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the Savings issue

audience with him. Which is why I had never learned that Marvin had a previous life as a hairdresser. Or that Guy’s was formerly a Sicilian-owned corner grocery store. Or that once when Marvin went to Commander’s Palace for his birthday, Emeril Lagasse invited him into the kitchen and personally cooked Marvin’s rabbit. Or that Marvin eats a lot of quinoa at home. Or that he considers every po-boy he makes to be sacred. We sat down for this deeper-than-usual conversation as part of a Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA) oral history project titled The Lives and Loaves of New Orleans. I made a digital recording of the interview, and I returned a few weeks later with a professional photographer. The interview transcript and photos live in an archive at the University of Mississippi at Oxford where the SFA is part of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, and they also exist for public consumption on the SFA’s web site. I have slowly been gathering oral history interviews for the SFA for ten years on topics like gumbo, boudin, sno-balls, ya- ka-mein and most recently, po-boys. I am also a writer, and interviewing is a large part of that work as well. But as in the case with Marvin, it’s always the oral history interviews that dig the deepest and yield the most intimate, gratifying information. I love that these interviews will exist in perpetuity, so that decades — even centuries — from now, southerners can learn the history and spirit behind their foodways through the very voices of the people who cook, produce and otherwise spend their days thinking about southern food today. As outlined in its mission statement, “The Southern Foodways Alliance documents, studies, and celebrates the diverse food cultures of the changing American South. We set a common table where black and white, rich and poor — all who gather — may consider our history and our future in a spirit of reconciliation.” It’s an organization of ideals and earnestness and goodwill. Inclusiveness has always been a guiding principle (see Founders Letter sidebar), which is partly how this Wisconsin native became an oral historian in Louisiana. Oral history is just one of the SFA’s

The Southern Foodways Alliance by Sara Roahen

L ast spring, I sat down for nearly two hours with one of my heroes: Marvin Matherne, the po-boy-maker and proprietor of Guy’s Po-Boys in Uptown New Orleans. I had known Marvin since my first Guy’s Po-Boys experience fifteen

years prior, and I had interviewed him several times for articles about the city’s iconic sandwich. But Marvin is one of the busiest people I know — he makes every po-boy that leaves Guy’s kitchen. Every po- boy. I had never dared ask for a two-hour

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MY ROUSES EVERYDAY SEPTEMBER | OCTOBER 2015