It is impossible, in one blog, to even attempt to address the things that make the South a unique place. Note: You may see a food pattern forming below, but that’s okay. If you see a skinny Southerner, that just means they have a seriously blue collar job and are working off the calories faster than a one-legged man in an butt-kicking contest. Anyway, here we go.
What makes us Southern:
* Accents: This has to be the most recognizable thing about the South. From “Y’all” to “Yonder”, Southerners talk like they have all day and a good shade to finish a sentence. Our accents are the most obvious thing that happens in the South because we hide them in our mouths so poorly. The hardest thing for a Southerner to do is shut up. Also, there are times when we exaggerate our Southern dialect just to piss off people who think we’re stupid because we drag out our words. So here’s a little advice to those who assume stupidity follows such an accent: Don’t. You just might be surprised when Bubba and Bubbette aren’t as dumb as their bending words make them sound to your unbending ears.
* Catfish: Whether you’re jugging for channel cat or noodling the big honkers behind a dam, no fish says South like catfish. Even the catfish’s face has a whiskered Colonel Sanders-ish grin that will work a trotline like an all-night truck stop. We used to hit my Uncle Carlor’s catfish pond, snag a few cats, yank them nekked with some pliers, batter them up with buttermilk, Texas Pete and Martha White and eat like Paul Bryant visiting Shug Jordan for Sunday dinner.
* Football: It has become a cliche to say that football is a religion in the South. Here’s how you tell how much football means: On a Friday night down here, call your Southern friends’ home number. They won’t answer. Then call their cell and listen to them cuss you for interrupting them in the stands of the Varina Blue Devils or the Andalusia Bulldogs or the Opp Bobcats game. Want more proof? Do the math on the largest stadiums in America and see if Tennessee’s Neyland, Alabama’s Bryant-Denny, LSU’s Tiger and Auburn’s Jordan-Hare are in there. They won’t be the only ones in the South by a hundred yards.
* NASCAR: “One, two, Earnhardt, four…” That’s how a lot of Southern kids learned to count. The ugly duckling of stock car dirt tracks across the South has sprouted into an 800 hp supermodel. If we combined NASCAR and college football in the South, good lord, we could sell enough beer and barbecue to fill Harvard’s endowment.
* Sweet Potatoes: A serious Southerner can turn a sweet potato into at least 42,000 different kinds of recipes in a few minutes. I have a cousin who swears he can power his 4×4 with the methane produced after eating a mess of sweet potatoes (I don’t want to see that contraption but he allowed that it involves a plastic tube, a match and not much else). From sweet potatoes that act like baked potatoes to sweet potato pie (shut muh mouth), this orange gourd of the gods is handier than a Leatherman tool at a lock-picking convention.
Southern Baptists: If you are really Southern, you know the smell of a Southern Baptist church: It’s the hymnals. They must have some kind of odoriferous Southern DNA imprinted in them because when we go into almost any Southern Baptist church, that smell is there. If you were in church on Sunday, you know what we mean. If you weren’t, you better repent before you read about barbecue below, because clogged arteries can lead to hellfire if you’re not careful.
* Barbecue: God Himself invented barbecue when He told Abraham to lay Issac on the grill (later saying He was just kidding). If you go back to the original Greek in the New Testament, Jesus and his disciples had barbecue at the last supper. No joke. I’m serious as a double bypass. Barbecue, no matter how it is spelled (and it has at least 49,984 ways to spell it) is the penultimate Southern food. Man cannot live by bread alone, but he can live just fine with nothing but spareribs.
When pork meets smoke, it equates heaven between your molars. Every Southern town worth stopping in has a good barbecue joint. The way you can tell a good veinplugger is simple: Their sign must have a picture of at least one dancing pig on it, preferably in neon, or, if not, painted so badly that it appears that a drunken, mutant troll slathered it on some plywood in the heat of a romantic frenzy. Now this is not a hard and fast rule, just a general observation. Basically, the uglier the building, the better the ‘cue.
* Pork: This fits under BBQ but is bigger than just that category. Back before we all started drawling, a Southerner somewhere in Georgia crossed a nasty feral dog with an alligator and the pig was born. Hogs may smell like the skid marks in Satan’s dirty drawers, but somehow they taste like God’s gift to humans. Sausage, pork chops, pork roast, barbecue, bacon, ham (which could be its own Southern category), ham hocks, pig’s feet, pig tails, ears, knuckles, souse, pork rinds, chitterlings – I have eaten everything but the squeal and so have you if you claim Southernness. That is called contradiction. And if Southerners have a true religion, contradiction is it.
* Music: Come on, do we really have to even put this on the list? Jazz was invented in the South. Blues were invented in the South, country music, bluegrass, rock and roll and gospel were all conjured up by bored Southerners who couldn’t read a lick of sheet music. There’s something mighty supernatural about that.
* Cheerleading: Down here, women will kill you over this. They don’t even need a sport to cheer for; cheering itself is the sport. And if you mistakenly get between a cheerleading mom and a 3-foot-tall gold-colored plastic trophy, you’d better be right with the Good Lord because that woman will fillet you like a brim.
* Greens: If you have never had a mess of greens (I am using the correct English here for mess o’ greens) then you need to adjust your colon for a seriously fartacious culinary experience. Just cooking collards will make your house smell like six feet up a defensive lineman’s butt. Yet, oddly, it’s worth it. Soul food started in a truck patch in a million places down here and spread out all over God’s nasty playground. If you eat enough turnips, collards and mustard greens you can compete with my cousin’s methane invention.
* Community Coffee: Get a cup of this coffee with chickory and you will know why it’s on our list.
* MoonPies: Big River has a history with this venerable Southern icon of a product. We did the first-ever TV commericals for MoonPies. But that’s hardly why it’s on our list. We put the tasty orb here because there is no other snack combo that says The South like a MoonPie and an RC Cola. They are encoded into our genetic makeup. If you have never made a pilgrimage to the MoonPie plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., you should.
* Krystal Hamburgers: Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant ate here almost every day. The little bitty burgers are part of our Southern fabric, and if you want to prove your Southernization, eat a whole bag.
* Krispy Kreme Donuts: If that “Hot” neon light is on, get two dozen because the first dozen will be gone before you can back your car out of the parking lot.
* Lookout Mountain: From the ubiquitous old barn-top signs that read “See Rock City” to the mountain that became one of the South’s first tourist attractions, this hump of Southern earth still pulls in the sightseers after all these years. It’s worth a drive if you’ve never done it. If you claim to be Southern and have never seen “seven states” from the ledge, you better look down in your britches and examine your Southern roots, because your passport may be about to expire.
* Blue Bell Ice Cream: Right after God invented barbecue, He invented this to chase it with. If you move down here from up North (we capitalized that word to show our respect), go ahead and buy some bigger drawers.
* 18-Wheelers: How many Southerners make their living driving one of these? The Peterbilt built Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh, Dallas and Jacksonville singlehandedly. Follow the smell of grease and diesel and you will find the engine of the Southern economy.
* Deep Fryer: We shouldn’t even have to mention this tool that turned the South into the “Stroke Belt” and made funeral directors a respected (and well-utilized) part of the community. Rumor has it that Ulysses Grant invented this contraption to kill off his Rebel enemies. And if that’s true, he was better than Sherman’s pyromaniacs. No other single device has claimed more Southern lives than this boiling oil-filled chariot of death.
There can be a lot more and we will get to them eventually. But for now, this will make you at least Southern enough to get through the Atlanta airport on a Friday afternoon.
Tags: , Coffee, Food, Football, NASCAR, Religion, South, Sports