Southern Regional Cookery: The Modern South

After the Civil War, much of the South lingered in poverty for one hundred years. In the second half of the twentieth century, interstate highways and air-conditioning made the area attractive to vacationers from other states. Tourism became a leading industry in the old coastal cities and beaches. Atlanta, a railroad center, became an important transportation hub in the twentieth century, with most airlines and trucking firms using the centrally located city as a hub. The city quadrupled in size in the last half of the century as it popularized the atrium hotel, the convention center, and the shopping mall. Speculators founded Birmingham, Alabama, in 1871 as a manufacturing center, but the city today is better known for its medical and publishing empires and its numerous colleges. In recent years, a New Southern Cuisine has been championed by a handful of prominent chefs in the city. Charlotte became an important transportation hub of the Eastern Seaboard; banking interests and urban development followed quickly. Today the city has more than 2 million inhabitants, many of them highly skilled and highly salaried employees of the financial and high-tech industries. New Orleans and Charleston became tourist towns. Country music performers made their style more popular, and people flocked to Nashville, Tennessee. Chapel Hill, Raleigh, and Durham, North Carolina, became home to the Research Triangle Park, attracting thousands of new inhabitants. The region’s racial demographics reversed in the twentieth century, which saw African Americans leaving the area until the very end of the century; this trend had reversed again by the 2010 census. Television and other media contributed to the homogenization of the South. Women went to work, and home cooking largely disappeared, the way it has in the rest of the country, but the vast rural spaces and continued agricultural importance of the South have offered a buffer from the spread of urban values. Home cooking is still found in rural communities and small towns, at church socials, and at bake sales. In the 1980s and 1990s cookbook authors and chefs throughout the region began, however nostalgically, to call for a return to traditional southern fare.