Every language consists of parts of speech, such as your nouns, adjectives, and adverbs. In the South, our cuisine has developed into its own language; food is used to comfort, to welcome, to reminisce and to connect people to an often misunderstood region of the country. This language of Southern food consists of parts of speech, just like any other language, yet instead of adverbs, nouns, and verbs, the Southern food lexicon consists of brunches, bar b que, fried goods, sides, cocktails, and desserts. And rather than relying on teachers, grammar book or dictionary to teach the language, we in the South rely on our own mothers and grandmothers, and neighbors who have passed down recipes for decades. Instead of a dictionary, we have our own cookbooks, recipe boxes, scraps of paper, and our own handwriting scribbled beside these age old recipes. And instead of dialects, we have different renditions of our basic parts of speech that depend on where below the Mason Dixon line you reside.
a key component of speech
Our way of life, history, and cultural traditions can all seem be communicated through this Southern culinary language. Even when one I would put it as we cannot understand our the dialect, they we can understand a plate of ______ (everyone has their own iconic dish to insert in this blank)and for a brief moment understand with the culture and people associated with it. No, they may never understand the hows or whys ingrained in the dish, but the flavors and aromas allow them to literally taste a truly unique way of life. It's no wonder that Southern cooking has become such a buzz word in kitchens throughout the country. Therefore, to stray away from plants for a few articles, I've decided to focus on some key parts of speech in our language of Southern Food. We'll start at the beginning of the alphabet with brunch.
my frustrated sous chef
Brunch. Something we from the South are very familiar with. We know the best places to go, the best dishes to serve, and the best cocktails to go along with it. We have more variations of the breakfast casserole than varieties of Camellias. Hosting brunch is simply an understood talent that one must acquire to have any chance of survival within our Southern societies. Hosting is of course This hosting talent is easy when the guest list includes your closest friends and neighbors, but when it involves a guest list from across the country, brunch takes on an entirely different meaning.
Margaret Affleck's Breakfast Casserole
(Dedicated to all of Maggie's variations of breakfast casserole on Christmas Eve after multiple cocktails...)
- 1 lb. breakfast sausage
- 1 (13 oz.) can evaporated milk
- 1 1/2 slices bread, cubed
- 5 eggs
- 2 C. cheddar cheese, grated
- Season to taste
Prepare evening before. Cook sausage and drain thoroughly on paper towels. Beat the 5 eggs and evaporated milk slightly. Add sausage, cubed bread and cheddar cheese. Pour into 9 X 9 in. casserole and cover with plastic wrap. Bake uncovered for 45 minutes or until firm, in a preheated 350 degree oven.
A few weeks ago, some dear friends of the family were hosting this very guest list; a list that ranged from South Carolina to California. They asked the Pegs to help with the flowers for the evening party and to handle the brunch for the following Sunday morning. The idea was to represent the Delta through the flowers and the food. Given our past experiences, the flower part was easy, but the challenge was to communicate our way of life through our native tongue, brunch.
a lighter brunch accent
To speak the language of Southern food for our guests, the absolute right recipes had to be utilized for the brunch. Pegs and I spent hours polling our friends, our cookbooks, and the internet to come up with options. We settled upon a quintessential choice in the brunch vocabulary of shrimp and grits. We also made a new introduction, a scalloped. These were to be accompanied by an assortment of homemade muffins, mini muffins because petite is chic when it comes to brunch, and fruit skewers, because despite certain prejudices people carry about the South, we want you to know that we can do "the healthy" too.
Scalloped Pineapple:
- 4 cups fresh bread, cubed
- 1 20 oz. can pineapple chunks, drained
- 2 cups sugar
- 3 eggs, beaten
- 1 cup butter, melted
Toss together bread and pineapple. Place in greased baking dish. Combine remaining ingredients over pineapple. Bake at 350 for 30 minutes. Casserole can be made up and refrigerated overnight before baking. Reheats well.
