Was there a point where you felt like it was the right time to start? You've been writing about the South for a long time, but is now is particularly apt moment to publish it?
I would like to say that I could have anticipated where we are now, but for me the real impetus was the passing of John Egerton, who was my mentor in so many things. He wrote beautifully about many subjects, but his two big books were Speak Now Against the Day about the generation before the Civil Rights Movement in the South, and Southern Food. When he passed [in 2013] and when his family asked me to be one of the speakers at his celebration of life, I felt not a burden but a responsibility to his work and to what I believed I was doing with my own. Writing magazine pieces for the Oxford American, or newspaper columns for The New York Times, or more recently pieces for Garden & Gun, or the piece about barbecue that I did for y'all, you can see glimpses of how I mean to write about food.

Leslie Pariseau