Robert Burronghs

The foraging "wood pig" gradually was replaced by the "lard pig," a pig fed exclusively on corn.

Poor white trash, Rhoda's mother would have called them. The salt of the earth, her father would have said. — Ellen Gilchrist

In 1959 Elvis Presley was shipped overseas to a post in Bermerhaven, West Germany. With him, he brought his paternal grandmother Minnie Mae. She was to cook with him.

Food speaks to us and in us, in a language before words. Food talks to our darkest depths.

When Priscilla Presley first started dating Elvis, she was a 14-year-old high school student in Germany. Years later, she recalled how Minnie Mae — or "Dodger," as Elvis called her — would cook for the many friends and fans who gathered at Elvis's off-base home. The first meal Dodger cooked for Priscilla was an Elvis favorite: wieners, black-eyed peas, and coconut cake.

We imagine a coffee can filled with bacon grease set on the back of the stove and jelly glasses on the table.

Later, in Memphis, after Priscilla had decamped with her karate instructor, leaving Elvis alone at Graceland, he would send his valet, the corpulent Hamburger James, on a 3:00 a.m. run to a round-the-clock market to buy up Eskimo Pies, Dreamsicles, and Nutty Buddys. And according to his biographer, Albert Goldman, in those later days Elvis would, night after night, in an act of gustatory athleticism, eat one pound of King Cotton bacon fried up crisp, a Pike's Peak of mashed potatoes sluiced with thickenin' gravy, sauerkraut, a dish of crowder peas, and sliced tomatoes. Elvis's wright at the time of his death, Goldman noted, was 255 pounds.

Much of American's WASP middle class was once landless and powerless and poor. Risen out of that, they want only to put it behind them and forget, and put aside the constant fear of falling back.

What set me to scrounging around in my cardboard boxes of old books to find Priscilla's memoir and Goldman's scurrilous five-year-old Elvis biography was the arrival of White Trash Cooking, Ernest Matthew Mickler's handsomely illustrated collection of recipes from poor white Southerners. The dishes Mickler describes are to food what country is to music. And like country music, Mickler's recipes are romantic, occasionally even melodramatic, and filled with "making-do."

My grandmother inherited her mother's German cookery repertoire and the recipes that newly arrived neighbors carried with them from the Appalachians.

Ernest Mathew

"This food," writes Mickler, "is about all that is genuinely unadornedly made in the USA."

Early in 1984, White Trash Cooking was only one more battered manuscript at which a series of New York publishers had turned up their noses, Mickler, a North-Florida-born-and reared Mills College MFA graduate, was supporting himself as a cook and caterer at a Key West, Florida, guest house. Then a small literary press from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the Jargon Society, was shown Mickler's bundle of recipes. The editor fell in love with what he called Mickler's "snap-bean prose style" and his assemblage of recipes and decided to publish the book. Late this summer, the Jargon Society sold White Trash Cooking to Berkeley's Ten Speed Press for a $90,000 advance. Several New York publishers had also bid the book, which by August — with scant advertising — already had 50,000 copies in print. Mickler and the Jargon Society split the $90,000 and the 46-year-old Mickler quit his Key West job, moved his cast-iron frying pans and Dutch ovens to St. Augustine, and then took to the road to promote his book.

Before World War II, for those who lived on the farm, the only store-bought foods were salt and spices, tea, coffee, flours, grains, meals, and sweeteners like Karo syrup, molasses, and sugar.

It was about then that I got my hands on a copy. I was fascinated. Sloppy Joes on Cornbread, Matty Meade's Corn and Tomatoes, Mamma's Brown Gravy, Kitchen Sink Tomato Sandwich, Cornbread in a Glass, Bonnie Jean Butt's Banana Puddin' (six real ripe bananas, one box Nabisco vanilla wafers, two boxes Royal vanilla puddin', one large can of crushed pineapple), Goldie's Yo-You Puddin') more vanilla wafers, more crushed pineapple): the recipes are simple, plain fare; the food more illustrative of how the majority of Americans of every color and class actually eats than a shelf full of trend-setting cookbooks; the ingredients are inexpensive cuts of meat, poultry, and fish, garden vegetables and fruit, and a variety of processed foods — canned cream soup, dried soup mixes, Jell-O, crackers and cookies, marshmallows, pudding and cake mixes. It is easy to enjoy the nostalgic aromas that emerge from these recipes, but there are also persistent whiffs of menace, sadness, and doom.