Now, obviously if I'm writing an article completely on brunch, I have given it more thought than it probably deserves, but the shrimp and grits discussion became a discourse between my entire family; my Dad, complaining that you ruin perfectly good grits with shrimp and the other "stuff:" that goes in there, my Mom, worrying that a group from across the country would only eat the shrimp, and me, theorizing on the entire concept while trying to keep the 8 cups of grits from sticking. Throughout this discourse, the idea was also brought up, that shrimp and grits has become almost a status symbol in the South. It is what you serve when trying to impress someone, which in this case we were. But like so many other quintessentially Southern foods, shrimp & grits represents the more humble history of our cuisine. I mean our humble beginnings cannot descend past grinding up corn, mixing it with water and eating it. Only when we added shrimp and white sauce did it begin to climb the ranks into a cosmopolitan, must have Southern dish.
Shrimp & Grits
Serves 4 (multiply according to your guest list)
Grits:
- 14 oz. chicken broth
- 3/4 cup half and half
- 3/4 tsp. of salt
- 2 cups of water
- 1 cup grits
- 2 T. butter
- 3/4 cup white cheddar
- 1/4 cup Parmesan
- 31 t. cayenne pepper
- 1 t. paprika
- Tabasco
- Salt/Pepper
Bring first four ingredients to a boil in medium saucepan; whisk in grits gradually. Reduce heat and simmer, stirring occasionally, 10 minutes or until thickened. Add remaining ingredients and keep warm.
White Sauce:
- 2 tablespoons butter
- 2 tablespoons flour
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1 cup milk or 1/2 cup evaporated milk and 1/2 cup water
Melt butter in a sauce pan and whisk in flour and salt until smooth. Gradually stir in cold milk, cooking over direct heat and stirring constantly until sauce boils; reduce heat slightly and continue to stir until sauce becomes smooth and thick. When sauce thickens, simmer for an additional 10 minutes over very low heat, stirring occasionally. Stir carefully to avoid lumps. If sauce becomes lumpy, use a stick blender or rotary beater to blend out lumps or else press through a sieve.
Shrimp:
- 3 slices bacon
- 1 ound shrimp, pealed and deveined
- 1/4 tsp black pepper
- 1/8 tsp. salt
- 1/4 cup all purpose flour
- 1 c. sliced mushroom
- 1/2 c. chopped green onions
- 2 cloves garlic, minced
- 1/2 cup chicken broth
- 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
Sprinkle shrimp with pepper and salt; dredge in flour. Saute mushrooms in hot bacon drippings 5 minutes. Add green onions and saute 2 minutes. Add shrimp and garlic for 2 more minutes, until shrimp are lightly brown. Stir in broth, lemon juice, and hot sauce3 and cook 2 more minutes, stirring to loosen particles from bottom of skillet.
Personally, shrimp and grits is more like the great mediator between Southern cuisine and all the others. It gives us a chance to convince people to sample the most southern side of all, grits, by adding a recognizable protein to it...shrimp and in some cases (our case for sure) bacon. The shrimp is key because unlike beef or chicken that can come from who knows where, a pound of Gulf Coast shrimp ties the dish tighter to our region. Were we to just have a dish of hot grits, I am most certain it would have been bypassed by the out of towners. Instead, we provided a taste of both history, tradition, and regionality in a relate able manner for our interstate guests and they ate it up...Grits from a 300 year old mill (Sciples in Dekalb, MS), which one guest asked if the same person had been operating the mill for that long...and shrimp from our Gulf Coast, combined in a recipe that has been passed down and around for decades. And for a brief moment in time, we were all speaking in the exact same language and the exact same dialect.
So whether you're fully fluent in the Southern Food language or simply starting to translate, jump start your education with an early spring brunch and begin to utilize some of our most favorite parts of speech.
Bloody Mary:
Zing Zang's Blood Mary Mix
Vodka (proportion of mix to vodka is up to you)
Pickled Okra garnish (don't even try celery, it will only just get left on your side tables and stain your linens)
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