Regional Cuisine – Down Home
Southern Cooking
by:
Kirsten Hawkins
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.
About The Author
Kirsten Hawkins is a food and nutrition expert specializing the
Mexican, Chinese, and Italian food. Visit
http://www.food-and-nutrition.com/ for
more information on cooking delicious and
healthy meals. |
