The home of "plain cooking", New England, is where I grew up. Where corn on the cob is served as is with just a slab of butter and a dash of salt or pepper. We boil salted meats with vegetables and call it just that- a boiled dinner. Our clam chowder is white, our baked beans boast bacon and molasses, and no one in the world has ever invented a food that was improved by adding curry. By the time I was eighteen I could boil a lobster, steam clams and grill a pork chop to perfection. It wasn't until I moved to Virginia and acquired a roommate from North Carolina that I discovered an entirely new world of down home, country cooking goodness.
Being an all American, Italian girl from Boston meant that restaurant menus might have well as been written in a foreign language. Items such as chicken-fried steak, grits, corn pone pudding, strawberry rhubarb pie and sweet potato pie were all things I could have never imagined even existed! Where did these things come from and who could possibly want to eat them? Where I came from, chicken and steak were two different meats, grits came from sandpaper, corn was a vegetable, and why would anyone put crust around a sweet potato? However, once I tasted my roommates baking powder biscuits topped with sausage gravy, I was hooked on Southern cooking. From that day forward, Sue became my mentor. I stood at her side as she diced scallions to make up a mess of pinto beans, stirred the milk into a pan of drippings for milk gravy and rolled thin steak strips in chicken batter to make chicken-fried steak. I never grew tired of watching her concoct her ingestible Southern masterpieces.
At the most basic of levels, down home Southern cooking is no different than New England plain cooking. Like any regional style of cooking, it makes use of local ingredients that are cheap and plentiful. In New England we dress up our dried beans with brown sugar and molasses and serve them with thick, sweet heavy brown bread graced by raisins, which is a perfect meal for a cold winter night. In North Carolina, salt pork and onions are simmered for hours and then served with scallions for scooping and a side of flaky, hot biscuits cut out of dough with a juice glass. Just thinking about this salty, spicy, flaky, scrumptious down home meal makes my mouth water.
No matter how hard we tried, some dishes just wouldn't translate. For example, there is no substitute for a Southern barbecue sandwich. Shredded pork simmered in spices for hours and heaped over buns in a "sandwich" that you need a fork to eat. The tried equivalent, the "sloppy joe", just doesn't cut it; there isn't that spicy-sweet tang that comes with the barbecue. If you've had chicken-fried steak, you know how good it is and realize that nothing could replace this yummy dish.
Lasagna will always be one of my favorites, and New England boiled dinners still make my mouth water, so no matter where I go, my New England, Italian roots always seem to show. Secretly, of course, I pray that when I go to Heaven they will be serving flaky Southern biscuits, sausage gravy and chicken-fried steak. Southern cooking is a temptation that even the angels can't resist.