... And Native to the Soil
Feb 24 '01 (Updated Aug 04 '01)
The Bottom Line Southern food, like Southern history, is the gift of the land and the result of cultures clashing. As long as it stays 'down home,' it's the best there is.
Southern cooking is a function and reflection of Southern culture – culture being something the South has that is notably missing in the rest of the country, frankly.
Folks, the site continues to dance the Charlie Foxtrot: we can't seem, even now, to get Books fixed, the Hooch category's a total cluster, the top-tier writers (a mere statistical decimal in this crowd, but the yeast in an otherwise inert mass of inadequacy and incompetence) are this close to open revolt.... The place is a sump. And management, struggling to rise above incompetence through occasional sudden flashes of mediocrity, instead slaves over such world-shaking new categories as ... How to Choose Socks?* And yet, even the blind pig finds the occasional acorn. There are a spare few of these categories that transcend the inane, and this is one. So – unlike socks-and-hoes, and some hilarious mockery thereof by some of my colleagues – this one, I'm playing straight.
Southern culture is vivified, made a culture, by the melding of influences that are held far more closely than in other, lesser parts of the country: in the Southland, the past is not really past, and the ancestral homelands are not so far away as they are elsewhere, paradoxically: the assimilation of Southerners, unlike the uneasy attempts at assimilation of Americans elsewhere, has created a culture in which the old influences in our blood, of the Ivory Coast, Languedoc, the Highlands, Wales, Antrim, and Devon, of Sephardic communities from Amsterdam to Cadiz,** of the Caribbean sugar islands and Castile, have been absorbed into the fabric of New World life. Elsewhere, 'ethnic' influences are merely a type of applique atop the American fabric (threadbare, plain, and bleached white); in the South, ironically, they are warp and woof of the fabric.
A sense of historical irony is indispensable in discussing any Southern subject.
The fact is, German abolitionists and Irish dropouts were among the Confederacy's generals; Catholics and Jews labored under fewer disabilities in the antebellum and Confederate South (we were too stupidly hung up on skin pigmentation to deal with lesser prejudices to the North's extent): the result, as anyone who has eaten in the Texas Hill Country, Lafayette Parish, Louisiana, or parts of the Carolinas or the Great Valley of Virginia, can tell you, is a cuisine paradoxically more assimilated than those elsewhere in the country. And despite our vicious stupidity on the matter of race, having African-Americans in the kitchen, the garden, and the majordomo's pantry, sharing a roof and a larder with Anglos, made Southern cuisine integrated long before any other aspect of Southern life got that way. The cast-iron skillet was a melting-pot. You may take this as 'God moving in a mysterious way' or as the Fates having a pawky and sardonic sense of humor, as you like.
The reason the South has a culture and a civilization is simple: as any European will acknowledge, that sort of fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is the result of Original Sin. The bland, smug, whitebread triumphalism of the rest of the US can't support a culture and does not rise to the tragic dignity of a civilization: such things take defeat, and historic chastening, and disillusion. Lord knows we have all that and to spare down here.
Despite all our bloody and bumbling mistakes, our vices and sins, we as Southerners, despite ourselves, truly are one people and have one culture, even when our besetting sins and blindnesses have prevented our acknowledging it – or its sources. And it is in the kitchen and the garden and at table that this is clearest. Burgundians had pre-Renascence table-music, Telemann wrote tafelmusik for North German feasts, but it is in the South's broad kingdoms that mandolin and fiddle, harmonica and banjo and hammer-dulcimer, provide music for the great American cuisine.
Superficially, in yet another of those ironies that are inevitable in the complexity of the South, cuisine also seems to divide us. What constitutes barbecue, for example, is a heated question down here: even the two Carolinas cannot seem to agree, and much less can Kentucky, Texas, and the Old Dominion.
And yet....
From the Rappahannock, if not the Potomac and the Ohio, to beyond the Sabine, Red, and Trinity, there is a deep unity in Southern cuisine. Pig, for starters – you have to get out of Deep East Texas and well into the Plains to reach the end of ham culture and the beginnings of beef culture. Smithfield ham, country ham, sausage, pork ribs, cracklin's, hamhocks, bacon, fatback: the pig is, in the South, almost what he long was in Ireland, 'the little gentleman that pays the rent.' Even in the leanest of times, when there's little meat to be had, vegetables or corn dodgers or what you do have tends to be flavored with a last scrap of fatback or lard.
Times change, of course, and things evolve, but palates, and especially Southern palates, change but slowly and grudgingly. There's no question but that, say, the Valley of Virginia, the Shenandoah Country, supports more cow-and-calf or sheep units per acre than the trans-Brazos plains of Texas; but that very richness long meant that cash crops dominated the East in place of range animals, meat on the hoof. Thus the persistence of the Dixie pig. When you have a Smithfield ham biscuit, you're eating history.
Smoked meat, cured meat, preserved meat: links, bulk sausage, andouille and boudin from the Cajun country, ham, the barbecuing of whatever the local meat may be, whether pork, mutton (in Kentucky), or beef: the omnipresence of climate as a factor cannot be better attested. Southern cookery remains dominated by its history of a hot climate in which meat went bad rapidly in the absence of refrigeration, unless cured in some way. That was another reason the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic, for all the fertility and grazing capacity of their soils, never became ranch country: before the creation of feeding and shipping operations, even a single steer was a right smart of meat for one family to get through before corruption set in.
