And speaking of frying, where would we be without the most basic kitchen essential, the cast iron skillet. It’s the most versatile of cooking implements and has been prized for hundreds of years by settlers, Native Americans and cooks all over the South.
This particular one has been in my family for well over 120 years. It was a wedding gift to my great-grandmother in 1888 and was given to me as a wedding gift by a great-aunt in 1989. I use it almost daily and without a doubt is my most prized possession.
It has been wielded by the sure hands of many of my forebears to delicious effect.
And it is treated with the reverence of a delicate piece of china. Woe be to anyone that uses soap on my well seasoned skillet! Oh, a gift or purchase of a new skillet is a good thing to be sure, but the inheritance of a well loved and well used cast iron skillet is to receiving the blessing of all the cooks that have used it before. It carries a magic all of its own. For there is literally nothing that cannot be cooked in a crusty bottomed, well seasoned cast iron skillet.

Our early ancestors valued them as well. The Indians traded for them, the early settlers and farmers used them to cook up the bounty of their land and when that bounty was scarce, when flour and lard were the only things left in the pantry, then the skillet was still the basis of a dinner of biscuits cooked in it. And they were good!

But the best thing a cast iron skillet is good for is to fry something. We’re fried everything we could get our hands out. Lard was a staple just like flour and sugar and it was used prodigiously. The early African slaves brought with them the propensity for frying in oil. But even before that, the early explorers and settlers could season a rather bland meal by frying it in pig or bear grease.. Our heritage of fried foods was forged in the backwoods and in the slave kitchens and it has endured to this day. If you don’t believe me, just take a look at how Colonel Harlan Sanders and his chain of fried chicken restaurants have circled the globe. Fried chicken is now not only enjoyed in the South, but has even reached places like Tokyo thanks to KFC.

But even before frying became the most popular form of cooking both our meat and vegetables, the Native Americans were smoking meat and teaching the settlers how to do it themselves. As early as the 18th century, “receipts” for barbeque included smoking a pig over a slow, smoky fire and basting it with a combination of wine, lemon juice and spices. Tomatoes were a very late arrival on the BBQ scene. Different styles of BBQ have developed over time and as I mentioned earlier can cause a deep rift as to sauces and even the type of meat that is smoked. Depending on the area of the South depends on whether you use a dry rub or a wet marinade, whether you use vinegar or mustard based sauce and even in some areas whether you use pork or beef. But predominantly in the South and particularly in the Carolinas, BBQ is pork! And today it’s not BBQ, if it’s not served with coleslaw and sweet tea. And a BBQ is also not a BBQ if it is not eaten in great quantities with lots of friends and family in attendance.




This brings me to the point, that as Southerners we believe that our food brings us together, whether in happy times or as comfort to the ailing and the recently bereaved. No sooner has word gotten out of a loved ones arrival at the pearly gates than the casserole brigade begins arriving. When my grandmother passed, we had barely gotten back in the house from the hospital when the doorbell rang. In fact, my mother had put her purse down and walked into the bathroom and was yelling at us from there to answer the door. On the porch was an old friend with a rice casserole ready to offer the much needed comfort of Southern sympathy in the form of food. But here’s a secret: this friend was the wife of my grandmother’s doctor, so she had gotten word sooner than most, as she had an inside connection. Still whether it’s within the hour or over the course of several days, the steady parade of visitors bringing their best foods in their best dishes is the balm to the soul of a family in grief.


While my own parents have been gone for many years and I truly do miss them, I have still not forgiven them (we do have long memories in the South) for depriving me, my siblings and family of the kindly bounty of caring friends and neighbors by opting not to have a funeral or visitation. We missed out on the stuffed eggs, pound cakes, potato salad and the many variations of the Campbell’s soup casseroles that arrive to sustain us through the arduous process of saying goodbye to our loved ones.
And honestly nothing brings out the best in Southern cooks than tragedy, sickness, death and new babies.

Minutes after Hurricane Charley had left us in ruins in SW Florida, I was in the kitchen whipping up food for those friends who suddenly had views of the big dipper from their living room sofas. And never underestimate what a Southern cook can whip up from a can of Vienna sausages, soda crackers and a can of cream of mushroom soup. We are nothing if not adaptable and creative. We’ve had to be. We’ve had close to 300 years of hardship, bad crops, wars, pestilence and famine. We’ve had to “make do” for a long time and we’re good at.

