In this episode of Narrative Edge, you join hosts Peter Biello and Orlando Montoya for a deep dive into John T. Edge’s memoir House of Smoke: A Southerner Goes Searching for Home, a book that braids Southern food, family, and history into one candid narrative. Together, we explore how Edge, founding director of the Southern Foodways Alliance and host of the TV series TrueSouth, uses dishes from turnip greens to catfish stew to examine race, class, and belonging across the modern South. If you love Southern food writing, cultural history, and memoirs that are honest without being self-indulgent, this conversation will give you plenty to chew on.

House of Smoke: A Southerner Goes Searching for Home by John T. Edge

Credit: Publisher: Crown



On this episode of Narrative Edge, you sit in as Peter Biello and Orlando Montoya open with steaming bowls of turnip greens from Atlanta’s Taqueria del Sol and use that dish as a doorway into John T. Edge’s memoir House of Smoke: A Southerner Goes Searching for Home. The conversation traces how a simple plate of greens carries the story of chef Eddie Hernandez, his grandmother’s kitchen in Mexico, and his journey into the American South, illustrating Edge’s belief that food is an elemental expression of people and place. Food here is never just garnish; it is the way Edge reads history, community, and identity.

Orlando walks you through Edge’s path as a writer and as the founding director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, which documents and studies the diverse food cultures of the American South. The hosts talk about the organization’s work with oral histories and symposia and how Edge’s TV series TrueSouth extends that mission of exploring Southern culture through its restaurants, back roads, and unsung cooks. From his childhood in a haunted antebellum house in Jones County to his mother’s catfish stew and love of historic preservation, the memoir becomes a research project on his own life, complete with library visits and cemetery walks. The result is a book that balances joy in food with frank acknowledgment of addiction, inherited myths, and the South’s hard histories.

In the episode’s emotional centerpiece, Orlando unpacks the controversial 2020 panel that eventually led to Edge stepping down from the Southern Foodways Alliance and how that “crescendo” chapter handles accountability, pain, and restraint without overwhelming the rest of the book. The hosts reflect on what it means to be called a “kingmaker” in a changing cultural moment and why some listeners and readers wanted Edge to step aside so other voices, particularly Black voices, could be heard. They close by returning to the road trips and roadside barbecue joints of Edge’s youth, the working-class food that sustains most of us, and the way Southern dishes from shrimp and grits to lowcountry boils and New Orleans classics become a shared language across race and geography. Food, the episode suggests, can be read like literature or music, and in House of Smoke, it becomes the clearest way Edge knows to search for home.