Giveway! | Asheville Grown Collection + The Potlikker Papers!
A giveaway you say? Yep. We're giving away a copy of The Potlikker Papers by John T. Edge AND a 12 piece box of our Asheville Grown Collection. Read on for details...
Called "The One Food Book You Must Read This Year." by Southern Living Magazine and profiled here by NPR and here by the New York Times, The Potlikker Papers is a people’s history that reveals how Southerners shaped American culinary identity and how race relations impacted Southern food culture over six revolutionary decades. The book uses food as a lens that helps us connect the dots between food and culture and social justice, from the the Montgomery Bus Boycott to the "New Southern" cuisine that cities like our hometown of Asheville have become famous for.
Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance of the University of Mississippi in Oxford, writes about the South with love and hope, paired with a firm belief that Southern eaters have a "responsibility to pay down the debts of pleasure owed to the enslaved African cooks and farmers who came before".
We at French Broad Chocolates consider ourselves incredibly lucky to call Asheville our home, and to be a part of the aforementioned "New Southern" food movement. We take our commitment to social and environmental and economic justice seriously and work hard to source all of our ingredients with intention. We feel truly blessed to live in a region that allows to source much of what we use locally, and develop and maintain close relationships with our farmers and organizations like the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project who advocate for them.
We created The Asheville Grown Collection as both a love letter to our mountain town and a celebration of the farmers and producers that comprise our bountiful foodshed. From raspberries to sorghum to lavender to honey, each of these handcrafted truffles and caramels features locally sourced ingredients combined with our bean-to-bar chocolate, grass-fed dairy and organic sugar.
We're over the moon to be partnering with Penguin Books on a seriously awesome (and simple) giveaway. Just leave a comment below telling us what "Southern Food" means to you. It could be a memory, a hope, a dream, a poem, a song... use your biscuit ;)
Contest closes on Wednesday, June 21. Winner will be announced on Thursday, June 22!
Southern food is family. Nostalgia. Meals with stories and history. Gathering generations around a table. Recipes that help preserve memories of loved ones who have passed.
Southern food is sitting in my grandmother’s kitchen on Christmas Eve and having the honor of preparing the sausage rolls that she sends home with each family to bake on Christmas morning. She allowed me to make them how I pleased, and she tended to the beans and biscuits and ham she was making for Christmas Eve dinner. Two weeks from now is her 90th birthday and I hope I have children who can carry that tradition, too!
southern food means full
Southern food means to me: the mountains and rain, home and love!
To tell a story of life in the south and not include the food, is to exclude something integral to its makeup. Biscuits in the morning, and iced tea in the afternoon immediately bring to mind a picture that encompassses life in the South. This is because Southern food is the bed rock of its culture. It is in its DNA. They are not mutually exclusive, but instead they grow and adapt together.
To say that Southern food speaks comfort is not untrue, but is not a full definition. It is also hot, humid nights, and a sharecropper’s toil in the fields. Therefore, Southern Food to me also speaks of struggle, pride in one’s heritage, and economic depression. As well as the comfort of a good meal around mama’s table.