The south gets its due

[bixaorellana]

Starting a new thread just to post this link:
Southern Farmers Vanquish the Clichés

The article also covers southern cooking in all its variety. I am so pleased to see this, & I'm sure anyone here who knows the US south & its food will be as well.

This caught my attention because I'm a US southerner, but anyone wanting to weigh in with comments about your own regional or country's cooking and attendant stereotypes, please join in.

[Deleted]

Obviously Southern cooking is a lot more interesting than many people think it is. For one thing, it benefits from a lot of products imported from Africa, even when they actually came from another continent, such as the peanut. But okra, watermelon or yams are very important and well loved.

Meanwhile, people of African origin and others of Scottish origin joined together with similar traditions to create one of the most typical Southern dishes : fried chicken.

[Don Cuevas]

We've had two Southern style foods within the last several days: Buttermilk biscuits with spicy country sausage gravy (breakfast) and today, Southern style cornbread. (Although I use yellow cornmeal instead of white because I like the yellow more.)

[lagatta]

Thanks Bixa! Since this was from you I assumed it pertained to North America, but didn't know whether it would be about the Southern US or Southern Mexico!

[bixaorellana]

Dec 28, 2011 18:08:18 GMT kerouac2 said:

Meanwhile, people of African origin and others of Scottish origin joined together with similar traditions to create one of the most typical Southern dishes : fried chicken.

I didn't know that!

I too like the yellow cornmeal more, DonC, although I'm not sure there's really a taste difference. Yellow is prettier.

LaGatta, when I was little I told people I came from South America. I knew I was from the south and from America, so ..........

[Deleted]

Great piece.
The New Yorker recently did a long piece on chef Sean Brock and it was a fascinating read.

It's a bit lengthy but well worth reading on the topic.

www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/31/111031fa_fact_bilger

[Deleted]

The dishes are laced with local oddities like cattails and pokeweed.

I would certainly give it a try, but descriptions like this do not make me drool!

[bixaorellana]

I think some kind of flour is made from cattails. Poke weed is only edible during part of the year, & is in fact poisonous at other times. Admittedly, the restaurant could have a source of continuously planted poke that's young enough to eat. But that would mean it's no longer a wild food item, so why not just use some less arcane green?

I do appreciate the comment in the article that this chef is showing what southern cooking could be, but then am immediately turned off by:
McCrady’s, housed in an eighteenth-century brick tavern, is devoted to the arcane craft of molecular gastronomy.

Say what? Whenever I read about this kind of tinkering or preciousness (food featuring different foams, for gods sakes!), I think these chefs should just play with their own food & not expect others to pay for it. My gut feeling is that it's often so much of a certain segment of diners falling for the latest version of the emperor's new clothes.

Watching the rather hero-worshipping video, I couldn't help but think if Julia Child's comment on nouvelle cuisine:
It's so beautifully arranged on the plate - you know someone's fingers have been all over it.

[lagatta]

I think the point is that poke salad and cattail are truly indigenous foods, before the arrival of various Europeans and Africans.

Though I certainly agree about the molecular crap. It veers so far from food as sustenance - and it is also very much "Processed food" of a more upscale type.

[Deleted]

I was completely taken aback when reading the piece on Brock where one minute he is lovingly recalling his childhood memories of food,nostalgic for his grandmothers cooking and small farming, coveting the seeds that she kept from year to year. Then,suddenly he begins "foaming at the mouth" about molecular gastronomy.
I thought that I had missed a paragraph introducing totally different chef,it was that dramatic a shift.
I often hear stories here in NOLA from some elderly persons who reminisce about going out to harvest 'pepper grass'* ,out on the neutral ground to use in their preparation of Gumbo Z'Herbes. Now they use the greens from carrot tops as a substitute.

(* a native grass in the mustard family that used to grow wild in vacant lots and the like here. I've been on a mission to find seeds for it.)

[Don Cuevas]

We've had poke sallet while living in the Arkansas Ozarks. It was boiled long enough to remove all the flavor as well as the toxins. I recall it was slimy.

[Deleted]

[Deleted]

Dec 30, 2011 21:44:22 GMT Don Cuevas said:

We've had poke sallet while living in the Arkansas Ozarks. It was boiled long enough to remove all the flavor as well as the toxins. I recall it was slimy.

I'm curious as to whether or not you read the two pieces posted or are merely resorting to the same old stereotypes about Southern cuisine.

[Deleted]

Probably several of us have the same problem with the New Yorker article, which is not accessible:

Subscribers can read this article on our iPad app or in our online archive. (Others can pay for access.)

[Don Cuevas]

Jan 3, 2012 13:32:16 GMT casimira said:

Dec 30, 2011 21:44:22 GMT Don Cuevas said:

We've had poke sallet while living in the Arkansas Ozarks. It was boiled long enough to remove all the flavor as well as the toxins. I recall it was slimy.

I'm curious as to whether or not you read the two pieces posted or are merely resorting to the same old stereotypes about Southern cuisine.

Casimira, I had barely skimmed the articles but we really did live in the Arkansas Ozarks from 1979 to 1995. We really did try slimy, tasteless poke sallet. I'll grant that perhaps some other cook may have made it better, but we didn't have that.

[bixaorellana]

I know that traditional methods for making dandelion greens involve boiling, then throwing out the water and boiling again. I imagine that might have been applied to the poke salad you were "treated" to.

Actually, I always wanted to try poke raw. Supposedly the new leaves, before flowers form, make a nice salad green. But I never trusted myself to know the safe time to pick it.

Another peculiar but traditional thing to do to greens such as turnip is to put sugar in them.
I didn't know about this, thank god, until I was grown. A lady who worked for my grandmother cooked them with sugar. I thought it was a mistake, but my grandmother said some people did them that way.

[Deleted]

I have only had dandelion as salad. I can't imagine cooking it.

[bixaorellana]

I'm pretty sure the use of it as a cooked vegetable was brought over from the old world. (along with dandelion wine!) People must have been grateful for any fresh vegetable after the winter but before crops starting coming in. I've also heard that dandelions-as-food made a comeback in the US during the Great Depression.

[Deleted]

Of course, for a salad you only collect the young and small leaves. If you tried to eat big old leaves, you would probably be rolling around on the ground spitting your guts out.

It is true that in the old world, it was necessary to boil just about any green leaf that was edible -- from nettles to turnip leaves; even now, when I look at rhubarb plants, for example, I wonder "who could have possible decided to try to eat that?"

[auntieannie]

must be an English thing, cooking dandelion (and making dandelion wine). I know someone who was telling me he puts them in a pan with bacon bits.

Thankfully, you can find commercially grown dandelion these days, although it is said that their therapeutic value is less than wild crafted dandelion.