Weekly Dish

The U.S. South, as a geographic region, is often pigeonholed as one monolithic entity, all of us southerners grouped into the same slow-talking, barefoot-going mass. But think through just the culinary traditions, and you’ll see quite a variance from one part of the South to the next. Take the simple idea of barbecue. Now I grew up in Mississippi, only three hours from Memphis (or for the more adventurous, an hour and a half from a joint in the middle of nowhere called Letha’s), so I will tell you that barbecue means ribs, plain and simple. And I like mine dry. But just ask folks from Texas or North Carolina to describe barbecue, and you’ll see. They have definite ideas about what goes in the sauce, and those ideas vary widely. Oh, and they also have very definite ideas that their state’s barbecue is the absolute best.

To be sure, there are traditions that appear consistently across the South, but many regions have distinct specialities that you can’t find in other places. In the hill country of Kentucky, where some of my mom’s family is from, they make these wonderful concoctions called ham biscuits, homemade biscuits slathered with butter and topped with the best ham I’ve ever eaten. In southern Louisiana, of course, Creole and Cajun cooking reigns supreme; jambalaya, etouffee, and gumbo aren’t likely to appear as frequently in other parts of the region.

In Mississippi, I grew up with frequent tutorials in frying–a staple method in most parts of the deep south–and what I would call good southern comfort food. When asked, my brother Jason requests what I think of as the quintessential comfort meal: fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, and black-eyed peas with pepper jelly. Oh, and homemade biscuits, which we smear with butter and honey. Southern food, for us, also meant wild game: my dad and brothers all hunt, so baked doves, roasted quail, and dry-fry (fried venison) were also big parts of our meals.

If the blogging event Food Bloggers’ Geography: Southern Style, put on by My Husband Cooks, had fallen at a different time in my life, I would love to have whipped up one of these dishes that so represents the culinary heritage of my southern family. But, alas, I had to go back to the days before the nausea set in to find something appropriate.

In the first few weeks of pregnancy, I felt hungry all the time. Mostly for salty, crunchy things. I ate olives by the handful and although I am usually not a potato chip girl, if they were near, I could eat a whole bag. One Sunday for lunch, after a heavy rain had knocked some of the not-yet-ripe fall tomatoes from the garden on the ground, we fried them up for what is, in Mississippi anyway, the quintessential southern summer sandwich: a BLT. Instead of ripe red tomatoes, I used the fried green ones, whose tartness works well with the bacon. Instead of lettuce, I added our garden arugula, and I loved the peppery flavor against the salty crunch of the bacon and the spicy coating of the tomatoes. If this were a traditional southern BLT, it would have to have homemade mayonnaise on it, but since I’m avoiding raw eggs, that wasn’t an option (and storebought mayonnaise is never, ever an option). Good, crusty bread is also a must: I used ciabatta for this one; sourdough also works.

I’m sorry I don’t have a real southern “recipe” to offer, but if you dig around in the archives, you’re likely to find many a southern dish: the South has, in many ways, defined the kind of cook I am. I’ve fried green tomatoes here before, so in case you want to make BLT’s with stray fall tomatoes, here’s how to do it.

I’m excited to see how other folks interpret “the South”; you can head over to My Husband Cooks and find out on Sunday.

Posted: Thursday, October 19th, 2006 at 2:25 pm Filed under: Main Dish, Food Blogging Events, Vegetables, Summer, Sandwiches. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.