The Liquid South

We use Mississippi State cheese
whenever we can...
only because there is no Rebel Cheese,
which would surely be more
tasteful and refined.

~ opinionated Chef John Currence

I’m missing the Southern Foodways Alliance’s annual symposium next month and I couldn’t be more bummed. It is, hands down, one of my favorite organizations in the country. It doesn’t hurt that John T. Edge, Mary Beth Lasseter, and the Center for the Study of Southern Culture staff and students throw one hell of a party every year under the guise of like-minded people coming together for serious discussions of what happens when southerners (displaced and in situ) come together at the table.

That I’ll be missing some of John Currence’s cooking is enough to drive me to drink. Oh, yeah ~ David Wondrich will be making punch, Ted Breaux is hosting an absinthe hour, and Junior Johnson will be...well, Junior.

Did I mention that it’s a hell of a party?

From the SFA symposium brochhure:

Dr. Nut was the favorite drink of Ignatius J. Reilly, the antihero of John Kennedy Toole’s Pulizer Prizewinning novel, A Confederacy of Dunces. Photograph, from 1949, by Charles L. Franck, courtesy of the Historic New Orleans Collection, accession no. 1979.325.58.