We’ve now entered the abstract phase of this culinary rebirth, in which the idea of Southern food is as fungible and bankable as the food itself.

On a summer day in 1949, ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, novelist Donald Windham, painter Buffie Johnson, playwright Tennessee Williams, and writer-provocateur Gore Vidal gathered at Café Nicholson, a bohemian supper club set in the back courtyard of an antique store on New York City’s Upper East Side.

An installment in Local Fare, a food column by John T. Edge. 

Integration came early to barbecue. (And it remained, after the Civil Rights Movement came and went, while schools and other public accommodations re-segregated.) That’s the story we chowhounds tell, with a whiff of self-satisfaction.

The South has diversified over the last twenty years. And so has my palate.

Potlikker, the soupy leavings at the bottom of a pot of greens or beans, is now vogue.