In his introduction to White Trash Cooking, Mickler notes that the recipes all depend upon three basic ingredients — cornmeal, bacon, and molasses. Indeed, the taste produced by this triad has set the mouths of Americans of all colors slavering and drooling for more than 300 years; it is a "taste" that combines saltiness and sweetness, a taste conveyed by pork fat. If we were to select a "national taste," a "Star-Spangled Banner" of flavor, it would be this salt, sweet, and fat meld that informs our most successful fast foods and best-selling processed foods.

Marvin Harris, in his book, Good to Eat, Riddles of Food and Culture, traces America's culinary romance with corn and pork at least as far back as 1623, when some filthy pigs were resident in the Plymouth Colony. In the Northern colonies, pigs — "wood pigs," colonists called them — rooted for acorns, beechnuts, and hazelnuts in the forests, while in the Southern colonies, farmers had discovered that pigs that were fed on corn for a month before slaughter would develop firmer flesh and gain weight more rapidly. By 1700 farmers in both the North and South were "finishing off" hogs on corn. "The wedding of pigs and corn was made in heaven," writes Harris. "As the farming frontier moved across the Alleghenies into the Midwest, the center of pig, cattle, and corn production moved with it." Meanwhile in the North, as Yankee shipbuilding and manufacturing industries depleted the forests, there were fewer nuts for the pigs. Cleared forests were turned to pasture, and in the pastures, cattle were being fattened. By 1800, in the Northeast, beef began to eclipse pork as the favored meat in both fresh and salted or "corned" forms.

As the upper Midwest was settled, its forests were plowed into farmland. The foraging "wood pig" gradually was replaced by the "lard pig," a pig fed exclusively on corn. "Corn on the hoof" is how Harris describes it, going on to quote from a letter written by a traveler visiting Illinois in 1819. When pork was in short supply, wrote the traveler, "People would rather live on corn bread for a month than eat an ounce of mutton, veal, rabbit, goose, or duck"

By the eve of the Civil War, two pigs per person were being raised in the South and Midwest, and Americans were consuming more pork than an other foodstuff except wheat. (Henry Adams noted that corn was eaten three times a day in the Unites States, as salt pork. In one of James Fenimore Cooper's novels, a housewife says, "Pork is the staff of life.")

At the same time in the Great Plains — Missouri, Texas, and what would become Kansas and Oklahoma — cattle were beginning to replace buffalo on the "endless sea of grass" (where the Indians no longer roamed). In every year from 1850 on, Americans began to eat more beef. After the Civil War, railroads made massive cattle drives a thing of the past. With the advent of refrigerated railroad cars in 1882, it was possible to ship already slaughtered beef from the Great Plains to both East and West coasts. (This was the point, writes Harris, when the beef barons and packing-house owners had bought up the railroads, cornered the grain markets, and become as rich as modern-day oil sheiks.")

Even with the late 19th-century beef bonanza, however, pork remained America's favorite meat: in 1900 the average American ate 73.9 pounds of pork and 67.1 pounds of beef. After 1900, as overgrazing and drought reduced the range, beef prices began to rise and Americans ate even more pork. On the eve of World War II, writes Harris, Americans were eating 18.6 pounds more pork per person than beef.

It was not until after World War II that the tide began to run against pork. By 1950 Americans were eating equal amounts of beef and pork. By the 1960s they were eating ten more of beef per person, and by the 1970s, 25 pounds more. In 1977 Americans ate 97.7 pounds of beef per person and 53.7 pounds of pork.

Pork lost its dominance in the American diet at a time when other sweeping changes were altering the face of the nation. in the 1870s, when three of my four grandparents were born, the majority of the U.S. farm population declined from 40 percent to 25 percent. From 1940 to 1960, a mass migration took place: each year during those two decades, one million people left their farms and made their hegiras to the cities. (A disproportionately large number of these folks arrived in California.)

From the throngs of rural white that left small land holdings came many of the unskilled laborers whose shoulders were put to the wheel of the U.S. war effort and postwar expansion. before the mid-Fifties, when industry demanded a lower level of skill and competence than it does today, many of these migrants rose into the lower middle class and joined America's working poor, or, often with the help of organized labor, they acquired middle-class incomes. But others who left rural areas never made it out of the "first hired/first fired" labor force. Torn from small communities in which everyone knew everyone by name, lacking education, confidence, and ease in city ways, often in poor health, they scrambled for livings that barely sustained them. In 1959, according to Michael Harrington's study of poverty in the United States, The Other America, one-third of the U.S. population lived below the poverty line, and two-thirds of that group were white.

