Title: Regional Cuisine - Down Home Southern Cooking

Author: Kirsten Hawkins

Article:
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
www.food-and-nutrition.com/ for more information on
cooking delicious and healthy meals.

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