The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South

"We Southerners tend to brag about the quality of our potlikker – the flavorful broth (perfect for cornbread sopping) left when you cook a pot of greens. But you won’t find recipes here, only tales of the cooks, waiters, farmers, writers and immigrants who forged change through food. John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi, uses food as a lens to explore Southern identity, seeking to reconcile a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow with who claims the Southern table today. “Potlikker is salvage food,” he writes; masters ate the greens and left the potlikker for slave cooks and their families, “unaware that the broth, not the greens, was nutrient rich.”"