Although Mickler's "white trash" are mostly still living on the land, their cousins in the city are frequently equally destitute and desperate. Both make up a vast American peasantry of WASP extraction, poor and getting poorer.

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead... taste and smell alone ... remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly ... the vast structure of recollection. — Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

My maternal grandmother was born in Indiana in the late 1870s, the child of German immigrants. Reared on a southern Indiana farm, the eldest of a dozen children of a storekeeper and farmer — the one upon whom the offices of sous chef and slops-emptier fell as soon as she could walk — my grandmother inherited her mother's German cookery repertoire and the recipes ("receipts," they were called) that newly arrived neighbors carried with them from the Appalachians. At 16, my maternal grandmother ran off to Indianapolis, married, and produced the first of her two children, a son. Another 20 years would pass before my mother was born, also in Indianapolis. When my mother was eight years old and ready for third grade, they moved to Oklahoma — well, sort of. Actually, my maternal grandmother ran off to California with a new man and "left off" my mother in Oklahoma with my mother's older brother, a wifeless man in his twenties who soon found himself making my mother's clothing on a toy sewing machine. My mother graduated from an Oklahoma high school, entered college, pledged Pi Phi, and married a little money. To the recipes she learned from her mother, she added those of the Oklahoma and Texas upper middle class of which my father was a part. In this latter group, many families had black cooks, and almost all had, just one generation (or two, at most) back, been dirt poor. My father was six feet six inches. My mother was four feet eleven inches. The marriage that began when my parents eloped right after Christmas, 1936, turned out to be a miserable one, but while it lasted the food was good.

In the years before Oklahoma's entry into the Union, in 1907, my father's paternal grandfather, "Oatmeal" Murphy, arrived from Georgia and began to put together what would become a good-sized cattle spread outside Claremore, Oklahoma. (Visiting Oatmeal's old spread during the early Sixties, I gathered the top leaves from elephant-eye-high marijuana plants that were volunteers from the days when, as one of his sidelines, Oatmeal grew hemp for the rope industry.) During the Twenties and Thirties, Oatmeal sat on the back porch in his rocking chair and — if my father is to be believed — ate the same breakfast every morning: a basin of "naked" unsugared oatmeal washed down with a tumble of raw local whisky. After he wiped his oatmeal of his mouth, he smoked what my father characterizes as a "big black cigar." Inside Oatmeal's kitchen, the ranch hands might be eating eggs, scrambled or fried in the fat from home-smoked bacon or ham or pork chops or sausage, biscuits sopped in sorghum molasses, warmed-up leftover mustard or turnip greens and green beans, boiled hominy under red-eye gravy, fried potatoes, fried apple rings, crisp fried oatmeal mush drizzled with sorghum or Karo syrup, "whole egg" custard, pearl tapioca, and slabs of fruit, pecan, or Chess pies. The hired hands, my father says, also drank buttermilk.

Memories, memories! God, how food brings back the past! The most famous example, of course, is Marcel Proust's madeleine, whose lime scent provoked the recollections that became the seven volumes of Remembrance of Things Past. As I leafed idly through Mickler's book, I thought that there has not been a time in my life when, looking for a comforting memory, I haven't conjured up the food of my youth, particularly the dishes prepared by my maternal grandmother and the woman my father's family all called "Black Mary" (to distinguish her in the course of conversation from my father's aunt, who was also named Mary).

I believe that what we are speaking of when we speak of the "unconscious" is not that blueprint of human mystery drawn by late 19th-century psychology. I am convinced that the "unconscious" is, quite simply, our flesh. From our very first moments of suckling, our first open-mouthed toothless nuzzlings at our mothers' breasts, food brings the world into our flesh. Food speaks to us and in us, in a language before words. Food talks to our darkest depths. It sometimes tells us what we would rather not remember or rather not know.

Recent studies have shown that the human brain had its beginnings in a "smell brain," an organ who responses to odors stimulated reactions to all that lay outside itself. The proportion of human brain tissue that governs smell is still very great, and, in addition to odor reception, this part of the brain also administers fundamental emotional responses and long-term memory and has a profound effect on hormones that regulate body metabolism and sexual arousal.

