SFA Symposium - It is that Time of the Year Again!

Tomorrow I am heading to Oxford for the 12th annual Southern Foodways Alliance Symposium. This is my favorite time of the year! Last year the theme was The Liquid South, from Well Water to Sparkling Muscadine. I learned about Buttermilk, Mexican Cokes, and Bootlegging. I even tasted my first Van Winkle Handmade Bourbon! I enjoyed Junior Johnson talk about his moonshine (botlegging days) and his later days in NASCAR racing.

This is a weekend where academics, writers, cooks, and intellectually curious eaters to come to a better understanding of Southern culture and Southern cookery. It is a great way to spend a weekend learning about southern food, meeting new people and eating. It is also a weekend where the whiskey flows all night, catfish is fried and people enjoy each other's love for food and culture. To listen to old podcasts click here.

I am so excited to get back to Mississippi and see my old friends and enjoy the weekend with some foodies.

This year the theme is Music and Food: Exploring Interdependent Cultural Expressions.

"Over the course of four days of lectures and performances, as well as breakfasts, dinners, and suppers, we will unlock the key to what Memphis Minnie really meant when she sang, “I’m selling my pork chops/But I’m giving my gravy away.”
New Orleans will get its due, by way of red beans and rice and jazz. So will Texas blues. And Tennessee country. And hip hop from the ATL.
We’ll stage a ballet and a goat roast. We’ll feed on deep-fried catish and slow-simmered greens. We’ll take you down to the crossroads where food and music meet, and we’ll sketch the ways in which these cultural expressions are complementary."

I will be twittering all weekend! Follow me! I'll post pictures and a blog after the event. It is going to be so much fun!

I took the photos at the past two symposiums. John T. Edge wanted a bacon forest two years ago when the theme was about Hogs - due to the year of the Pig. The top picture is a dish I still dream about - Atlanta Chef Anne Quatrano's Pickled Shrimp. It is amazing! So full of flavor and spice. (Now you can get it at Abattoir).