Paul Knipple

It’s like there is this other South underneath all the hype about pecan pie and pulled-pork barbecue and the correct way to make deviled eggs. And it is this South that Paul and Angela Knipple take you in The World in a Skillet: A Food Lover’s Tour of the New American South. They focus on what I suppose people like to call “the global South”—the first and second generation immigrant communities that make up that part of the South that exists alongside the fish frys and fried chicken church picnics. And this South, is eye-opening.

I’ll say right now, I’m not used to my southern cookbooks containing detailed instructions on how to make sashimi.

Divided into sections that look at the intersection of the immigrant experience with American culture (“Seeking the American Dream,” “Bringing Tradition to the Table”), The World in a Skillet is as much ethnography as it is cooking manual. Each chapter focuses on a particular ethnic group, highlighting some of the forces that brought them to America, to the South, in fact, and how they negotiated adapting their own cultural identity to new circumstances. Each chapter is really a collection of three or four portraits of people for whom food has become an expression of what it means to be both themselves, and to be “Southern” in their communities. Julio in North Charleston came to the US looking for work and got his start driving a taco truck, which eventually became a full-service restaurant. Pepe Magellanes was a retired engineer who opened a Mexican restaurant in Germantown, Tennessee not because he needed the money, but because he missed the food of Mexico City. “What we do on the grill is not difficult,” he says “What’s difficult is to do it right always and to care. If we don’t care, we don’t need to be here.” Read full review … (altro)