First and foremost, it's important that Southerners have taken ownership of their cooking in a way they haven't since Antebellum times. There's a real sense of pride burgeoning there, and the reawakening is taking place all over the South. For many years, especially during the Diet Police postwar generations up till the last decade, the bulk of famous Southern cooking, known for its unabashed decadence, was seen as something unhealthy and something to avoid, and I think a lot of Southern cooks were perpetually off balance as they tried to find substitutions for pork fat, offal, and butter in their recipes. Additionally, it's very important to consider that during Reconstruction and early 20th century, agricultural policy, big city financiers, and railroads moved the bulk of hog farming and slaughter to the Midwest while many Southern farmers were pushed off their land by extraction industries and the Great Depression. The dismantling of the agrarian tradition in the South was something that hurt Southern cooking tremendously over much of the 20th century. In the last couple of decades, with the blossoming of the farm to table movement across the country and the resurgence of small farms in the South, in addition to the final victory of whole hog culture over the comically absurd Diet Police, laid the foundation for a resurgence in Southern cooking. You now have a network of small farms and artisans feeding a growing demand in cities from New Orleans and Jackson, MS to Atlanta and Charleston, SC. Finally chefs are taking ownership of their heritage and cooking with the confidence Southern chefs lacked for most of the last century and a half. At grave risk of leaving someone important out, look at the work of Sean Brock, Linton Hopkins, Ashley Christensen, Alon Shaya, Donald Link, Charles Vincent, Mike Lata, and Steven Satterfield and you have world class talent cooking with world class ingredients from the likes of Anson Mills, Caw Caw Creek, Border Springs Farm, and the Bloomy Rind, and you have something truly compelling and it was inevitable someone would notice. Also don't underestimate the influence of the Southern Foodways Alliance inspiring authors, farmers, and chefs alike. As far as the nationwide interest in Southern food, I attribute it to the realization many have some to that the Diet Police are just as wrong as they are right. What? Lard and butter aren't as bad for you as shortening and margarine? I thought you spent the last 30 years telling us the opposite! Oh, well, they just don't have credibility any more. People who are interested in eating well have gone back to eating seasonally from the land, being more conscious of the sources of their food rather than what some nutrition scientist at some Land Grant college is telling us to eat. Eating consciously from sources with integrity means eating whole animals from farms you know, lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, and minimal processed foods from companies you trust. It's even possible to find locally milled grains in most parts of the country today. It's a healthy, well-balanced way of eating, just like Southern food has always been. I think Americans have always loved Southern food. It's just that now, it's ok to love it and enjoy it, and ignore the talking heads who pooh pooh lard. We're the ones having all the fun.

this is from David Cooper...my chef de cuisine at HB Home Bistro.



i believe there are several factors that have lead to this:
-more chefs from the south bringing food culture with them
-more chefs from the north traveling to the south to visit as opposed to say, europe or california
-recognition of the south as a region rich in unique food resources and food history
-growing access to these food resources and food artisans

some items we have sourced:
weisenberger mills white stone ground grits
kennys farmhouse cheese
schuckmans paddlefish roe
bourbon barrel foods barrel aged soy
oberholtzer sorghum
scuppernongs
all kinds of great ocean fish, farm raised fish and shrimp

at HB, we have had elements of southern cooking ever since joncarl
first asked me to do a special. i think it was a crawfish gumbo. as soon as i
became chef de cuisine(2 years ago) i knew i wanted to source more food from
kentucky and other parts of the south, not so much to create classic "southern" dishes
but just to add some nuance to what we were already doing which is american bistro food.
so we have had a bit of a southern touch for the past few years.

Having been born and raised in Alabama southern food has always been a part
of my life. Professionally I do not cook southern food but I appreciate the
techniques involved. Some of the best meals I have ever had has involved
fried chicken, pit roasted bbq, or a low country boil.

Although I don’t consider myself a southern chef I do go back to some of the
flavors on my menu. Right now for example we have a pork tenderloin dish
with jalapeño jelly, wild boar sausage, lardo “brulee”, and pickled ramps.
This dish was totally inspired by elements I remember from dishes in
Charleston South Carolina just with my spin on it.

Plain and simple, southern food is the most soulful food we can call our own here in the States, and it hits on all the things that seem to be popular now: whole animal ethics and cheap cuts, pork, generous sizes, pork, bacon and lard all over the place, and pork. People these days seem to celebrate excess the way people in the 80's celebrated ghastly thinness and day-glo, and have taken the "hearty" nature of southern cooking's nurturing side and blown it up into a Paula Deen-sized carnival of overindulgence. I'm guilty of that. The difference, however, between the roots of Southern cooking and where it has come today is that most of us sit at a computer all day, then go home and watch Top Chef and The Apprentice or whatever, rather than either spending the day a)working outside with our hands and our backs or b)cooking for a family of 12 using only cast iron and fire all day. Simply put, if we burn the food energy we intake (or, perhaps more
accurately, create a need to put more food energy in our body), it's usually only on a treadmill. And we're eating the food not because we need to, but because it is so durned good.

One of the things I enjoy is the simple tradition of Southern cooking. In Europe, food goes back hundreds of years. In my opinion, Southern cuisine is one of the only region-specific styles of cooking in America that holds that similar deep rooted history. There is a new resurgence of younger chefs in the Southern cities who are applying new innovations, modern techniques and the farm to table movement to these classic Southern traditions, which is making it increasingly popular.