In conclusion, while Southern food has sustained us in good and bad times, while it has forged a heritage unlike any other region of the country, it is still looked down on by many that just don’t understand it or us. But we don’t care, because we know that there is NOTHING else like the foods we grew up on, that our mother’s and grandmothers and ancestors cooked and handed down over the generations along with the wonderful stories that go along with them. It ties us to our roots and helps us fondly remember those that have gone on before us. And we are working on trying to educate the rest of the world about our food traditions. We have successfully exported many of them, like BBQ, Coca-Cola and Krispy Kreme donuts. But sadly, grits have not taken on like that triumvirate. I’ve had Coca-cola at the foot of the great pyramid in Egypt and in front of the Taj Mahal, but you cannot get grits in either of those places. So while we have sent Coca-cola, fried chicken and BBQ around the world, let’s hope that our heritage and proclivity for grits and sweet tea will not be far behind in the near future.

myrosiedog

Tomatoes have been another staple of the Southern diet and fried green tomatoes have become almost as much of an institution as grits have.

However, I hate to burst ya’ll’s bubbles, but fried green tomatoes are NOT a Southern dish. The very first recipes that appeared in print for fried green tomatoes appeared in Northern and Midwestern newspapers around 1900. These recipes were attributed to Jewish immigrants and to the Pennsylvania Dutch. The first recipes for fried green tomatoes that appeared in Southern Newspapers didn’t appear until around 1920. Now I know many of you are saying, but we grew up eating these. I did too, but my grandmother was from Midwestern stock and was of Pennsylvania Dutch descent so that might explain why my family ate them so often. Too be sure that book and movie by Fannie Flagg in the 90’s broadened the popularity of those wonderfully tangy, green, battered slices and nowadays you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a restaurant, humble or upscale that doesn’t serve some form of them, but they are not an original Southern dish. Now that’s not to say that we didn’t enjoy them, because obviously we have adopted them as our own, but until the Great depression, fried green tomatoes were not as commonly known here as they were elsewhere. Tomatoes in their ripe form have graced the Southern table from way back, but were often just served sliced or stewed and with the rise of sliced bread, as a wonderful taste of summer in a tomato sandwich (made with Duke’s mayonnaise or course). The green tomato, though, has certainly received its share of fame and I like nothing better than a good fried green tomato (and who can resist anything battered and fried in bacon grease particularly if you were born south of the Mason Dixon line). But its humble beginnings were formed outside the South and like many foods we eat today were imported and again we claimed them as our own after a while.
But rest assured we can take credit for such Southern delicacies as fried macaroni and cheese, fried Twinkies and snickers bars and the more recent and strangely intriguing fried Coca-Cola.

myrosiedog

Turner Catledge wrote in 1982 that

“grits is the first truly American food. On a day in 1607 when sea-weary members of the London Company came ashore at Jamestown, Va., they were greeted by a band of friendly Indians offering bowls of a steaming hot substance consisting of softened maize seasoned with salt and some kind of animal fat.
The welcomers called it ‘rockahiminie”. The settlers liked it so much they adopted it as part of their own diet. They anglicized the name to hominy and set about devising a milling process by which the large corn grains could be ground into smaller particles without losing any nutrients”.

So for over 400 years, grits have been the essential Southern symbol of our culture, customs and humor. They are an institution in the South which we tried hard to export in 1976 when Jimmy Carter became president, but unfortunately, they were only a passing fad in other parts of the country until Italian polenta came along. Polenta has become a favorite in Restaurants here and up north, but don’t go asking for grits up there, because they will be quick to tell you they don’t serve ‘em.

myrosiedog

The food of the upcountry started with the Native Americans.
Their diets consisted of quantities of fish and game and the “three sisters”: beans, squash and corn. When the first European settlers started moving in, the Native Americans shared their abundance with them and also introduced them to foods that helped them make it through until they got their farms built and their gardens planted. One of the earliest recipes I found was for a dish called cooter in the shell that has originated with the Cherokee in this area and was passed along to settlers here. A cooter as many of you know is a turtle and the Native Americans prized it for its rich and nourishing meat and the fact that the shell itself could also serve as a cooking vessel. The Cherokee also prized wild onions or ramps and thought them to not only be nourishing and flavorful, but to also cleanse and thin the blood after a cold winter. Soon the settlers were raising pigs, hunting fresh game and catching trout and catfish in the many streams and rivers. Jack Winthrop, a fellow docent here at the museum shared a family recipe that has been handed down for many generations for rabbit stew. It starts off with: “first catch a rabbit. Then skin it and take it down to the creek to wash it”.
Wild game was a very important part of both the Native American and the settlers diet.
Often young boys were tasked with the hunting of game like rabbits, squirrel and deer while their father’s worked the land for planting of crops or building up the farm and it’s outbuildings, including smokehouses, springhouses for keeping items cool, and cribs for storing corn.

