[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Wallykins asks:
>
> << 1- what are hush puppies and peach cobbler?
>
> Hush puppies are when you take corn meal, buttermilk, eggs, onions, and some
> garlic powder all mixed together, then you drop about a table spoon of the
> mix into a deep hot frier of oil for a few minutes til golden brown. They're
> kind of
> like a little fried ball of corn bread.
To add to that description, they're often served with salty fried fish and
coleslaw. Yummy! Not very healthy maybe, but most of Southern cooking isn't (or
at least the cooking I grew up on; it's changed somewhat; less lard is used).
> 2- do you think that southerners use so much frying because of
> african-american influence? >>
Maybe, I don't know. I always associated it with having so much fat available
from pork because even poor people, which was almost everyone, could keep at
least one pig and feed it scraps from the table. Everything from that pig was
used, including the fat (called lard) that was used to make biscuits and flavor
vegetables, which were always cooked until they were extremely soft.
And then there's bits of solid stuff from clarifying that fat, called cracklin',
that's put into biscuits for flavor. Even the intestines were fried and eaten;
can't remember what that's called now; I could never bring myelf to eat that.
Grits with red-eye gravy, tomatoes with mayonaise, butter beans and black-eyed
peas from the garden, cornbread, biscuits, ham, fried chicken, fried fish, cole
slaw, potato-salad, sweet-potato pie, pecan pie, iced tea... that's home food to
me (Virginia with parents from North Carolina).
Succotash is a vegetable stew with fresh tomatoes, corn kernels, butter beans
and okra. It's colorful and very good (except for that slimey okra).
Debra Shea
NP: PJ Harvey, To Bring You My Love. Mmmm, strong stuff; again I say, wow.
