed parts of it very much, but I thought it was a bit boggy in the mid-section, giving too much detail about various symposia, documentaries, etc., too much name-dropping, and not enough about the soul-searching that Edge was supposedly engaged in while trying to reconcile his past with his view of himself, and to come to terms with his own ambivalence about his mother. He came around to the point in the end, however, and would appear to have found peace and contentment with himself and the life he has built for his family. I may seek out some of his other work, and see what kind of a food-writer he is. After all, he has won my favorite food writer's namesake award: the M. F. K. Fisher Prize. show less

This is an autobiographical book about the author's life from his free-thinking eccentric mother to his advocacy of Southern Black cuisine through his writing and leadership of an organization trying to popularize local and regional chefs and recipes. It is a rocky road as he is muscled out of the organization that he helped found. Edge has an interesting story, but his ego comes into play maybe a little too much.

As a long-time fan of the culinary history works produced by the Southern Foodways Alliance, I was immediately drawn to this book. I'd honestly never heard of Iverson or most of his battles, but it was interesting to learn new facts about the Civil War and about rural Georgia, where I also lived for a few years as a child. Once his "cultural appropriation" penance is complete, I hope Mr Edge regains his footing in the world of substantive food writing because he has a gift for sniffing out the type of off-the-beaten-path eateries and culinary stories I prefer to enjoy on long road trips.