This issue features a micro-interview with John Currence conducted by Jack Pendarvis. Currence, an award-winning chef, first cooked professionally as a deckhand on a tugboat. He worked his way up in the restaurant business, starting out as a dishwasher at Bill Neal’s seminal Southern restaurant, Crook’s Corner and later, cooked in various kitchens for the Brennans, the famous family of restauranteurs. He wound up in Oxford, Mississippi, where one of the first friends he made was the writer Larry Brown. Their meeting was the beginning of Currence’s long association with the town’s writing community. At his restaurant Big Bad Breakfast, almost all the dishes are named for books by local authors. For Faulkner, there’s the Pylon, a hangover cure of jalapeños, chopped hot dogs, chili, pickles, oyster crackers, and other things too numerous and insane to mention, on top of a waffle. David Chang loves it. At last count, Currence owns four restaurants in Oxford, including his flagship, City Grocery, where his work has won him (among other honors) a 2009 James Beard Award as Best Chef South.

PART I

THE BELIEVER: In Alan Davidson’s definitive Oxford Companion to Food, which first appeared in 1999, Mr. Davidson states in his definitive way that parboiled possum is a “favourite Southern dish,” which makes it sound like a widespread and frequent meal. He’s wrong, isn’t he? I have lived in the South my whole life and have never come close to eating a possum. Have you?

JOHN CURRENCE: I’m led to believe that if you are going to prepare possum, the best thing you can do is to hold it in your oven for three days and feed it nothing but water to purge it.

BLVR: That doesn’t sound right. Aside from the horrific cruelty, wouldn’t the possum poop in the oven?

JC: I feel certain the possum would. I generally avoid the rodent family when eating, though Larry Brown’s wife Mary Annie makes an outstanding squirrel and dumplings. For now, that’s as deeply as I will indulge myself here. There’s too much other good stuff to eat out there.

PART II

BLVR: Most underrated vegetable?

JC: In the clubhouse turn, spaghetti squash and Brussels sprouts are neck and neck. I impersonated a vegetarian briefly in my early twenties (which goes against my very nature), all in the hopes of growing closer to a girl I was involved with. Anyhow, fake me was amazed at what the girl could do with a spaghetti squash, which was something that real me had never encountered before. In retrospect, I think fake me was as fascinated with how easy it was to make a meal from spaghetti squash as fake me actually “enjoyed” the...