SOURCE: Dvorak, Angeline Godwin. “Cooking as Mission and Ministry in Southern Culture: The Nurturers of Clyde Edgerton's Walking across Egypt, Fannie Flagg's Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe, and Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.” Southern Quarterly 30, nos. 2-3 (winter-spring 1992): 90-8.

In the following essay, Dvorak explores the role of cooking as it relates to a sense of community, spiritual sustenance, women's friendships, and female identity in three Southern novels.

The table spread with culinary delights easily triggers images of home, hearth and familial companionship. In southern culture, especially, food is nothing less than the social base of most interchanges of human experience and activity. The concept of “southern hospitality” has remained long after the demise of the antebellum era that birthed it. This graciousness surely began as much from logistics as generosity, for plantation and even tenant-farming neighbors, separated by hundreds of acres and miles...