John Egerton, 1935–2013

John Egerton liked to say there were five basic Southern food groups: “sugar, salt, butter, cream, and grease.” He meant no disrespect. The food of the South “unlocks the rusty gates of race and class, age and sex,” he wrote. “A place at the table is like a ringside seat at the historical and ongoing drama of life in the region.”

Born in Georgia and raised in Kentucky, Egerton was working in public relations in 1965 when he saw “the civil rights movement gaining strength around him,” said The New York Times. He moved to Nashville and took a job with the Southern Education Reporting Service, writing about integration efforts at the region’s colleges. The job led him into to a prolific career of writing articles and books that soon “became seminal for a region trying to understand itself.”

Egerton’s first major book, 1974’s The Americanization of Dixie,“presciently described how the South was becoming more like the rest of America,” said The Washington Post. “The South and the nation are not exchanging strengths,” he wrote, “as much as they are exchanging sins.” His masterwork, Southern Food, was one of the first books to recognize the contributions of African-American cooks, said the Louisville Courier-Journal, and was “hailed as the new historical food bible of the South.”

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For Egerton, there were few problems food couldn’t fix. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, he announced a plan to sell spiced pickles for $10 a jar to help rebuild New Orleans’s restaurants. Friends were doubtful. “I mean, how much money you going to raise with a damn pickle?” said Lolis Elie, a fellow writer. In the end, Egerton’s pickle project raised about $10,000.