Southern Cuisine

This category like the neologist could have it own section. Maybe I'll try to figure out how to Archive these sayings by category.

It is hard to decribe Southern Cuisine. But I think you need a lot of frying grease and a homemade garden. I can't tell you how many people (almost everybody) who has a little garden. The top most planted items are tomatoes (commonly referred to as t'maters) followed by figs. I know not everyone's experience is like mine especially on the fig part, but my parents have a fig tree (did have two when I was younger), my grandparents had fig trees, and many other grow figs. I can remember as a kid being cautious around the fig tree because of snakes and bees. If your yard is big enough, you may a combination of any of blueberries, apples, grapes, scuppernongs, muscadines (Oh the delight of wild muscadines), plums, pears, pecans, squash, or okra. I got married to my wife because of advice from an okra patch conversation. If you own a lot of land you may also have a corn field and maybe a pea patch. Picking peas in a pea patch can kill your back, and shucking and silking corn can be quite the workout. But nothing compares to picking pecans on halves. Usually the owner of the pecan field lets you to pick up his pecans and at the end of the day you get half of the amount picked.

But Southern Cuisine is also about cooking. Many people in the South still go to church on Sunday and often the church will have potluck dinners....

By way of explanation, dinner time is the noon meal, while supper is the evening meal. Somewhere down the line, dinner came to mean the evening meal and lunch became the noon meal. Who ever heard of such!

...where people bring their favorite dishes. You'll find fried chicken, chicken 'n dumplins, pineapple casserole, yeast bread or a pone of cornbread, pimmento sandwhiches, banana pudding, watergate salad, and a host of other delicacies. So the next time you are at church in the South at some small little Baptist church (they're the most famous for this activity) in the Wildwood, look in the bulletin for a dinner on the grounds. You'll be glad you did. Years ago the dinner on the grounds used to be outside. You'd find a roofed area just beside the church building with concrete tables under the roof. The sides were usually open, so if it rained, you probably were going to get wet (Man, I wish I had a picture of this, for y'all who don't have a clue). Nowadays, dinner on the grounds is in the "fellowhip hall" of the church. (A fellowhip hall was usually the old church building beside the newer bigger one, or a building attached to the main sanctuary for the purpose of eating and of course "fellowshiping".)

Thanks to Rachel and Rachel for the cookin' ideas.