My only real complaint about John T. Edge’s memoir and hymn to southern food, House of Smoke, is that I could never remember the title: as I read it, I kept saying to myself that it was such a warm and optimistic book for something titled (per my mismemory),“Up in Smoke.” Readers hoping for dish on Edge’s uncomfortable exit from the helm of the Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA) will be sent away mostly unfulfilled. While he describes the event, in some of the book’s most emotionally raw passages, and is frank about his feelings that some erstwhile friends betrayed him, the book is neither a retaliation nor an excuse. Instead, it’s a real-life picaresque—a life in food, curiosity, and misadventure.
Edge grew up in a scrap of a town in Georgia “famous” for a late and nearly irrelevant Confederate victory nearby. His parents brought him regularly to Atlanta for touches of sophistication and glimpses of the wider world, with his mother encouraging him to find different drummers to follow, even as she herself was led by the relentless beat of alcoholism. Edge boozed through a few years at the University of Georgia and spent a stint in corporate jobs before heading out to Oxford to finish his bachelor’s, planning to concentrate on Southern culture. From there, he built the career most followers of the Southern literary and cuisine beats will know.
Throughout the book, Edge returns to the idea of trying to understand the South, renegotiating his relationship with it, starting from the uncritical Lost Cause nostalgia he learned as a child and emerging into a thornier, but more genuine, appreciation—an emotional journey familiar to me and probably to many. When we spoke over the phone, he noted that in attempts to “explain” our region, people often describe Mississippi as both microcosm and exemplar of the South. “If I’m going to live here, I need to know it to its fullest, in its beauty and terror, which Mississippi demands.” He continued, saying that outsiders try to explain Mississippi away, treating it as something outside the core of the American norm, “but to do that is to explain away American history, which is folly.” Edge, like the rest of us, is left with a place famed for violence and hospitality, for poverty as well as the richness of its tables—choosing to love Mississippi instead of leaning on the love-hate duality, but relenting that love isn’t uncritical.
Another theme readers will broadly (not quite universally) find relatable is the tension, at least in Edge’s early life, between the person he wants to be and the person he is. In some ways, this is a natural part of youth: you look forward to what/who you’ll be when you grow up, hopefully arriving at early middle age in the company of a self you can stand to accompany the rest of the way. At its worst, what Edge calls “the gerbil wheel of self-criticism in your head” can push us to be selfish and self-critical; if you bat this rickety demon away, there’s more room to treat others, and yourself, with grace.
Edge also returned to his mother’s influence: she wanted to be a little more, a little different, a little grander than she was—and of course, addiction often creates a sort of double self. Though Edge struggled to grieve his mother when she died, he honored her death later in one of the book’s most affecting scenes, and in our conversation credited her with some of the personality traits that led him to becoming a writer: the little bit of vigilance, of distance, that lets someone observe a scene they’re participating in to record it later.
“If I’m going to live here, I need to know it to its fullest, in its beauty and terror, which Mississippi demands.” —John T. Edge
A less comfortable but valuable point Edge raises is the transactionality of intimacy between Black and white people in the South. Edge, and I, and probably thousands of others, have written about the unifying power of food, especially in the South, and while in the best cases the observation is true and we live up to the promise of broken bread, its success is not guaranteed. It’s easy, and tempting, to conflate proximity and intimacy, to assume that people who are cordial when one sells the other barbecue or fried catfish or what-have-you share something beyond a commercial relationship. But when Edge reports his difficulties in growing SFA stakeholders beyond a white audience and relays the criticism he received for benefiting off Black foodways, it’s clear that any unity is shaky. There’s any number of ways to divide the South, but the ancient chasm of white vs. Black remains unsealed.
When describing events put on by the SFA, Edge references that each multiday conference would feature a “keynote meal.” I asked him what the keynote meal for his life and career would be, and he gave two answers. For a restaurant meal, he’d go to Highlands Bar and Grill in Birmingham, now open only on special occasions but a marker in his life where he celebrated milestone birthdays. At home, he’d opt for the one recipe in his book, a family catfish stew refined by his wife, Blair Hobbs. And lest anyone accuse him of losing his sense of humor, he added that he’d like to preface the stew with a kind of passed hors d’oeuvre Hobbs makes, with a single black olive on a cheese wafer. She calls them “kitty buttholes,” and she gave one to Calvin Trillin. At the end of the book, I wanted to share a tray of kitty buttholes with Edge, Hobbs, and whoever else they might have to supper. You will too. johntedge.com.
.jpg)
