My Roots

Southern Cuisine

I grew up in mid-century mid-America. Memphis, Tennessee on the Mississippi River. My parents are from Mississippi and Arkansas. But I’ve lived in California the past three decades and think of food with a California “health conscious” attitude.

Southern fried chicken is probably the most widely known Southern food. Spread nationwide by fast food establishments of the “Colonel Sanders” variety, this has become a staple of American pop culture.

Our Southern style chicken was baked – not deep fried. Cut up chicken pieces were dipped in milk, then rolled in a mixture of cornmeal and spices. A small amount of olive oil coated the baking dish before the pieces were added. We lowered the calorie content from fat and used a “good” oil rather than the traditional lard.

Southern cooking is a fusion based on Native American cultures, with elements from Africa and Europe.

Native American

Corn was the only grain available before settlers brought wheat and rice and it is the key to Southern Cooking.

True Southern Cornbread does not contain any wheat flour.

Flour was added to recipes as a social statement to make a smoother texture and a whiter bread to distinguish it from the coarser yellow stone ground cornmeal used by the poor.

Indian tribes in what is now the Southern United States had developed techniques and recipes based on local vegetation and food animals. Settlers adopted these as they learned how to consume the corn, squash, tomatoes, hot peppers, beans, pecans, peanuts, blackberries, raspberries and potatoes that already grew on the land.

Native game in the South includes raccoon, deer, rabbits, squirrels and opossum. Seafoods along the coast included shrimp, crawfish, crab, fish and oysters.

European Settlers

The Europeans brought pigs and chickens to North America.

They planted apple and pear trees and sowed wheat.

Black Eyed Peas – traditionally flavored with ham hocks. We left out the saturated fats, so ours have pieces of onion, tomato, garlic and Jalapeno pepper. It is traditional to serve black eyed peas on New Years Day for good luck in the coming year. This custom was actually brought to the Americas in 1730 by Sephardic Jewish immigrants who followed a Talmudic tradition.

During the Civil War, the Union troops participating in Sherman’s March through the South considered corn and “field peas” only suitable for animal fodder. They were ignored when the troops stripped and burned local food supplies. As these were the only grains and protein left to the local inhabitants during the next few years, they became stigmatized as “hard times” foods.

African Influences

When Africans were imported to work on large plantations as slaves they brought their native foods. Some of these food had already come to America by way of Mediterranean settlers, but slaves were widely used as cooks and they preferred to serve the foods they knew best. After the abolition of slavery these recipes lived on particularly in Creole cuisine.

This is fried okra rolled in corn meal and fried in cannola oil. Cut okra has a slimy feel that many dislike, but rolling the pieces in cornmeal takes advantage of the adhesive properties of the vegetable and makes it much more attractive. As a child, this is the only way I could be persuaded to eat okra.

Eggplant, okra, sorghum, black eyed peas, sesame seeds, one variety of rice and several varieties of melon made their way from Africa to the Americas. Today these foods are not only found in Southern kitchens but they’re available in most supermarkets in the United States.

Contemporary

Southern cooking has continued to evolve since African, European and Native American cooking traditions came together in the 18th and 19th centuries. Many significant changes occurred in the 20th century as science and technology added new dimensions to the chef’s toolkit.

Today’s dish – Pecan Pie – is technically “Karo Pecan Pie” because this recipe requires corn syrup. The first recipes for pecan pie date from the 1920′s when corn syrup was introduced and the manufacturer was trying to sell its new product. Mainstream cookbooks didn’t list the recipe until 1940. This pie can be hazardous to your health! As a child, I ate so much at my grandfather’s funeral that I got sick.

Home refrigeration was another technical innovation that changed the face of Southern cooking. I still remember visiting my Aunt Mae and seeing her General Electric Monitor refrigerator – basically an icebox with the compressor/heat exchanger on top. Sometime in the early 1960′s she got a new refrigerator. But the old one lived on in the form of an electric clock on the wall that looked just like the old refrigerator (a freebie gift from the refrigerator manufacturer designed to entice the buyer).