One of America’s most powerful voices in food tells an American story of soul searching and deep truths. (No pizza.)

John T. Edge sent me an email, and I don’t even know the guy.
 
He’s actually sent me several emails if you count all his patient replies to my ongoing inane questions about pizza in Mississippi.

​Like, “Do you have any idea why Mississippians are so enamored of squirting French dressing all over their pizza?” (He does not have any idea. This dynamic is apparently not even a blip on his radar.)
 
But really, to whom else can one pose such questions? Nobody writes about the history of Southern cuisine with even a scant semblance of insight the way James Beard Award-winning John T. Edge writes about it. And he has a new book coming out, and you might like an autographed copy. 

The man is an education in the South for the food curious. And you’d be amazed how much southern cuisine has influenced the palate of our nation--something he illustrates under the intense illumination of 2017's The Potlikker Papers: A Food History Of The Modern South. From Edna Lewis to Minnie Pearl, from Colonel Sanders to the Black Panthers, it’s epic.
 
Of course, the real answer to my stupid question about Mississippian behavior vis à vis pizza may not be as much about Southern cuisine as it is about joyfully recalcitrant Southerners showing an invasive food who’s boss.

“I see your pizza and I raise you French dressing! Take that, yall!”

Mississippi is a place with fierce defenders of their food culture and intense opinions about things as simple as roux. (If you do not know, roux is a mixture of flour and fat that is cooked as a thickening agent for things like gravy or gumbo.)
 
But it could also be that Mississippi was ahead of the curve on salad dressing as pizza condiment. My cursory and unscientific research suggests the salad-dressing slather started in the 1960s on the Gulf Coast at a long gone joint called Hugo's. But there is a newer pizza joint up the coast that features a pizza with housemade "Hugo sauce" in homage to that erstwhile institution. 

And for what it’s worth, there are a lot of culinary pros who believe that since salad dressing is an emulsion, it has a place on pizza.
 
Nathan Mhyrvold even says as much in Modernist Pizza, which weighs over 30 pounds and has a list price over $400. If you can’t trust in that kind of excess, what can you trust? (You can read my excessive, 50,000-word review of that book here.)
 
But I digress.
 
John T. Edge sent me an email because I am now in his address book. And he is letting everyone in his address book know that he has written a new book that is like thunder in the distance. (My words, not his.) There’s a promise of something big and bold that you don’t normally expect from a food writer. 
 
His new book is called House Of Smoke: A Southerner Goes Searching for Home.
 
The dust-jacket copy of the book reads in part:

“Born in a house where a Confederate general took his first breath and the Lost Cause narrative was gospel, troubled by the violence he witnessed as a boy, Edge ran from his past, searching for a newer and better South.”
 
In his email, John T. Edge says, “I’m really proud of House of Smoke. If your family relationships are complicated, home is a thorny idea turning in your head, or the South seems to pull you close and push you away—this book is for you.”
 
There’s a relatable mouthful. And I'm not even from here. 
 
As a guy who has been called a Connecticut carpetbagger (in jest, I think) I am fascinated by the South I now call home.

I’m a pizza-slinging Yankee on the Dirty Coast living in a cute yellow house of indeterminate age about a mile from where James Carville goes to get away from the madness.

I'm not entirely an alien. I have family roots in Florida and Louisiana.

I commit profane acts like tossing tasso, crawfish and boudin atop pizzas to the sideways glances from the very polite locals. (Who admit they never considered those things as pizza toppings while they're scarfing down the second slice.)
 
But mostly, besides making those pizzas and enjoying the heck out of the good friends we’ve made here in this hurricane target zone we call home, I spend time wondering about the South.
 
Beyond that, I also admit to being a cad with literature. I often make drive-by judgments about books based on the first line. As irresponsible as that sounds, it pays off more often than it doesn’t.
 
The first line of House Of Smoke is the Chapter One title: “Kudzu and Lies.”
 
I saw those three words. And it’s that simple. I’m in.

I have ordered my autographed copy of House Of Smoke.
 
Anyway, I just thought I’d share. This is what Random Slice Wednesday is about: whatever is on my mind regardless of its relationship to the pizziatic arts.
 
The affiliate links above take you to Amazon. If you buy, they pay me a paltry commission (which looks more a rounding error) at no additional cost to you.

At Amazon, you can pre-order the book which will be released next week on September 16, 2025.
 
BUT…
 
This is better.
 
There are other sources for the book--including an autographed copy from Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi--which you may find by clicking here. (It’s where I ordered my autographed copy at full cover price plus shipping.)
 
That’s all I got. On Saturday, assuming the creek don’t rise, the good Lord's willin' and there ain't no meltdown, we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled pizza.

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I live in a house of pizza. There is so much pizza coming from my home oven that we had to enact a moratorium while we catch our breaths and eat a few carrots. Would you like to be so prolific with pizza? My weird little award-winning book is one way to make it so. It's less a cookbook than an entertaining guidebook about how to get from zero to pizza using the oven you already have. Besides learning to make great pizza, there’s not much else you can do with it. In fact, you can’t even use it to level a table leg if you buy the Kindle edition (which is less expensive than the print editions and has links to instructional videos and printable kitchen worksheets). To learn more about Free The Pizza: A Simple System For Making Great Pizza Whenever You Want With The Oven You Already Have, click here. ​