My roots are from the South and I remember spending whole of my childhood there. The best memory of my childhood is of the long summer when all of us used to drink ice tea, shelling peas and butterbeans basking in the afternoon sun in our grandmother’s porch. I had to move on to a different part of the country and from then on my life changed except for the passion love for southern cooking and cuisine.
It was only during my teens that I understood that tea can be served in different ways other than being served with loads of sugar and ice. Around the same phase I saw that a few of the population ate vegetables that were not soaked in batter, dredged in cornmeal or fried fat deeply. At times I do fell that the southern cooking I have tasted through out my childhood is one of the best I have had till date for no other recipe or cuisine can never replace it.
Did you know that most of the southern population knew the technique to do in little quantities but many a times in a day? The main reason for this is that most of the people living in South America are victims of poverty but even amidst the scarcity they are munificent. It is the same case with food too. Food is one of the items that is in adequate quantity available in the south. The people living in the south have many traditions of which the most popular is to feed the guests a hearty and satisfactory meal.
Probably the magic is all done by the seasonings made use in southern cooking. Be it the crab boil and gumbo file of Cajun Cuisine or the special southern fried chicken recipes, the ingredients are still mystical and are kept a secret from those who do not belong to the South. This is what makes southern cooking special. So, if you get the chance to taste southern dishes then you should immediately grab the opportunity because otherwise you will be missing on something big in your life.
If you have already made up your mind to taste the southern delicacies then let me tell you that you can pamper yourself with the yummiest desserts. A few popular desserts are banana pudding, pralines and bread pudding. If you move slightly towards the east you will be wonderstruck how many great recipes, like the lemon icebox pie and the pecan pie, were secretly preserved amongst the communities or people and were never ever shared to outsiders! However, there are a great many cooking recipes like the appetizing Mississippi Mud cake that that were brought in by the South.
Some of the favorite vegetables of all the people living in the south are peas and butterbeans, snap beans, corn, summer squash and okra. The southern cooking has only a few listed vegetable recipes that were deep fried. It still reminds me of my childhood days where we used to have okra, fried squash and of course, the fried green tomatoes. Well, people in those days werent too health conscious and used to relish what they ate. Even though these cannot be made a part of the regular meals, you can try these dishes out once in a while to treat your family with a different kind of food.
The next best part of southern cooking is the mouth watering fried seafood that was available in plenty. Be it fried fish or fried oysters, seafood had their own magical flavor when cooked in the south. Well then, if you have made up your mind in cooking southern recipes then the first thing you will need to do is to prepare a list of spices you will want and get them shipped if your nearest supermarket does not store them. Try looking for as few southern seasonings on the International food stock in the local grocery shop.