I recently was a guest on a podcast for Southern Living, the house organ of the nostalgia set, and while talking about The Barn and the modern South, I mentioned the incontrovertible fact that the dominant working-class and agrarian breakfast in the South today is the breakfast taco, not the biscuit. People lost their minds. Some of the messages I got about biscuits were as angry as the ones I’ve gotten about telling the truth about Emmett Till. A reason emerged. The sausage biscuit, the country-ham biscuit, the biscuit covered with sawmill gravy—these are the only talismans left from a once-vibrant constellation of rural patterns and traditions. Almost nobody makes their own sage sausage in the smokehouse anymore. They buy it in a store owned by a publicly traded company. In many cases, an heirloom biscuit recipe, written on a 4-by-6 note card in your mother’s or grandmother’s looping blue ink, is the only part of the family farm that’s survived. By mentioning tacos, I was assaulting with inconvenient facts a final, frayed link to a familial past. Dismissing biscuits and naming names from 1955 were the same sin against the same doxology.
I've been listening to Wright Thompson's book _The Barn_. It's very hard to listen to, and an excellent book.
One thing led to another, and I found this snippet from the writer in an Atlantic article. As a southerner, I cannot tell you how biting and insightful […]
[Original post on theres.life]