The planting of gardens often began before the cabin was built as a necessary way of providing food for the family. These gardens consisted of the three sisters, but corn became a staple item to both man and livestock. Corn grows fairly quickly, doesn’t require as much land as wheat for yield and is not as susceptible to the diseases that wheat is. Corn also didn’t require as much processing as wheat did to become edible. Actually it required none as it could be picked and eaten almost immediately. Gradually as more settlers came in and trade was becoming easier with the coast, particularly Charleston, more types of seed and food became available.

However, game and pork were the source of almost all meat consumed in the rural upcountry. Game was plentiful and so was pork. Cows were expensive to maintain, required a lot of land for grazing and only produce one calf a year. Pigs on the other hand were not only wild by this time (thanks to the Spanish in the 16th century), but could easily be domesticated, didn’t require much land to keep them on and could be let out to forage in the woods and rounded up once a year to be fattened up on corn and they produced large litters of piglets each year that could be traded or sold.

Due to the natural predators that lived here (wolves, panthers, wildcats, etc.), chickens were not considered worth the expense, so eggs were scarce. Only when the population of predators was depleted through hunting, were chickens brought in to supplement the diets of the population.

But getting back to pigs or hawgs. The pigs of our ancestors were almost a different breed than the pork we now eat today. The early pigs were of course wild because the Spanish had brought them over and many had escaped to breed in the woods. But settlers also brought domesticated pigs with them when they made the upcountry their home.
Up until the 1960’s the pig was an animal that was probably smaller in statue than the ones that we raise today. The animal itself was prone to be fatty and the flavor was much stronger. These pigs were actually called lard pigs. The 1960’s saw the beginnings of more health consciousness among the general population and more and more people were turning to chicken. The pig farmers began to breed their livestock to be leaner with less fat and produce an animal that could grow quickly and produce more meat, but the flavor suffered as did the moisture in the meat. It tasted more like chicken (and was almost as dry as breast meat)! Hence the advertising campaign “Pork the OTHER white meat”. Today wild hogs probably taste more like the animals our ancestors raised than the pork we buy today packaged neatly in plastic wrap at Bi-Lo.

Hog killing time was usually a jubilant time for a farmer and his family. It happened on the first truly cold day of the fall when the meat wouldn’t spoil and those first few days of hog killing meant the family would gorge themselves on meat that had probably become scarce since the last fall. The brains and liver were eaten first because there was no real means of preserving these. The rest of the pig could be butchered and cured, and hung in the smokehouse to keep. This meat sustained the farmer and his family throughout the winter when game can be scarce and the garden has stopped producing. Most farmers in the upcountry and throughout the South were scraping to get by. They were land rich, but cash poor or they were sharecroppers with no land and little money after settling up their crops with the landlord for the season.. That meant having enough pork put up could be the difference between a hungry winter and one that saw them through with bacon, hams, fatback and side meat. Rick Bagwell, Upcountry native and one of our docents here in the museum told me that his grandparents ate everything on the pig but the squeal and they didn’t eat that because they couldn’t catch it. Only the very affluent ate “high off the hog” meaning they ate the hams and shoulders and left the parts to their slaves and later servants and tenant farmers.

Everyone even the children helped at a hog killing. The men would kill the pig and a big pot was put under the carcass that hand been strung up in a tree. The blood was collected by the women and later turned into blood sausage that could be cured along with the hams and bacon. The hog was then skinned and butchered by the men and the women dropped the skin in a kettle that had been set to boil. Once boiled, the children were given the task of scrapping the hair off. The fat was rendered for lard and the skin was then fried and is what we now know and love as, well, fried pork rinds. Cracklins were skinned out of the large kettle and were used for addition to cornbread. As I mentioned, the brains and liver were likely cooked that day and the chitterlings or “chitlins’” were boiled and reboiled and boiled some more to make them palatable. These intestines could also be used for sausage casings, but still are today prized as “good eatin’” on their own
Hog killing time was a very labor intensive process that could take up to several days depending on the number of hogs butchered. But even if it was only one pig, it was still an all day process.

