Paula Deen's Southern Cooking Bible: The New Classic Guide to Delicious Dishes With More Than 300 Recipes by Paula Deen & Melissa Clark

Author:Paula Deen & Melissa Clark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Cooking, Regional & Ethnic, American, Southern States, Courses & Dishes, Desserts, Reference, Individual Chefs & Restaurants
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2011-10-11T05:28:20+00:00

Southern food takes some bad hits, y’all: people say it’s not very healthy. Well, I happen to know a lot of old Southerners who have lived long, long lives eating the Southern staples down here. And since I’ve had the opportunity to travel around the United States, I have deduced that there’s something to this: The South eats more vegetables than any other region I’ve been in. We eat more cucumbers, tomatoes, butter beans, black-eyed peas, fresh corn, and okra, not to mention our pickles, and our collards, turnip greens, and mustard greens.

Southerners don’t just buy vegetables at the store, we also grow our own, so we know the glory of freshly harvested corn and peas from the garden. When I was a girl, my Aunt Peggy and Uncle George would let me plant a bit of their garden. I grew okra, peas, and tomatoes. Grandmama Paul and I would go out there and harvest, and make all kinds of pickles. Gardening brought my grandmama so much pleasure. Even after she could hardly walk, she would put down a piece of cardboard, get on her hands and knees, and scoot along her rows, then get back up holding on to her walker.

While I don’t have much land (or time) for it, I do garden year-round. In cold weather I grow broccoli, cauliflower, lettuces, mustard greens, and collards. I mix together all my cooking greens in one big pot, simmer them down till they’re tender and silky, then add some butter at the end, and they are so stinkin’ outrageous. People rave over those greens. In the spring we plant our cucumbers, tomatoes, and all the herbs that I love. To just have an opportunity to have a few things from my own garden is a reward that I look forward to. Making Fried Green Tomatoes (page 254), Fried Cabbage (page 266), Sautéed Summer Squash (page 263), and Southern-Style Green Beans with Bacon and Tomato (page 262) from my very own garden allows me to stay in touch with where I came from.

In addition to the bounty of the garden, grits are one of the biggest Southern staples. That’s because corn was one of those crops that we could count on down here, and grits are nothing but ground-up dried hominy corn. I swear, we have found a way to eat it four times a day—at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and in a pie for dessert. I remember Mama would pour any leftover grits into a glass and put it in the refrigerator, and the next day she’d take her knife, run it around her glass so this cylinder came out, and slice that up to fry into grits cakes. I do my grits plain, or I do Cheese Grits (page 234) or even Cheesy Tomato Grits (page 235). Grits are very inexpensive, so they’re a great way to fill up a hungry family for almost no money. But you can’t convince me that they’re not worth a million dollars.

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