Editor's note: Southern food writer John T. Edge begins an occasional series in which he explores our region's culinary ethnic roots. Look for future installments throughout the year. (Edge will also be a panelist at the $100 "Cork and Pork" event as part of the High Museum Wine Auction at 11:30 a.m. Friday at Restaurant Eugene, 2277 Peachtree Road. Reservations: 404-733-5335; www.atlanta-wineauction.org.)

An hour west of my hometown of Oxford, Miss., at Abe's, a crossroads barbecue stand in Clarksdale, the Davises, a family of Lebanese ancestry, dish Mississippi Delta favorites: flattop-fried barbecue sandwiches, chili cheeseburgers, those sorts of things. By the register, however, Pat Davis stacks rectangles of baklava, a solitary tip of the hat to his people, his place of origin, his culinary legacy.

Across town is the region's best pork rind producer, Kim's Processing. The Wong family, natives of the Guangdong province of China, have, for two generations, spiced chicken cracklings and pork skins with Chinese aromatics and fried them in oversize woks. Clarksdale is a Mississippi River town, long driven by waterborne commerce. It's exceptional. But it's not singular. Throughout the South, pockets of unsuspected ethnicity flourish.

In Charlotte, natives of subcontinental India stoke barbecue pits with the same green hickory that their country-come-to-town Scots-Irish predecessors did.

In Houston, Cajun Kitchen, a strip-mall restaurant run by Vietnamese, blazons its windows with dancing crawfish and French Quarter street scenes selling boiled crawfish to emigres and Anglos alike.

In Atlanta, Koreans fry yardbird drumsticks in a one-time Wendy's on Buford Highway, serving the hacked-to-order chicken with a sauce that tastes remarkably similar to the stuff that McDonald's smears on Big Macs.

John Shelton Reed, the region's reigning sociologist, has argued that Southerners are similar, in the way that members of an ethnic group are similar. Shared values. Shared histories. And shared palates. The South, as Reed understands it — as I ingest it — is more than merely white and black, Anglo-Saxon and West African. Maybe it always has been.

Maybe, until recently, we couldn't see the baklava for the barbecue. Maybe Southern-ness is a kind of secular belief system. One that assimilates all manner of ethnicities. One that finds honest expression in the dishes that emerge from our collective kitchen.