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Regional Cuisine – Down Home Southern Cooking
I grew up in New England, the home of ‘plain cooking’, where corn on
the cob is served as is with a slab of butter and a sprinkle of salt
and pepper. We boil salted meats with vegetables and call it – well, a
boiled dinner. Our clam chowder is white, our baked beans have bacon
and molasses in them, and no one in the world has ever invented a food
that was improved by the addition of curry. By the time I was eighteen,
I could boil a lobster, steam clams and grill a pork chop to
perfection. Then I moved to Virginia, picked up a roommate from North
Carolina – and discovered a whole new world of down home country
cooking goodness.
To an All-American Italian girl from Boston, the menus in restaurants
were in a foreign language. Chicken-fried steak, grits, corn pone
pudding, strawberry rhubarb pie – sweet potato pie?? In my mind,
chicken and steak were two different meats, grits is what’s on
sandpaper, corn is a vegetable – and what in the world is sweet potato
doing in a crust?
But I became a fervent convert to Southern cooking the first time my
roommate made up a pan of the sweetest, tastiest, most perfectly
melt-in-your-mouth delicious Southern baking powder biscuits and topped
them with sausage gravy. From that day on, I was Sue’s disciple,
standing at her elbow as she diced scallions to make up a mess of pinto
beans, stirred the milk into a pan of drippings for milk gravy and
rolled thin steak strips in chicken batter to make chicken-fried steak.
Down home southern cooking is no different than New England plain
cooking – at least at its most basic level. Like any other regional
style of cooking, it makes use of the ingredients that are plentiful
and cheap. In New England we gussy up our dried beans with brown sugar
and molasses, and serve them with thick, sweet heavy brown bread dotted
with raisins – perfect fare for cold winter nights. In North Carolina,
they simmer for hours with salt pork and onions and served with
scallions for scooping and a side of flaky biscuits cut out of dough
with a juice glass. Salty, spicy and flaky-good all at once, it’s a
down home meal that makes my mouth water just to remember.
Some dishes just don’t translate, though. There is no New England
substitute for a Southern barbecue sandwich – shredded pork simmered
with spices for hours and ladled over buns in a ‘sandwich’ that really
requires a fork. The ubiquitous ‘sloppy joe’ just doesn’t cut it. It
lacks the spicy-sweet tang and buttery texture of real slow-simmered
pork barbecue.
Nor is there anything that compares with chicken fried steak – a dish
that can’t be described in words without selling it short. If you’ve
had it, you KNOW how good it is. If you haven’t, the idea of dredging
and dipping strips of beef and frying it like chicken just doesn’t do
it justice.
My New England Italian roots show wherever I go. Lasagna will always be
a favorite meal, and New England boiled dinners still make my mouth
water. But I know, deep in my soul, that when I go to Heaven, the
diners will serve flaky Southern biscuits with sausage gravy and
chicken fried steak. Some temptations even the angels can’t resist.
Home > Cuisines > Southern Cuisine
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