Yet fresh meat there has always been in Dixie. All you need is an axe.
The great rival of the pig in Southern cooking is of course that day-to-day source of fresh meat, the chicken. Fried chicken livers in cream gravy (Dixie's version of sauce bechamel); fried chicken in all its golden, deep-fat glory; chicken and dumplings; Brunswick stew: poultry has eked out or crowned Southern meals meager or elegant since the memory of man runs not to the contrary. General R. E. Lee himself described his ideal of otium cum dignitate as a Virginia farm with inexhaustible quantities of fried chicken: 'not one chicken, or two, but unlimited fried chicken.'
New England has its beans-and-cod-and-succotash. The trinity of Southern cuisine is probably ham-chicken-and-cornmeal. One reason Southerners dote so on biscuits: beat, drop, or rolled, ham biscuits or just 'short' ones slathered in butter or covered with cane syrup or with gravy or what have you: is probably that most Southerners for a long time hadn't wheat flour enough to eat them save on special occasions (though the planter class rarely went without). The main cereal grain of the Southland has always been corn – maize, that is, but 'corn' too in the British sense in which that term describes whatever is the region's staff of life.
Corn is omnipresent in Dixie cuisine, from cornbread to corn muffins to elegant spoonbread to corn pudding to roasting ears to hominy and grits. It is one of the building blocks of Southern cuisine: you cannot escape it even when frying catfish (in cornmeal, with hush puppies inevitably to the side).
Then of course there are the most commonly recognized African-American contributions to Dixie's cultural table. The rush of modernity may have blurred the Mason-Dixon line, but by God there's still a clear set of lines when it comes to yams, sweet potatoes, peanut soup, and okra.
And let us pause and thank the Good Lord for all those kitchen contributions that are part of The Debt that whitebread America owes Black Americans. The one that comes foremost to mind is pot-likker. The English, Welsh, Anglo-Irish, Huguenots, Ulstermen, Scots, and whatnot who made up the dominant strains of white Southern settlement will to this day, if left unwatched, carefully boil the goodness and worth out of every vegetable God ever created, just as their cousins in Great Britain do. Fortunately, generations of contact with our Black neighbors have intervened. They have never been ones to throw out the baby or the bathwater when it came to simmering greens or the venerable black-eyed pea, that glorious legume that attests to the South's essential unity by being celebrated from Athens, Texas to Hard Scrabble, Virginia. They wisely refuse to drain out all the goodness from a mess of vegetables in the pot, before serving it, as any average white woman will.
As long as there's some smidgin of a soul-food approach to the cooking of vegetables in any Southern kitchen, you're safe.
And then there are creamed vegetables – no, wait. I'm not talking about those ghastly methods by which perfectly good whole-kernel corn or English peas (as they're called down here) or, most painfully to those who love them, butterbeans, are rendered into mushy pap. I'm talking about such things as blanching salsify, oyster-plant, and then making a cassoulet of the vegetable in a cream sauce. You don't have to be 'a big butter-and-egg man from Memphis' (in the words of a classic of Southern drama) to recognize that memories of butter and milk from the family Guernsey of old still profoundly influence Southern cooking.
Nor ought we forget what Mr Lincoln, Mr Gideon Welles, Mr Gustavus Vasa Fox, Admiral Porter, General Scott, and Admiral Farrgut never forgot when planning the Blockade: the South has a hell of a coastline. Snapper Pontchartrain, she-crab soup, oysters Bienville, softshell crabs from the Chesapeake, shad.... Southern cooking means seafood, too.
I could go on for pages about eggs, gravies (from sausage to red-eye), grits, cane syrup, apple butter in the Shenandoah, chess pie, rice pudding, sweet potato pie, and pecans. But I won't.
What I will say is that Southern cuisine, properly understood, is a function of Southern history for good and ill, the result of a synthesis of cultures even in the worst of conditions, and always fundamentally representative of the land and waters of the Southland.
Trick it up, tart it up, as you will, it remains built of the same building blocks that are part and parcel of the Southern experience: chicken and ham and the bounty of the nearest bay, corn and greens and black-eyed peas, milk and butter and eggs, game not rarely from venison to turkey to quail, and peanuts and pecans, 'simmons and mayhaws, all the native flora and fauna of Dixie. It is what can only be called 'Afro-Saxon' cooking, as the South in the final analysis is culturally Afro-Saxon. It's all a matter of roots, and as long as Southern food stays close to those roots and doesn't try to get above or go back on its raising, it's the best vittles a man ever got his own self outside of.
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* As if that weren't obvious: merino wool. Clocked if you feel daring. Argyle for real over-the-top hilarity. And of course, no socks at all with loafers-and-madras, with Topsiders and similar deck shoes, and so on....
** The first three Jewish US Senators were from the antebellum South, one of whom of course was the first Jew to hold Cabinet rank in any American government: the Hon. Judah P. Benjamin, variously Secretary of War, Attorney General, and Secretary of State for the Confederacy.
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Member: Markham Shaw Pyle, JD
Location: Houston, Texas
Reviews written: 539
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About Me:
Historian, baseballing bon vivant, Boll Weevil, W&L man; and the Walter Mitty of field sports
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