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!
Mmm southern food to me means freshly baked cornbread popped out of a hand me down cast iron. It means melding traditional ingredients with new techniques. Great now I’m hungry. ;)
A memory-my father and potlikker.
My father loved all southern food, but he especially loved potlikker. The best kind was from butter beans cooked with ham hocks. The good kind we grew in Eastern NC. We would stand over the pot taking turns spooning up the salty goodness loaded with finely ground black pepper. We didn’t speak-didn’t need to. Our eyes and the smiles on our faces were all the communication we needed as we shared. It has been over 17 years since he passed away all too soon. I miss my dad and Eastern NC. Thank you for this walk down memory lane!
To me, southern food is the food my grandmother cooked all her life. Fried cube steak. Green beans that she spent the morning stringing and breaking. Tomatoes on toast. Collards. And her famous – in our family – biscuits she made almost daily. Labors of love for her family.
Southern food means family time around the dinner table building life and memories together. Most of my favorite memories revolve around spending time with family, working in the kitchen together to nourish both soul and body through love and kind advice.
My grandmother’s fried chicken and pound cake. Family, comfort, love.