I grew up in New England, which is home to ‘open cooking’, where corn cobs are served as a slab of butter sprinkled with salt and pepper. We boil salted meat with vegetables and call it - well, a boiled dinner. Our clam chowder is white, our baked beans have bacon and molasses in them, and no one in the world has ever invented a diet developed with curry sauce. By the time I was eighteen, I was able to boil lobsters, steam clams and grease pork chops to perfection. Then I moved to Virginia, picked up my roommate in North Carolina - and discovered a whole new world of good cooking in my home country.
For an All-American Italian girl from Boston, the menus at the restaurants were foreign. Fried chicken, grits, corn pone pudding, strawberry rhubarb pie - sweet potato pie ?? In my mind, chicken and beef were two different meats, grits are what’s on paper, corn is a vegetable - and what in the world do sweet potatoes do with crumbs? But I was a passionate change in Southern cuisine for the first time my roommate made a pan of delicious biscuits, tasted, melted in your delicious Southern baking powder mouth and filled them with sausage broth. From that day on, I became a student of Sue, standing on her elbow as she dyed scallions to make a mess of pinto beans, stirring the milk in a drip pan to get the milk broth and pieces of meat wrapped in chicken dough to make chicken- fried steak.
Southern home cooking is not the same as New England plain cooking - at least for your basic level. Like any other regional cooking style, we use many and cheap ingredients. In New England we wrap our dried beans with brown sugar and molasses, and serve them with heavy black bread with dried dots - the perfect amount for a cold winter night. In North Carolina, they cook for hours with salted pork and onions and are served with scallions to coat them with a side of clear biscuits cut into dough with a glass of juice. Salty, spicy and spicy - good at the same time, homemade food that makes my mouth fill with water just to remember you.
Some containers do not translate, however. There is no place in New England for a South African grilling sandwich - boiled pork boiled with spices for hours and loaded on ‘switch’ buns that really need a fork. The ubiquitous 'sloppy joe' does not break down. It has no spicy-sweet tang and butter texture of real boiled pork sauce. And nothing compares with fried chicken - a dish that cannot be described in words without selling it briefly. If you have ever had it, YOU KNOW how good it is. If you have not already done so, the idea of lowering and dipping beef and frying it like chicken does not do justice.
My New England Italian roots show everywhere I go. Lasagna will always be a favorite dish, and New England boiled foods still make water in my mouth. But I know, deep down in my soul, that when I go to Heaven, the eater will serve the Southern biscuits scattered with sausage broth and fried chicken. Some trials even the angels cannot resist.
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