Southern food, memory, and where to eat next.
Deep South Dining treats food as a way into place, family, and community. Malcolm White and Carol Palmer move from home meals and holiday tables to chef interviews, Mississippi events, regional restaurants, and the recipes people wish they had written down.
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Deep South Dining is a Mississippi public-radio food conversation with a broad table and an easy chair pulled up beside it. Malcolm White and Carol Palmer give the show its familiar back-and-forth, moving from home cooking to guest interviews without sanding off the little detours that make the hour feel human. It is warm, practical, and local. It is also more curious than its relaxed surface first suggests. A segment on salads can reach back to the Middle Ages and kitchen gardens, then turn toward greenhouse production, restaurant buyers, and how local lettuce lands in neighborhood stores. A St. Patrick's Day episode can move from Irish music and religious feast days to the quiet truth that stew often tastes better after a day or two. The show keeps returning to food as inheritance. Alon Shia's account of recording his grandmother's dishes becomes a larger reminder that family recipes disappear when nobody takes the time to write them down. That kind of moment is where Deep South Dining is strongest. It does not treat cooking as decoration. It treats cooking as a record of people, places, habits, and care. Recent episodes range across Sip and Savor at The Max, Tavi's Salumeria, Lebanese cuisine, 67 Cookbooks, Poppy Tooker, and Christopher Prieto's barbecue work connected to veterans. The geography matters. Jackson, Meridian, Starkville, the Gulf Coast, New Orleans, Memphis, and the broader Southeast all show up as living food maps rather than generic destinations. The show can be chatty. It can be exacting about ingredients, pronunciation, and restaurant culture. It can also stop for a small joke about ticketing, boxed dough, or a song cue. That mix is the point. Deep South Dining is for people who want recipes, but also want the names, memories, festivals, chefs, and family stories that give those recipes somewhere to live.
Made for: For listeners who like public-radio conversation, regional food culture, family recipes, chef stories, and Mississippi-centered event chatter. It fits people who want cooking talk with warmth, history, and a strong sense of place.
What sets it apart: The show stands out by making food feel like community evidence rather than lifestyle content. Recipes, festivals, restaurants, cookbooks, and holiday meals all become ways to trace Southern identity in real time.
There’s more to a recipe besides add a pinch of salt and a dash of pepper. Pull up a chair to Deep South Dining and get a new recipe that you can try or you can share one of your own. Having some friends over and don’t know what to cook? Does everybody go crazy over your specialty dish? What’s the story behind your family’s secret sauce? It’s the history behind true southern cooking. It’s Deep South Dining! Monday mornings at 9 a.m. CST on MPB Think Radio. Email the show: [email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Food becomes social history as Malcolm White and Carol Palmer connect Southern kitchens with memory, labor, community, and regional enterprise.
Deep South Dining treats food as a record of work, place, and inheritance. Malcolm White and Carol Palmer move through conversations with chefs, growers, cookbook collectors, and culinary broadcasters, asking how meals are produced and why their stories endure.
Pie dough in the freezer gets you a seat with Malcolm White and Carol Palmer.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A Mississippi food gathering becomes a warm reflection on recipes, memory, and culinary inheritance.
Deep South Dining uses Sip and Savor 2026 as more than a quick event dispatch, letting The Max in Meridian become a backdrop for talk about Southern flavor, Mississippi cooking, and the memories that stay tucked inside recipes.
A coastal food story about tradition, testing, and hospitality rooted at home.
A coastal salumeria anchors this episode's look at how Italian and Spanish food traditions can travel into a new setting without losing their personal roots.
A salad story moves from medieval gardens to greenhouse harvests and regional grocery shelves.
Deep South Dining treats salad as a small history of taste, tracing it from medieval kitchen gardens on Europe's large estates to the basic pull of salt, vinegar, and oil.
A cookbook collection turns into a small evolving game about appetite, routine, and trying something new.
A freezer full of dough opens a warm single-episode review about cooking by instinct before the conversation turns to a homegrown cookbook contest. The idea is simple enough: count the books, pick one for the other player, and make something neither has cooked before.
A warm, well-anchored entry into New Orleans food history, radio memory, and the people who carry both forward.
Poppy Tooker comes through as a careful keeper of New Orleans food memory, with the episode moving from the block party for 150 years of P&J Oysters to the archive she has shaped through Louisiana Eats.
A warm barbecue interview about veterans, community, and what a shared meal can make possible.
Deep South Dining's veteran-focused episode centers on Christopher Prieto and the moment a Wounded Warrior Project coordinator's invitation changed how he understood barbecue's role in a community.
A no-plan ticket to Italy turns into a grounded lesson in finding a place at the table.
An Italy trip comes into focus through one grounded question: how does a traveler with a ticket, no real plan, and a pull toward food find a way into the country's kitchens?
Christian culture talk with actual chemistry.
Politics after midnight, dry and awake.
Fast banter, petty debates, random obsessions.
Hosts Malcolm White and Carol Palmer open Deep South Dining by discussing the National Folk Festival and the Michelin Guide's debut in the American South, highlighting Mississippi restaurants like LV's of Jackson and Sacred Ground Barbecue.
Hosts Malcolm White and Carol Palmer welcome guests Andrew Puckett, a Mississippi State student who spent the summer WOOFing on organic farms in Italy, and chef Chaz Lindsay, who facilitated the trip.
Malcolm White and Carol Palmer host an open-topic coffee chat about seasonal vegetables and peaches from a local garden.
Hosts Malcolm White and Carol Palmer interview Chef Alon Shia at the Sip and Savor 2026 fundraiser in Meridian, Mississippi, discussing his culinary journey and love for the South.
A radio show host introduces the concept of a salumeria and shares a personal Easter meal story before discussing Tavi's Salumeria, a place blending European and Gulf Coast cuisine.
Lee Bailey says Salad Days has moved from an 18,000-square-foot greenhouse in Flora to a 65,000-square-foot building that can produce three million heads of lettuce a year.
Hosts discuss Lebanese cuisine and share a story about trying to attend the Jackson Food and Wine Festival.
Malcolm White and Carol Palmer celebrate St.
Delia Parman and Robert Kyle built “67 cookbooks” around a simple rule: count the books, choose one, and cook something “I’ve never cooked before.” The project began after Robert Kyle looked around Delia’s study in Memphis and asked whether she had cooked from all those books.
Poppy Tooker explains why Creole cream cheese almost disappeared, then came back "with a vengeance."
Hosts Malcolm White and Carol Palmer discuss the National Folk Festival and introduce a Veteran's Day interview with Christopher Prieto about using barbecue to bring soldiers together.
Hosts Malcolm White and Carol Palmer introduce a coffee shop edition of Deep South Dining, featuring Urban Foxes bakery and cafe in Jackson, Mississippi.
Hosts discuss chuckwagon cooking with guest Jeffrey Mueller, exploring traditional cowboy cuisine and its Southern roots.