chicken fried yankee

Ever since we moved to Charleston back in Feb., I’ve been all about taking a Southern roadtrip. There are just so many cool-seeming cities I’ve never been to. Places like Nashville, Austin, Memphis, etc. And, after reading the Best Southern Foods piece in the November issue of Garden & Gun, I have new motivation to fill up the tank and go: This interactive map of things you simply must eat before you die. It’s a Southern roadtrip bible! Side note: the guy who wrote the piece—John T. Edge, author of Fried Chicken: an American Story, and director of the Southern Foodways Alliance—was a judge on Iron Chef last night. He was really great—def deserves his own show.  

Here’s the intro the the piece…

 

Southern food is all about the low and the high. On the one hand, it’s a pig ear sandwich, devoured beneath the glare of an overhead fluorescent at a stand-up counter in Jackson, Mississippi. On the other, it’s a pâté of chicken liver, savored, with a tumbler of bourbon, at a damask-draped table in Charleston, South Carolina. This roster includes both of those dishes. And it maps both extremes. 

For fifteen-odd years now I’ve been documenting the stories told at our collective table, paying homage to our cooks by way of words. Still, the compilation of this list was an exercise in folly, attempted with a 100-count bottle of antacids and a modicum of hubris. I’m sure I’ll be roundly condemned for leaving out the hog’s temple boudin stuffed and steamed by Bubba Frey, proprietor of the Mowata Store, near Eunice, Louisiana. Perhaps I’ll be called a jackass for failing to recognize that the best chess pie in Christendom is baked by the nice ladies at the Whole Truth Lunchroom in Wilson, North Carolina. 

But in the bites that follow, I hope that you recognize the diverse and delicious South I know and love. My idea was not to codify the best Southern eats. My aim was to assemble a sample of the sort of bounty that beckons the curious and the hungry. Upon first bite, each dish announces its peculiar terroir. And commands a second bite. Then a third. 

 

Enjoy.