HOUSE OF SMOKE

The distinguished Southern food writer delivers a thoughtful memoir of his life and work.

“As a boy, all I knew was the good guys wore gray,” writes Georgia-born Edge. His mother, a bohemian intellectual with a wild streak (“Bravado was her calling, in much the same way that other mothers were good at needlepoint”), fed that notion, instructing him that defeat in the Civil War “connected our hometown to other failed and beautiful places,” not least of them ancient Rome. His father, meanwhile, was a diligent student of barbecue, using his job as a federal probation officer to travel the state looking for new “houses of smoke” to haunt, a clear gateway drug for his son, who writes fondly of a local spot where a bag of white bread was the centerpiece of every table and sweet tea arrived in “a tall plastic tumbler.” Edge would soon come to reject the good-guys-in-gray mythology, writing, “Hundreds of thousands of Lost Cause narratives fed the grand cultural lie the white South told itself about what went wrong. The lie my family told me. The lie I learned to tell myself.” His devotion to his terroir remained, however, and he fulfilled his interests in history, literature, and food by becoming the director of the Southern Foodways Alliance. That brought him into an ever-deepening appreciation for Black food traditions, and out of that grew the aim of sponsoring “honest conversations about slavery and its legacies” with food as an instrument of healing. Results didn’t quite work out as hoped: Edge found himself challenged by activists such as the Nigerian-born chef Tunde Wey, who told him, “You have endorsed and celebrated the appropriation of Black Southern food without consequence.” The denouement finds Edge recognizing the justice of that statement without self-pity and committing himself to “my ongoing reconstruction.”

An insightful consideration of food, race and racism, and sins historical and contemporary.