When my father was six, his mother died horribly and tragically. I cannot say how. Black Mary took over his care. When I was born, she moved into our house, cooked and baked for us, washed and ironed and cleaned house, and took care of me. Black Mary made a chocolate meringue pie into whose salty lard crust she ladled a chocolate filling which she had stirred in a glass boiler set over a low flame. This filling, made of shaved baker's chocolate, egg yolks, flour, and thick pasteurized milk, took one's mouth down the chasm of the beginning before all beginnings, the fathomless and ladderless abyss, before God spoke his first Word, before God even talked to himself: the chocolate went on forever in an always expanding taste of great complexity and possibility; it spoke of beauty and hinted at torment and death. Black Mary would let me clean the pot and lick the spoon, and I would be afraid and not know why.

For the meringue, Mary would beat egg whites stiff and shiny until the aerated whites could stand in curls without wavering. She would set dollops of raw meringue to the outer edges of the crust's fluted rim, thus sealing in the chocolate filling. Then she would run the pie in and out of the hot oven only long enough to tan its surface.

Outside, under a tree whose branches threw shade of such hospitable circumference that my best friend Janet and I could use it for our entire house, I made my first mud pies. Janet was five. I was four. The dirt was red. But I always made Black Mary's chocolate meringue. That pie defined pie. Cherry, boysenberry, peach, greengage plum, huckleberry, gooseberry, raspberry, even sour cream prune and raisin — after Mary's chocolate meringue, they were just all cobbler.

Well before the Civil War, according to Laura Shapiro's Perfection Salad, Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century, American cooking had already begun to undergo the changes that would eventually turn a nation of honest appetites into an obedient market for instant mashed potatoes. in 1823 a New Yorker took out the first patent for a tin can, and soon thereafter, the New England fishing industry, to overcome the difficulty of transporting highly perishable lobster, fish, and oysters, began to can its catch. Fruit and vegetable growers followed. Just before the Civil War, in 1860, five million cans of food were produced in the United States. Ten years later, during the 12 months of 1870, 30 million cans of food entered the marketplace.

By 1870 a considerable number of married American women were engaged solely in homemaking and child raising. With a down trend in the birthrate and an increased presence of servants in the home, these "home-making" women were allowed more time and capital to pursue other interests.

At first, processed foods were used cautiously; there were moral and practical, as well as health, concerns. Food processing brought variety, elegance, connection to Europe and European ways — but even over these things, Americans were split in their opinions. There was a strong movement that aimed at eliminating ethnic distinctions from American cuisine, and there were campaigns against the garlicky, heavy foods of lower-class European immigrants. It was the age of Fannie Farmer and the triumph of middle-class cooking.

None of these culinary developments and debates ever really affected the rural poor, of course. Before World War II, for those who lived on the farm, the only store-bought foods were salt and spices, tea, coffee, flours, grains, meals, and sweeteners like Karo syrup, molasses, and sugar. Almost everything else they either grew or they bartered for. When many of these folks moved to the city during the great migrations of the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties, however, all was to change. Suddenly the new urban immigrants were drizzling crushed pineapple with Coca-Cola and sticking it on a store-bought ham. They were learning to carve radishes into roses, stuff celery ribs with Sunny Jim peanut butter; they were discovering Jell-O, store-bought mayonnaise, and canned shredded coconut.

Those in my parents' generation who survived the depression and World War II and who left behind their rural beginnings turned to what folks would later call "piss-elegance." They made promiscuous and showy use of the processed and frozen foods; they pursued novelty, bringing foods to the table that had never been there before. Food processors hired ad agencies to devise lures. Home economists devised recipes that used processed food.

After the Great Plains droughts of the Twenties, the depression, the Southwest and Midwest Dustbowl of the Thirties, after the war and all the doing-without and death, there came a glorification of waste, a celebration of excess.

Occasionally, my mother would cook some of her mother's dishes. She'd say she was a peasant, and then she'd wait for people to say no she wasn't at all.

• Hunger allows no choice
• To the citizen or the police;
• We must love one another or die.