Rice and seafood were scarce in the upcountry due to the amount of time it took to bring these items from the coast. Seafood would naturally spoil as there was no refrigeration process. However, the diet of the upcountry settler soon expanded with the influx of slaves into this country. The Africans brought peas, peanuts, okra, watermelons and sweet potatoes and soon these non-native foods began to be featured in the recipes or “receipts” as they were called then of the inhabitants of the South.

Greens, particularly turnips and collards, were also prized as they were more impervious to the cold than other vegetables and could be planted and harvested much later in the fall and early winter. They provided a valuable source of nutrients in a diet that was often lacking in iron and other vitamins.

Corn, the great sustainer, was first grown by the Native Americans, but soon came to be a staple in the settler’s diet. As I mentioned earlier, it was fairly easy to grow, had a fairly short growing season and could be eaten by human and animal alike. Richard Pearis, established the first grist mill in 1768 along the Reedy River in what is now Greenville to grind corn.
This ground corn was made into meal and many recipes for cornbread, corn pone, hoecakes and corn dodgers followed. Corn kernels could be soaked in lye, the hull removed and the result was something called big hominy. The hominy was also dried and ground into what we all know now as grits or hominy grits. One Southerner told me that grits were something you went to buy at the store, but once cooked they were called hominy grits or just plain hominy.

I have had many people from outside the South tell me that they just cannot get over our fascination with grits and why would we eat such a thing. What I find absolutely hilarious is that these same people that wouldn’t be caught dead eating grits will eat polenta. Polenta is basically Italian grits. It’s the same thing and it’s cooked similarly and it is served with tomato sauce poured over it. You know, Italian gravy. We’ve been eating grits with gravy from almost our first footfall in the new world.

myrosiedog

While any of the larger cities, especially the ports like Charleston, Savannah and New Orleans often had abundance not just in quantity, but in variety, the “rural” South made do with a few staples supplemented with the fruits of the kitchen garden and what game was readily available.

Foods that started out as a means of filling up an empty belly have developed over time into Southern tradition and culture. Biscuits, cornmeal, grits, greens and the almighty pig that once were essential to the survival of the inhabitants of this region have entered our very heritage that set us apart from the rest of the country both culinary and healthwise. But while we may not have started out eating healthy, we are catching up! We no longer HAVE to fry everything ad have discovered more nutritious ways of eating our favorite Southern dishes while still retaining our rich food history.

But as recently as 50 years ago and going back to over 300 years ago, the population wasn’t as concerned with the caloric content and cholesterol levels of some fried side meat accompanied by a mess of greens cooked with ham hocks or jowls. The men and women that populated most of the South and especially the SC Upcountry worked hard and needed hearty food that would sustain them in the fields, farms and mills.

Ben Robertson writes in his classic upcountry tale “Red Hills and Cotton”:

“We had quantities of food on our table; no matter how hard times were, we always had more than we needed to eat, and even when cotton was down to five cents, there was an air of happiness about our boards.

At breakfast, we had a big bowl of water-ground hominy grits that had simmered for an hour over a slow fire…..we had red gravy in bowls and wide platters filled with thick slices of ham, smoked, cured and fried, and we had fried eggs right from the nests, we had pitcherfuls of rich milk that had been chilled overnight in the spring branch and we had blackberry jam for the hot biscuits, and preserves made from the little clingstone peaches that grew wild on the terraces.

At twelve o’clock, the bell rang in the back yard and we all sat down to dinner. At my grandfather’s house at noontime we had soup and two or three kinds of meat, fried chicken, fried ham, or spareribs or liver pudding; and we had four or five vegetables and a desert or so and fruit.”




However, this type of abundant eating was not always the case. Often many farmers and the very, very poor ate what they had and often it wasn’t much. Only much later was the abundance of food on the table enjoyed by all.
Books such as Cotton in Augusta, by Shirley Proctor Twiss and diaries of the time describe a breakfast consisting of a pone of cornbread or some biscuits if they could get flour, and whatever pork might have been available, but more often than not, the cornbread or biscuits were served with whatever was on hand and in the summer it was probably blackberries that grew wild.

Dinner (which is lunch here) was usually equally abundant as Mr. Robertson described. The early settlers, the farmers, and later the mill workers, worked hard and needed a good quantity of food to sustain their labors throughout the day. Supper consisted of what was leftover from dinner and eaten cold. Or it could be another pan of biscuits or cake of cornbread served with either sweet milk or buttermilk.

myrosiedog