How to Eat Like a Southerner, Part II
by: Jon Crane

Saturday Ramblins, Vol. 2, No. 17 (August 28, 1999)

In the beginning there was gravy. Back in the days when fat and grease were good for us, Southerners invented gravy. Many Northerners are convinced that in the South, gravy is classified as a beverage. In Tennessee and some parts of Alabama, it is.

We put gravy on everything: rice, potatoes, biscuits, grits. If we can find nothing else, we spoon it over a slice of bread. We even take a piece of beef, bread it like chicken, deep-fry it and pour gravy over that. We call it chicken-fried steak. Of course we serve mashed potatoes with it and pour gravy over them, too.

In the South there are brown gravies, white gravies (sometimes called cream or bulldog gravy), and red gravies, the last being made with tomatoes. Then there's redeye gravy, but that's another story. Any good Southern worth his salt and red cayenne pepper can look at a 100-acre field of rice and calculate to within a half-pint, how much gravy it would take to cover all that rice when it's cooked. I don't know how we do it; it's something we're born with.

Before you can make gravy, you have to fry something. What do we fry as a part of Southern cuisine? On this subject we have strict rules: if it walks, crawls, swims, flies, or grows from the ground, batter it and fry it. Chicken and catfish may come to mind first, but have you ever tried fried okra? Fried summer squash? Fried green tomatoes? We even deep-fry whole turkeys at Thanksgiving.

Before someone (probably a Yankee who liked his food boiled) came along and told us grease and fried foods were not good for us, making gravy from things fried was a practical way to get a little bit around a bunch of folks - sort of the Southern version of the loaves and fishes.

Take a poor Southern family. At breakfast, mama may have had only a few ounces of pork sausage and a couple of cups of milks. How was she to spread this evenly across eight children? The answer was simple: make sausage gravy and pour it over biscuits. The sausage was fried and crumbled, flour was added to the grease. Once it was cooked, milk was added to make white gravy. Everyone got a little bit of milk and meat this way.

Someone (probably the same Yankee who told us fried foods were no good) also introduced the notion of vegetables cooked "al dente." You know what I'm talking about. You take some green beans, put them in boiling water for three and a half seconds and then arrange four of them on a plate a call it a serving. Not for this ol' boy.

Give me a mess of green beans cooked the way my grandmama did them: a big pot of pole beans slow-simmered all day with bacon and little red new potatoes. Those beans will melt in your mouth. I wouldn't lie to you!

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