• — W.H. Auden

I chatted on the telephone for half an hour with Ernest Mickler on an afternoon when he had just gotten back to a friend's house in Atlanta after doing interviews with a local TV station and the Atlanta Constitution's cooking columnist. "Are you too tired to talk?" I asked; he responded in a beguiling Southern drawn, "No, I'm just layin' here on the carpet with my feet up."

We had a good visit. Mickler told me that he was born poor and grew up poorer in Palm Valley, Florida, a cabbage-palm swamp near St. Augustine. He was raised by his mother who, until her death, ran a grocery store and filling station. After high school, he and the granddaughter of the woman who would later contribute the recipe for Tutti's Fruited Porkettes formed a country music duo. They sang with Skeeter Davis, Maybelle Carter, Faron Young, Roy Orbison, and Patsy Cline. After two years and three records, the duo broke up. Mickler began to support himself by making birds from driftwood shells. The art director of Jacksonville University saw them and encouraged Mickler to enter college. He did, and received a BFA.

In 1967 Mickler went to Oakland and entered the gradate fine arts program at Mills College. "I got down on my knees to get grant money from Mills," he said. "I was that poor."

Mickler stayed in the Bay Area until 1973. I was left with the impression that Mickler did not entirely like it there. "In California," he said, "I found out that people were snobby with people who had Southern accents. They took us as being country idiots. Most of my friends were black. I related to them easier and better."

In 1971 Mickler graduated from Mills. "I made the second page of the Chronicle when I graduated. I wore six-foot-wide butterfly wings. I did it because the administration insisted that you had to go through graduation ceremonies if you wanted to get your degree. I said, 'Well, if I have to go through this, I might as well have some fun.'"

After Mills, Mickler obtained a teaching certificate and did substitute teaching in the Oakland elementary schools. "Practically all to black children. Here I was, with this raging Southern accent. And those kids just loved it. 'Oh, you sound like my mama,' they'd say. They could really relate to me."

Lady Esther's, a soul food restaurant in Oakland, was Mickler's favorite place to eat. "They had fryin' pans there as big as tabletops," he said, adding that Lady Esther's was the one place in the Bay Area where he really felt at home. He did all his grocery shopping at Housewives Market. "Exactly right there, White Trash Cooking was born. They had everything — seasoning meats, ham hocks, fatback, wonderful Louisiana seafood, all those dried beans in open bags."

We talked about the recent popularity of "diner food" and the phenomenal interest in Mickler's book and others like it — Jane and Michael Stern's Square Meals most notable among them. "People have been gourmeted to death," Mickler suggested. "That every meal has to be the end, or the most exotic, or the most fabulously delicious — people are tired of that." Enjoying one's dinner, he added, involves more than the food on the table. "It depends a lot on who is around the table with you."

Mickler, who has been autographing White Trash Cooking and visiting with its buyers, characterized some of the book's purchasers as people "who were born poor and worked hard to get out of poverty." Buying his book, he joked, these same people were now "workin' hard at getting back to it." More seriously, he added, "We've lost something along the way. We don't want to go back to that total meagerness, but we do want to get back to the good manners and the small kindnesses that went with that way of life."

After Mickler and I talked, I put together what Mickler told me was "hands down, the best recipe in the book," Marie's River Cajun Bread Puddin:

• First Layer: In a deep pan or bowl that you can bake in, put a layer of stale sliced bread (broken up). Sprinkle this with raisins, to choice, half can Angel Flake coconut, and dot with pats of butter (one stick).
• Second Layer: Just broken bread.
• Third Layer: Repeat firs layer, but not quite as thick.
• In a large bowl, mix 2 cups of sugar and 5 beaten eggs with 1/2 large bottle of butter-flavored vanilla. Then add i can of Pet milk, 1 cup of water, and 1 cup of sweet milk. Pout this over the layers until it's slightly covered. Use milk if you need more liquid. Now pass it through the oven for 15 minutes and take it out. With a knife or a big spoon, poke it down until the liquid rises to the top again. Then you put it back in the oven for an hour. Please do not cook dry.
• Meringue: Break ten egg whites in a bowl and beat. When stiffening begins, put 1/2 teaspoon baking powder in and beat to final stiff. Add 3/4 cup sugar and beat till sugar melts. Put on pudding and pass it back through the oven till it's brown.

