Regional Food Down-home Southern Cooking

As is with a drop of salt and pepper and a slab of butter where corn on-the cob is supported, I spent my youth in New England, the home of ordinary cooking. We boil salted meats with veggies and call it well, a boiled dinner. Our clam chowder is white, our baked beans have bread and molasses inside them, and no-one in the world has ever invented a food which was enhanced by the addition of curry. From the time I was eighteen, I can boil a lobster, steam clams and grill a pork chop to perfection. Then I moved to Virginia, found a roommate from Vermont and discovered a whole new world of down home country cooking goodness. <br /><br />To an All-American Italian girl from Boston, the menus in restaurants were in a language. Chicken-fried steak, grits, corn pone pudding, strawberry-rhubarb pie special potato pie?? In my mind, chicken and meat were two different meats, grits is whats o-n sandpaper, corn is a vegetable and what in the entire world is sweet potato performing in a crust? But I became a fervent change to Southern cooking the very first time my roommate composed a pan of the best, tastiest, most properly melt-in-your-mouth delicious Southern baking powder biscuits and topped them with chicken gravy. From that time on, I was Sues disciple, standing at her elbow 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 mixture to make chicken-fried steak. <br /><br />Down home southern cooking is not any different than New England basic cooking at least at its most basic level. We discovered [https://plus.google.com/100711610522916313857/ website] by browsing Bing. Like any other local type of cooking, it employs the what are abundant and cheap. In New England we gussy up our dried beans with brown sugar and molasses, and provide them with heavy, sweet heavy brown bread dotted with raisins excellent fare for cold winter nights. In New York, they simmer for hours with salt pork and onions and served with scallions for scooping and an area of flaky cookies cut right out of bread with a juice glass. Salty, flaky-good and spicy at one time, its a down home meal that makes my mouth water just to remember. <br /><br />Some dishes just dont read, although. There is no New England exchange for a Southern barbecue sandwich shredded pig simmered with spices for hours and ladled over buttocks in a fork that is really required by a sandwich. The ubiquitous poor joe only doesnt cut it. It lacks the buttery texture and spicy-sweet tang of real slow-simmered pork barbecue. Nor is there something that compares with chicken-fried steak a meal that cant be described in words without attempting to sell it short. If youve had it, you UNDERSTAND how great it is. In the event that you havent, the notion of dredging and dipping strips of meat and baking it like chicken only doesnt do justice to it. <br /><br />Wherever I go my New England Italian sources show. Lasagna will always be a well liked food, and New England boiled dinners however make my mouth water. But I know, deep within my soul, that whenever I go to Heaven, the diners can serve flaky Southern biscuits with sausage gravy and chicken-fried steak. Some temptations even the angels cant avoid..Cold Stone Creamery 321 Mt. Hope Ave. Rockaway NJ 07866 (973) 537-8200<br />