Dixie Dishes

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(ICR BaOADCASS USE OlILY)
Subject: "Dixie Dishes." Approved "by the .bureau, of Home Economics. Information
in part from "American Cookery."
00O00
If any part of our country is fa ous for its cooking, the South is.
•vthArn cooking, dating "back to plantation days, has become a legend of foods
"that melt in your mouth." The very words suggest an epicure's dream to many
people. Eut Southern cooking has had its criticism, too, from those who disap-
prove of hot "bread and rich foods the year around.
As a matter of fact, my friends in different parts of Dixie all tell me

that Southern tables today have much the same food that people in other parts of
country are eating. Eut now and then, of course, some of the traditional
old-South dishes appear.
When you start talking about Southern cooking, you can work up an argument
any time as to just what these traditional dishes are. Your friends from hew
Orleans will mention chicken or ham gumbo and certain sea-food dishes. Virginians
will speak about their fine old hams. Folks from Tennessee will remember their
racked ham and sausage. And those from Florida will speak of the guava jelly and
Key West crayfish that they were raided 'on. Eut after all, these are the
.
special dishes from individual localities. The real Dixie dishes that have been
typical of the South for generations are turnip greens and corn bread, grits and
gravy, the fried chicken and hot biscuits, and sweetpotatoes.
The Hew Englanders swear by their beet greens and the Southerners by their
turnip greens and both are right. Cooked properly, no variety of greens can be
rare delicious than turnip greens. Southern cooks season them with salt pork —
or "fat meat" as they term it. The water in which the pork and greens cook is
the famous "pot likker." Of course, you know what the nutritionists say about pot
liquor. It's one of their prize examples of how we can lose minerals by discarding
the rater in which vegetables are cooked. In plantation days, the colored slaves
soaked up corn bread in the pot liquor and thus often had better teeth than the
white family who ate the greens but had less of the cooking water.
Well,you can usually find a difference of opinion in the South as to

whether pot liquor should be used for "dunking" or not. But most people will
agree that it's of no earthly use without its side partner —
corn bread. lTow
corn tread is of many kinds. You may be most familiar with the squares of egg
°read, cooked in thick sheets and cut while it's hot and crumbly. Or you may
Prefer muffins made of cornmeal and eggs, or those Southern corn-sticks, long and
Q in and crusty.
But the real old-Southern bread is plain corn pone, made without
eggs — just
a cornmeal and water mixture patted into small oval cakes and baked.
-2- 1/25/35
Down in Florida they fry this corn mixture instead of "balling it —

fry it in deep
:at to accompany one of their famous fish fries. And the thin fried pones they
make go by the name of "hush puppies." I can't tell you exactly where or when
that term started. But anyone who has eaten this variety of corn "bread under-
stands how it would hush any puppy's cry of hunger.
Hoecake belongs to the same family as pone corn "bread. Iloecakes are a
little thinner and are fried on a griddle until "brown on one side and then turned
to "brown on the other. Humor says that the early settlers used the flat smooth
blade of the hoe for cooking hoecake.
Another member of the corn bread family is "crackling bread" — corn bread
seasoned with crisp pieces of pork fat from which most of the lard has been
rendered. Today you'll hear this bread referred to as " short 'nin' bread." It is
simply corn pone with a shortening of cracklings.
Hot "raised" biscuits are favorites on most Southern tables. So are soda
biscuits —a so da- and- sour-mi Ik version of the Northern baking powder biscuit.
And there are the beaten biscuits — beaten with a wooden mallet until blisters
form on the dough.
For breakfast in the South, batter or griddle cakes are popular. They're
niade of flour or meal and eaten drenched in sirup —
corn, cane or sorghum
classes. But the acme of hot breads is the crisp waffle which, custom says, goes
with bacon and eggs and sirup for breakfast, or with sausage or chicken for supper.
Visitors from the Horth or "Jest are often mystified by reference to "young
fryers." But once you have some real Southern fried chicken, you'll understand
hov necessary a young fryer is to that delicious and tender dish which the South
serves so frequently during the spring and summer. Southern cooks carefully dis-
member each piece of chicken, roll it in flour or in an egg- and- f lour batter, and
then fry it in a heavy iron skillet until it comer, out a golden brown with no
urease on its crisp surface. And tradition sa^ s a bowl of gravy goes along with
a platter of fried chicken.
Some people want "cream gravy" with their chicken. Others want plain flour-
-water gravy. "Cream gravy" is made with milk, of course. The less hearty gravy
is just flour and water, mixed with the brown leavings of the chicken in the
skillet.
At this time of year when older chickens are to be cooked that famous
chicken stew known as fricassee fits the menu..
Hb discussion of Southern food is complete without mention of the sweet-

potato. Cooked in many ways, this golden vegetable serves both as a vegetable and
a s\7eet. You can have yellow yams baked and served butter. Or you can candy
with
/cur sweetpotato with brown sugar and perhaps add spice. Or you can maize sweet-
potato pie which anyone south of the Mason-Dixon line will tell you is superior
to any pumpkin
pie ever made.
-3- 1/25/35
Finally, let's not forget hominy. You may have the lye hominy or "Dig
hominy" made"by soaking the whole grains of corn in a lye solution to remove the
tough outer skin. Or you may have pearl hominy with the grains cracked in two
or three pieces, or the small hominy. C-rits is the popular name for rather
finely ground corn, cooked in the same manner as rice and eaten with "butter or
y, or as a "breakfast or supper dish, with cream and sugar.
Dixie dishes? Well, those that have stood the test of time and "become
ridely popular are mostly the very simple ones that would fit the menu of almost
iny American home: turnip greens and corn "bread; hominy grits or rice and gravy
Tied chicken or fricassee; ham; and sveetpotatoes.
You don't have to live in the South to have a traditional Southern meal,
'or this coming Sunday, say, here's the way you might work out a menu, no matter
,f you live way up in the land of ice and snow. Chicken fricassee; Boiled rice;
rreens seasoned with "bits of salt 98? "bacon; Watermelon rind pickle; Crisp corn
iticks; and for dessert, Sweetpotato pie.

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Historic, archived document

As a matter of fact, my friends in different parts of Dixie all tell me

Well,you can usually find a difference of opinion in the South as to

Down in Florida they fry this corn mixture instead of "balling it —

Hb discussion of Southern food is complete without mention of the sweet-

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