by Brad Edmonds
Southern food is fun. The whole point of food is fun. We should prepare our food the way we like, and Southerners do that. Ben Franklin is reported to have said "eat to live, don’t live to eat." I suppose technically he was correct, but as long as your doctor isn’t getting really mad at you, you should learn some techniques from Southern cooks. Slather some comfort on that food, and enjoy.
Louisianans love mud bugs (a.k.a. crawdads, and they are bugs – lobsters are apparently close cousins of cockroaches, too). They’ll boil them in a giant pot with crabs, potatoes, leeks, onions, jalapenos, and whatever else is in the kitchen that might work (indeed, legend has it that "jambalaya" loosely translated means "what’s in the fridge?"), along with about a cup of ground spices and dried herbs. I’ve seen a vintage cooking show where the cook was struggling to get the lid on the pot against all the crawdads and crabs struggling to get out. This is proper – you want to know the seafood is fresh. Only in Louisiana is boiling a form of performance art.
Southern cooking is definitely not all hillbilly. Continuing with Louisiana, you will find that people on the street, especially in south Louisiana, understand the use of a mirepois – a mix of aromatic vegetables, sautéed. (Aromatics include carrots, onions, leeks, garlic, shallots, peppers of all kinds, and more: non-watery vegetables, herbs, spices, etc. that stand up to a good sauté. The classical European continental technique is to sauté or sweat some aromatics; deglaze the pan with wine, stock, broth, whatever; "mount" the sauce with butter or cream; strain (or not) and serve with the meat that is naturally the centerpiece of the meal. You want a mirepois.) Indeed, most south Louisianans will know the difference between the Cajun mirepois (onion, sweet bell pepper, celery) and the French (onion, carrot, celery). Fewer people know the Italian than should – onion, garlic, then whatever you want from among bell pepper, hot red pepper flakes, carrot…sometimes Italians use anchovies as an aromatic.
The Louisianans are known for putting heat into most of their savory dishes. Easy dishes use Tabasco or powdered cayenne pepper; when cooking from scratch, diced hot peppers are added to the mirepois. Cajun cooking, it should be said, is not typical of most Southern food: The classical techniques and general style derive from French cooking, which seems to owe its best aspects to inheritances from Italy dating back to the paleoculinary epoch. The deepest roots of Cajun cooking thus are Mediterranean, with the attendant abundance of fresh vegetable type things with bright colors. And herbs.
By contrast, Southern cooking has its roots in southern British cooking, which has its own roots in older German and Danish tribal fare (Saxons and Angles). At any rate, the heritage of non-Cajun Southern cooking, hailing from Germany, would explain the similarities between them – heavy sauces, heavy on the meat and dumplings and bread. The problem with Southern food, as you’ve probably heard about German food, is that after eating it you’re hungry again in 72 hours.
We’re most famous for barbeque, of course. For those of you unfamiliar with the verb "barbeque" used as a noun, when we say "barbeque" we mean "barbequed meat." If a Southerner refers to "barbeque" without further specification, he means pork. If you say "barbeque" in a restaurant, we’ll bring you shredded pork (usually shoulder) swimming in barbeque sauce. We have two types of sauces, mustard-based and tomato-based, both with sugar and vinegar and with whatever degree of pepper heat you want. Texans often serve their barbeque unsauced; they don’t generally assume pork; and they prefer to serve whole slabs of meat rather than shredded. Their homemade sauces, in my limited experience, tend not to stress the vinegar or sugar as much as Dixie sauces. I prefer Texas barbeque with Dixie sauces.
As far as actual cooking techniques (as Alton Brown puts it, cooking is the application of heat to food) and barbeque, there’s pretty much just fire, smoke, and meat. Southerners use more smoke than fire, which distinguishes barbequing from grilling. We’ll keep the meat six feet away from the flames. As long as there’s smoke flavor (with its attendant carcinogens), from actual smoke rather’n a bottle, we’re happy. (I suppose I should apologize at some point for the overuse of parentheses.)
Our second most famous technique is deep frying. Bread it and deep fry it, and you’ll find a Southerner who’ll eat it. Just last week, I did it to orange roughy filets, but we do it to green tomato slices, okry, zucchini (we grow 'em football size), pickles, and as I said in a previous article, a steak. Pop-tarts is about the only thing we won’t deep fry, but don’t quote me on that. I might be among the first to do it. Deep frying does wonderful things to food that other cooking methods don’t do.
The other techniques we’ve either created or adopted include throwing a ham hock in it; splashing Tabasco in it; putting gravy on it; wrapping biscuits around it; cooking it in lard and/or bacon; and church socializing around it ("Baptist" is next to "pot luck" in the dictionary). Each of these techniques was developed to keep Southerners happy and full. The heart-healthers, animal-firsters, nouvelle-cuisiners, and similar ers would fit in better elsewhere. But we’d be happy to offer them a plate of biscuits with ham and redeye gravy as long as they keep their visit short. A heads-up: We’ve heard the "I’ll have a grit" jokes.
The rest of y’all’re welcome anytime. Y’all’ll enjoy your stay.
May 2, 2003
Brad Edmonds [send him mail] writes from Alabama.
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