As I cooked, I thought that there's a lot more to all this return to home-cooking than Mickler had said. I kept thinking back to the series of color photographs that are bound in between "Sandwiches 'n Eggs" and "Candles, Cakes, Cobbler 'n Cookies" in White Trash Cooking. There were pictures of broken-down houses, and faces with eyes that sought out some far-off promise. There was a white dinner plate on which a yellow corn muffin, burned at the edges, set off autumnal gold-and-brown mounds of creamed corn, lasagna and crowder peas. The pictures made me sad. And the "make-do" aspects of the recipes, the mix of hunger and need and indominatibility and pride that produced so many of them, made me even sadder.

In his introduction to White Trash Cooking, Mickler writes with what I believe is a great show of diplomacy, and more poetry than fact, that "the first thing you've got to understand is that there's white trash and there's White Trash. Manners and pride separate the two. Common white trash has very little in the way of pride, and no manners to speak of, and hardly any respect for anybody or anything. But where I come from in North Florida you never failed to say 'Yes, ma'am' and 'No, sir,' never sat on a made-up bed...and never forgot to say 'thank you' for the teeniest favor. That's the way the ones before us were raised, and that's the way they raised us in the South."

The diplomacy is necessary, for to talk of "White Trash" is to refer to what sociologist Paul Blumberg calls "America's forbidden thought": that our nation is divided into economic and social classes. In this country, to allude to class differences is to raise what C. Wright Mills called "a status panic."

Much of American's WASP middle class was once landless and powerless and poor. Risen out of that, they want only to put it behind them and forget, and put aside the constant fear of falling back. No wonder no class is as class sensitive — as "class-scared" (to use Paul Fussell''s phrase) — as the middle.

Our images of the poor white South are as likely to come from Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road, or TV's Beverly Hillbillies, or Al Capp's L'il Abner, as from any honest depiction of Southern rural poverty. In our sentimental imaginings, we conjure kerosene lamps set in frame houses with sagging porches and an outhouse in the back with toilet paper torn from old Monkey Ward catalogues. We imagine a coffee can filled with bacon grease set on the back of the stove and jelly glasses on the table. Yapping under the table, there'd be a cross-eyed, feisty little terrier, and mama'd be trying to quiet him down by tossing sops of lightbread dipped in pot likker that stewed up off the greens and sidemeat. On the front porch, you'd brush up against two tick hounds licking milk gravy off the dinner plates. We guess that, out front, set in the chicken-scratched red dirt in the yard, there's a five-pointed star made of Coca-Cola and Grapette bottle caps. There'd be a rusted-out wringer washer; behind an old International tractor, there'd be a flatbed, and along the lane, tires painted white and planted with pink petunias.

And the radio going all day.

James Agee didn't put it so picturesquely in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in which he and Walker Evans depicted the lives of three Southern tenant farm families in 1936. At one point, Agree tried to describe the odors he found in one Alabama sharecropper's cabin. These odors, he wrote, "are classical in every thoroughly poor white Southern country house, and by which such a house could be identified blindfolded in any part of the world, among no matter what other odors. [They are] compacted of many odors and made into one: pine lumber, woodsmoke, the odors of cooking." Among these odors, Agee found these most assailant: "first, fried salt pork and friend and boiled pork lard, and second, the odor of cooked corn." Even the odors of sweat, wrote Agree, are a distillation of pork, lard, corn, woodsmoke, pine. He continued: "I should further describe the odor of corn: in sweat, or on the teeth and breath, when it is eaten as much as they eat it, it is of a particular sweet stuffy fetor, to which the nearest parallel is the odor of the yellow excrement of a baby."

I thought of Agee's words as I sat down on my back porch in the cool twilight with a bowl of Mickler's bread pudding. For the past few years, I have entertained the notion that whenever America conquers a nation, taking over its land for our corporate uses, managing its economy, we symbolize our triumph by eating the captured nation's food. Of course, because these are usually underdeveloped nations, their food is usually cheaper and easier to prepare than ours — but there's something more here, a sort of zoo principle in which exotic cuisines are cleaned up, toned down, rendered safe, and presented in chic gustatory menageries.

Maybe White Trash Cooking owes its success to our belief that in the Reagan era, America has finally conquered its poor. Now we can safely eat their food. If so, we are wrong — and Mickler's book will ultimately make us both sad and apprehensive. America's poor — both urban and rural — still exist and are getting poorer every day. Their frustration and pain rings through even these cheery recipes. And with every bite, we will be forced to remember that we are connected to them by history and family.

Food is memory. And we all still have to eat.