In the 1760s, ancestors on my mother’s side of the family landed in Philadelphia and started down the Trans-Allegheny trail, heading for South Carolina. By the 1790s, they had moved up into the North Carolina mountains to a series of communities in Transylvania and Henderson counties—Quebec, Toxaway, Brevard, Hendersonville. Most of them never left. They worked in timber, tannin, and the later paper factories; kept boarders; had small general stores; and generally did what they could to survive. They helped found churches and build schoolhouses; they farmed in small ways and kept garden patches. For more than two hundred...

Many foods at the turn of the century were suspect, according to the United States government. For instance, the same laws that tightened the regulation of alcohol and created what would be the federal Food and Drug Administration (fda) also targeted non-licensed and adulterated butter and cheese, as well as any number of patent medicines. Yet, the one we remember, the one whose bad reputation remains intact (taboo and technically illegal), is moonshine. It may seem counterintuitive to start this book on southern foodways with a food item that for years existed largely outside the bounds of socially acceptable consumption....

Imagine you were a young mother in the rural southern mountains before the turn of the century. You did not have much ready cash on hand, but you did have a family to feed. For years, your easiest solution was to put together a pone of cornbread while you were finishing the rest of the meal. It served well to sop up the potlikker in the bowls of beans or greens; it was delicious cold with sorghum or honey for a breakfast or snack; it crumbled into buttermilk for a light end-of-day meal. Then, some single women with college educations...

Shortly after Jane McKimmon began demonstrating bread making on the margins of farmers’ institutes in North Carolina, Marie Samuella Cromer sat in the audience at a 1909 teachers’ meeting in South Carolina. A rural schoolteacher in the western South Carolina town of Aiken, Cromer heard a speech about Dr. Seaman A. Knapp’s boys’ corn clubs that were transforming southern crop yields. According to her own retelling, Cromer raised her hand to ask, “But what are we doing for the farm girls?” She was not the first audience member across the South to ask such a question; but what made Cromer...

When Marie Cromer raised her hand to propose founding a tomato club for girls in 1909, she made the suggestion to counter putting girls in a chrysanthemum club. To Cromer, flowers represented mere domesticity, daintiness, and leisure time—something fun and distracting for whiling away the hours—but not something helpful to the disempowered rural girls she was targeting. Cromer looked for a task that would help girls become productive members of their societies; something that might train them in leadership, responsibility, and economic self-sufficiency. Later, in retelling the story, Cromer revealed one of her inspirations for choosing the tomato...

We have finally arrived at the mess of greens in the southern food and gender story—and I propose we meet it on its own terms rather than force it into order.¹ It takes on Granny Starkweather’s recipe collection and other cookbooks and adds in Elliott’s curb market memories, each of which will be supremely messy.

The phrase “a mess of,” meaning a serving of food, a portion of a dish, especially of vegetables, is surprisingly ancient. The Oxford English Dictionary dates its origins as a phrase to the 1300s, even while acknowledging that its use today is increasingly “US...

Cookbooks and curb markets continued across the twentieth century and into our own. From the 1930s to today they have been simultaneously places of containment and exclusion on the one hand, and possibility and potential on the other. To conclude our exploration of moments in the southern food and gender story, we turn to one final example of mess writing, one final hidden archive. With the perspective garnered from female moonshiners in literature, battles over biscuits and cornbread, economic stores of the gardenvariety tomato, ghostly pellagrins in strike novels, and the hopeful possibility encoded in cookbooks and curb markets, we...