Southern Foodways: Wild Game Supper

An oral history of Gene’s Bar-B-Que in Brinkley, Arkansas.

From Monday through Saturday, Gene’s Bar-B-Que in Brinkley, Arkansas, offers a standard menu of barbecue and country cooking. But on Sunday evenings, owner Gene DePriest and his friends cook up a wild game supper.

The Southern Foodways Alliance, with the help of talented Oxford filmmaker Joe York, documented what makes the supper special in this short film, published on HottyToddy.com by permission of the SFA:

Based in Oxford, the Southern Foodways Alliance documents, studies, and celebrates the diverse food cultures of the changing American South. Its mission is to “set common table where black and white, rich, and poor—all who gather—may consider our history and our future in a spirit of reconciliation.”

A member-supported non-profit, based at the University of Mississippi, SFA stages symposia on food culture, produces documentary films, collects oral histories, and publishes compendiums of great writing. In the Atlantic Monthly, Corby Kummer dubbed the SFA “this country’s most intellectually engaged (and probably most engaging) food society.”