House of Smoke: A Southerner Goes Searching for Home

James Beard Award winner Edge (The Potlikker Papers) serves up a bountiful repast that covers family legacy, Southern history, and enduring connections between race and food. Growing up in small-town 1960s Georgia in a house originally owned by a Confederate general, Edge learned early on to regale his friends with stories of the Lost Cause. His bohemian mother fueled such tales, while his father pulled him away to visit local “houses of smoke,” where Edge’s “passion for food blossomed, born of my father’s taste for barbecue and our shared curiosity about the wider world.” After graduating from the University of Mississippi with a Southern studies degree, Edge settled in Oxford, Miss., eating and writing until, in 1999, he became the founding director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, an organization devoted to preserving the South’s diverse food cultures. In 2020, activists called for him to step down, citing a lack of diversity among leadership, pushing him to reconsider “the stories on which I depended” about his homeland. His subsequent reckoning with his role as a white spokesperson for Black cultures is gracious and direct. Clear-eyed, bighearted, and beautifully written, this nourishing memoir offers readers plenty to chew on. Photos. Agent: David Black, David Black Literary. (Sept.)