In Search of Southern Food

I never thought I’d see the day when the collard green was elevated to the national cuisine consciousness, but there it is getting coverage on all the cooking shows and showing its green, leafy face in the food columns of magazines and newspapers.  This humble green has gone mainstream, which is nice because it is uniquely southern and true southern cuisine deserves its iconic place in history and the cookbook section at Barnes and Noble.  Real southern food, that is.

Southern cuisine is misunderstood, misrepresented and rare.  At its heart, it is fundamentally based upon vegetables that come from the field, like the leafy collard green, berries and fruits that thrive in our humid climate, the Sunday chicken, the butchering of the hog, and, for the southern coastal region, seafood.  It is a cuisine infused with African-American heritage, which was agricultural.  If you really want to trace it back you’ll find that West Africans generally ate little meat and lots of vegetables.  We are the lucky recipients of their black eyed peas, ground-nuts, yams, okra and all their derivatives.    

It’s also supremely important to understand that southern food is quite varied according to region, and that is why when you are in Charleston, South Carolina, you have shrimp and grits virtually any time of day, but when you are in Huntsville, Alabama, well, you might have grits, but only for breakfast and certainly not with shrimp.  In fact, don't have shrimp at all in Huntsville.  Have fried chicken.   

As for here in Atlanta, well, Atlanta is such a large city and a city that sits at such a mammoth transportation hub that southern food gets real diluted.  Absolutely nothing in the northern suburbs of Atlanta, where I live, comes to mind.  Sorry, the one you want to recommend to me?  A forgery!  Uses cans of cream corn, cream of chicken soup and cans of green beans.  Cans, cans, cans.  Trust me, you’re not getting the real thing.  Southern food is inherently fresh and from the field.  This is a crucial, yet forgotten fact and the forgetting of it helps to explain the national roller coaster ride towards diabetes, obesity and heart disease from processed, flavorless food that depends upon fat molecules to enhance what little flavor is actually coming from a canned vegetable or the much over-used ground beef.  

There was one hero, one pioneer, one student of the old school whose fried chicken was so well researched and authentic he only served it once a week.  This was, of course, Scott Peacock, formerly of Watershed in Decatur.  Unfortunately, Mr. Peacock left Watershed in 2010, although I hear that the restaurant is carrying on his emphasis of high southern cooking.

When I worked downtown during the early '80s, I frequently ate at soul food restaurants; soul food being the essence of southern cuisine (although I passed on the chittlins).  I ate at places I can’t remember names for, real holes in the wall.  In fact, it was at Deacon (somebody’s) place that I first had collard greens.  And no, this wasn’t the Deacon somebody’s place where the Rolling Stones ate; it was another Deacon.  It was soul food restaurants that introduced me to the triumvirate 3 – the quintessential 3 items that marry so well with each they just melt in your mouth in yumtastic goodness.  I speak of course, of fried chicken, turnip greens and macaroni and cheese.  OK!  OK!  The mac and cheese is NOT southern, but thank goodness someone discovered how well it compliments the chicken and greens. 

Maybe the places making the real southern food are just obscure.  I remember being at the East Tennessee Farmer’s Market in Knoxville in 1994 and sitting down to eat the “special” – a special that left me forever a changed person.  It was a humble meal, uniquely of east Tennessee origin, of corn bread, pinto beans and slaw.  I’ve been trying to re-create that meal for 17 years now – the cornbread made of white (never yellow) cornmeal, sans sugar, moist beyond belief; the pinto beans, cooked to the perfect texture and in their own gravy; the finely shredded slaw with some mixture of vinegar and mayonnaise (possibly similar to Margaret Lupo’s recipe for one part vinegar to one part mayonnaise). Oh, that was a southern meal – uniquely east Tennessee, humble, simple.

Oh southern food, Oh southern food, wherefore art thou?  Hidden in oral tradition undoubtedly, served up at restaurants that are so obscure you and I will never hear about them, or researched and recreated by the idiosyncratic chef that comes along once every decade or so.  Oh southern food, this is my ode to you as I continue my quest for the real thing.