The Southern Culinary Bible: A History of Southern Living

Once upon a time I devoted hours to reading and writing about Southern food culture and Southern Living magazine. Exactly four professors read my giant final report and let me have a master’s degree (woohoo) and put it in at a nice j-library in Missouri. I am resurrecting the best parts of said giant report in a more digestible blog version.

Southern women love them some Southern Living recipes. Millions of then read the magazine. They cook from it. They write love letters to it. They trust it, they revere it, it is part of who they are as Southerners, as women, as cooks.

My mom's SL-filled kitchen bookshelf.

In the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Dianne Young calls Southern Living “one of the South’s self-proclaimed culinary bibles,” and Patricia Gantt refers to the magazine as “that great dame of southern cookery.” Food is essential to the Southern Living but is only part of the larger history of the iconic Southern lifestyle magazine.

In 1966 Southern Living was born as vehicle for emphasizing Southern identity for publisher Progressive Farmer’s non-farm circulation. Beginning in the 1930s, the region had become increasingly urban and nonagrarian with a diversification of manufacturing and of agriculture. As the region progressed toward mainstream America and a global economy, Southerners faced an identity crisis and looked for reaffirmations of Southerness. However, after the Jim Crow era, the South no longer could use the North as a strong contrast upon which to draw their identity, so they exaggerated their small differences in distinctiveness.

The magazine was launched to serve a new reader divorced from rural roots and to celebrate the white Southern lifestyle at a time when Southerners faced negative perceptions in the media and the stress of change during the Civil Rights Movement. According to Southern historian James Cobb, Southern Living became “the most convenient fig leaf” to cover Southerners’ “cultural nakedness” after being stripped of their Jim Crow identity.

Southern Food: A Brief History

Once upon a time I devoted hours to reading and writing about Southern food culture and Southern Living magazine. Exactly four professors read my giant final report and let me have a degree (woohoo). Now the report lives at a nice j-library in Missouri. Other important things in life, like cooking and friends and family, distracted me from getting it published for the past year, but now I am resurrecting the best parts of said giant report in a more digestible blog version. I promise Southerners and their food are interesting.


It was an agrarian way of life in the Old South. There were fields and plantations and slaves. So people ate what came from the fields (revolutionary, right?)—after frying it up or boiling it with good ole fat-cured pork. They ate lots ‘o corn, but it didn’t make the “great triumvirate” of veggies: turnips, cowpeas (today’s blackeyed or crowder peas), and sweet potatoes.

Pork was long the staple from swine herds, but eventually, farmers in the region began to raise poultry, which gave rise to the delicacy of fried chicken.

Photo by SouthernLiving.com

Cornbread served as the primary bread when Southern mills could not handle glutinous wheat and the wheat crop was small. In the second half of the nineteenth century, increased wheat production and new milling methods made wheat available to all classes, and hence wheat flour biscuits joined the ranks of cornbread in the Southern diet.

But then days of plantations came to an end. Northerners infiltrated the region. People moved to cities. What was to become of Southerners? What of the traditional culture would remain? Food! Sunday dinner. Biscuits and collards. Peach pie and pimiento cheese. Gravy and hushpuppies. Food provided definition, security, and stability to family and community life and to regional culture.

“The spiritual meaning of food in the South is perhaps best seen on Sundays. Dinner on the grounds brings together a church community in a symbol of wholeness. Sunday dinner at home has been a shared ritual of different Southerners for generations, reinforcing family ties over chicken and gravy. Breaking cornbread together and drinking sweet tea have been Southern sacraments, outward signs of deeper communion. Food in the South, and the shared importance of it to family and community among many kinds of Southerners, represents a peculiar resource for fellowship among the people of the South.”
-Charles Reagan Wilson, Foodways: The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Vol. 7, XVI-XVII