A Culinary Atlas of the South

RECIPES - GAMES - STORIES - MAPS

The Culinary Atlas

Your path to understanding the food of who you are and where you come from. Take an afternoon with us and noodle around. You'll be surprised at what you find.

CHOOSE YOUR JOURNEY

I want to...

EXPLORE WORLD DISHES AND COMPARE MY REGIONS

From curating your own personal digital recipe book, to

a platform for exploring others' relationship to food. T

Oral Histories

Families and individuals contribute their own stories — where their version of a dish came from, how it changed, and what it means. This layer is peer-produced and grows over time, like the atlas itself.

Platform Overview

718Dishes16 published

1Recipeseditorial + contributed

2Oral Histories2 live · 2 pending

249Contributors2 moderators

4Municipalities

BROWSE

— dishes

⌕

The browse page is currently based on sample data. When submissions begin to flow, this page will show the most recently submitted stories, recipes, and responses. You'll be able to see the queue in the column, things that have been submitted but not accepted to the database yet. To see all the data from a specific dish, use the search bar above.

Get an idea about a dish you want to see represented? Add a map pin or add a story. Data looking sparse? We're just getting started — we need your help to support more interviews and reach more families.

Know a dish not in the atlas?

Every entry starts as a submission. Community moderators review and connect your dish to its diasporic origins before it goes live.

Oral Histories

— entries

Have a story to share?

Your family's recipe, where it came from, and what it means — that's what this atlas is for.

What This Is

This is a culinary atlas built alongside a documentary of the same name — tracing the origins, migrations, and living lineages of soul food in the American South. It is not a recipe database. It is an oral history archive organized around dishes.

Each dish in the atlas carries two kinds of knowledge: a curated editorial record written by the documentary team, tracing diasporic origins and historical context; and a growing collection of oral histories contributed by families, home cooks, and community members across the South and its diaspora.

The atlas is designed to grow with the documentary — and beyond it.

Two Layers

Editorial Record

Written and maintained by the documentary team. Each dish entry includes a short history of diasporic origin, movement through Southern foodways, and cultural context. Edited, cited, and fixed.

Oral Histories

Peer-contributed. Anyone can submit their family's version of a dish — where it came from, who made it, how it changed across generations. Reviewed by community moderators before going live.

How a Contribution Moves

1

You Submit

Share your family's story — the dish, where your family is from, how the recipe was passed down, what it means. You can include a recipe or just the story.

2

Community Review

Volunteer moderators — many of them contributors themselves — review submissions for completeness and context. They may add connections to existing dishes or origins.

3

Goes Live

Approved oral histories are attached to their dish and appear in the atlas — searchable, linked, and permanently part of the record.

4

Enters the Archive

All contributions are preserved in the atlas archive. This knowledge does not disappear when the documentary ends.

Tags Used in This Atlas

Each dish is tagged two ways. Diasporic origin tags trace where a dish's core ingredients, techniques, or traditions come from — West Africa, Indigenous/Native, Gullah Geechee, European, Caribbean & Creole, and Appalachian. Many dishes carry more than one. Recipe type tags describe where the dish lives at the table: main, side, breakfast, dessert, preservation food, or ritual/celebration.

These tags are not meant to fully contain a dish. They are a way in — a starting point for navigation.

About this map: Contribution locations are geocoded at county level — specific enough to be meaningful, vague enough to protect contributors. Future versions will include county-level choropleth density, migration route overlays, and spatial filtering by origin region. Built with Leaflet.js + OpenStreetMap.