Two rounds of dishes. Your answers map where Southern food lives.
Round 1
12 classic soul food dishes
Fried chicken. Cornbread. Collard greens. Tell us which you eat or cook.
Round 2
12 dishes from the deeper record
Hoecake. Pot likker. Delta tamales. How far into the Atlas do you go?
Southern Culinary Atlas · Find Your Dishes
Find your dishes.
What do you cook? What did you grow up eating? In about two minutes, you'll help build a living map of Southern food, by where people live now and where they're from.
Anonymous. No sign-up. Your answers become part of the Atlas.
Where do you live now?
Raleigh · Durham · Chapel Hill · Cary · Hillsborough. Enter your ZIP for a precise pin.
Responses outside the US won't appear on the map, but your dish answers are recorded in the Atlas.
Where'd you grow up eating?
The place whose food shaped you most.
Round 1 of 2 · Classic soul food
Loading dishes…
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Add a recipe?
Optional. Share how you make one of the dishes you eat or cook.
You didn't mark any dishes as one you eat or cook, so there's nothing to add a recipe for right now. That's fine!
The room, mapped.
Every play lands here live. Switch between where people live and where they grew up.
No dishes on the map yet. You may be the first.
Want to know when the full Atlas launches?
✓ You're on the list.
Now for something different.
Round 2 has 12 dishes from the deeper record — ones most people haven't heard of. How far into the Atlas do you go?
Round 1 done.
Your answers are part of the Atlas. Want to try the harder round?
Both rounds done.
Your answers are now part of the Southern Culinary Atlas — a public, living record of how the South eats.
Built for the Culinary Documentary Studies lecture · Durham · July 6, 2026
The Southern Culinary Atlas · Beta
The Culinary Atlas
An atlas of soul food and its lineages — built from oral histories, family recipes, and dish scouts like the one you just completed.
The Atlas is in sandbox. Here's what's inside:
Dish Index
Documented dishes with origins & lineages
Grits. Collard greens. Hoppin' John. Each dish has a curated editorial record tracing its diasporic journey — West African, Indigenous, Gullah Geechee, Caribbean. Browse by origin or type.
Interactive Suite
Oral History · Dish Scout · Simmering Takes
Contribute your food story. Submit a family recipe. Play the Dish Scout — you just did. Simmering Takes: culinary debates, no right answers. Well, maybe.
Data Suite
Open datasets for researchers
All dishes, recipes, and oral histories — downloadable as CSV, JSON, Stata, and R. Pseudonymized contributor data. Built for culinary documentary studies.
Atlas Map
Where the South eats, by county
Oral histories and dish origins plotted by contributor location. NC county-level detail. SC, VA, and the full South coming as the archive grows.
Get notified at launch.
The Atlas opens to the public later this year. Leave your email and we'll let you know.
✓ You're on the list.
Built for the Culinary Documentary Studies lecture · Durham · July 6, 2026