Southern Foodways Barbecue Trails series launches Mississippi Trail

The Southern Foodways Alliance has a series of websites called “trails” where they collect food-related oral histories.  There’s a gumbo and a boudin trail in Louisiana and a Delta tamale trail in Mississippi, for instance.  Each trail has an introductory essay, a map, and individual oral histories where a cook talks about the food and the culture producing it.

There is a big multi-state project are barbecue trails.  They’ve had trails up for North Carolina (with an introduction by John Stelton Reed), Texas (introduced by Rob Walsh), Tennessee (introduced by James R. Veteto and Ted Maclin), and Alabama (introduced by Jake York).

I was asked to write a short essay about Mississippi barbecue as an introduction to a series of oral histories that were mostly collected this summer; the set also includes an interview I did with Deke Baskin several years ago; this is part of the reason I’ve been grappling with Mississippi barbecue for the last few months.