Southern Cooking:

Southern American Cooking

by Anne Berline

I grew up in New England, where corn on the cob is served as is with a slab of butter and a sprinkle of salt and pepper. We yankees boil salted meats with vegetables and call it a boiled dinner, plain and simple. Our clam chowder is white, our baked beans have bacon and molasses in them, and Indian food is taboo. By the time I was eighteen, I could boil a lobster, steam up a mess of clams, and grill a perfect pork chop. Then I moved to Virginia, got a roommate from North Carolina, and I discovered a whole new world of southern country cooking goodness.

To an Italian girl from Boston, the menus in southern restaurants were in a foreign language. Chicken-fried steak, grits, corn pone pudding, strawberry rhubarb pie, even sweet potato pie... In my mind, chicken and steak were two different meats, grit is on sandpaper, 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 cooked up a pan of delicious, melt-in-your-mouth southern biscuits topped them with sausage gravy. From that day on, I was Becky's disciple -- standing by as she diced scallions to make up a dish of pinto beans, stirred the milk into a pan of drippings for milk gravy, and rolled thin steak strips in chicken batter to make the terribly unhealthy but delicious chicken-fried steak.

Southern cooking is not much different than New England plain cooking -- at least at its most basic level. Like any other regional style of cooking, it utilizes the ingredients that are plentiful and cheap. In New England we sweeten up our dried beans with brown sugar and molasses, and serve them with thick, heavy brown bread dotted with raisins -- perfect for cold winter nights. In North Carolina, they simmer salt pork and onions for hours and serve with scallions for scooping and a side of flaky biscuits. Salty, spicy and flaky-good all at once, it's a southern cooking meal that makes my mouth water just to remember.

Some dishes just don't translate, unfortunately. There is no New England substitute for a southern barbecue sandwich - shredded pork simmered for hours and ladled over buns in a "sandwich" that requires a fork. The ubiquitous sloppy joe just doesn't cut it. It lacks the spicy-sweet tang and buttery texture of true slow-simmered pork barbecue.

There also isn't anything that compares with chicken fried steak. 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 sounds nasty.

My Italian roots of New England show wherever I go. Lasagna will always be a favorite meal, and New England boiled dinners still make my mouth water. But there's a place in my heart for southern cooking.

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