48 Fun Facts About Southern Food

Grits are a porridge made from which grain?

Corn. Native peoples of the Southeast were pounding and boiling it long before Europeans arrived, and English settlers had adopted the dish by 1630.

Which Native American crop trio was known as the Three Sisters?

Beans, maize and squash. Planted in the same mound, the maize stalks give the beans a pole to climb, the beans add nitrogen to the soil and the squash leaves shade out weeds.

Which of these vegetables did enslaved West Africans introduce to the South?

Okra. Its name comes from a West African language, and 'gumbo', the Louisiana stew it thickens, probably comes from a Bantu word for the same pod.

Which Lowcountry people made rice prominent because they already knew the crop?

The Gullah. Carolina planters paid more for captives from West Africa's Rice Coast, whose skill with dikes and flooded fields made the plantations work; their descendants still live on the Sea Islands.

Fried chicken in the South traces partly to frying traditions from which European country?

Scotland. Scots are thought to have fried their chicken in fat where the English baked or boiled it, though food historians admit the dish's early history is something of a mystery.

Which New Orleans dessert, cooked in butter, brown sugar and rum, is set alight and served over ice cream?

Bananas Foster. Brennan's restaurant created it in 1951, when the city was a major hub for banana imports, and named it for Richard Foster, a friend of the owner.

Red-eye gravy is made by stirring which drink into the pan drippings of fried country ham?

Black coffee. It loosens the salty ham drippings into a thin, dark sauce, and diners dip a split biscuit in it so the ham sandwich is not too dry.

What did Confederate soldiers eat instead of wheat hardtack?

Cornbread. Wheat was scarce in most Confederate states, so soldiers baked cornmeal, salt and water into rock-hard 'dodgers' and Johnny cakes instead.

Which chef wrote The Taste of Country Cooking (1976), a landmark cookbook and memoir of Southern farm life?

Edna Lewis. She grew up in Freetown, a farming settlement of freed slaves and their descendants, and she built the book around the seasons of that community.

Which hot sauce has been made on Louisiana's Avery Island since 1868?

Tabasco. Edmund McIlhenny first made it there from peppers, vinegar and salt, and his family's company still bottles it on the same island.

Which Atlanta restaurant did Martin Luther King Jr use to 'eat, meet, rest, plan, and strategize'?

Paschal's. Two brothers opened it as a small sandwich shop in 1947, and King won their permission to bring his team and guests there whenever he was back in the city.

Alabama's 'white barbecue sauce' is based on what?

Mayonnaise. Pitmaster Bob Gibson is credited with inventing it in Decatur in 1925, and it stayed a north Alabama secret until it was first bottled for sale in 1994.

The golden-yellow barbecue sauce of central South Carolina has which base?

Mustard. Known as Carolina Gold, it is linked to a 'Mustard Belt' of counties where German immigrants settled in the 1700s, and it may have begun in their kitchens.

Cajun and Creole cooks call onions, celery and which third vegetable their 'holy trinity'?

Bell pepper. The trio is Louisiana's answer to French mirepoix, with green pepper standing in for the carrot, and it starts gumbo, jambalaya and étouffée.

Eastern North Carolina barbecue uses which kind of sauce?

Vinegar-based. Eastern pitmasters cook the whole hog, 'every part except the squeal', and dress it with vinegar and pepper alone; the Lexington style further west stirs in ketchup.

Memphis barbecue is distinctive for what?

A dry rub with no sauce while cooking. The ribs are coated in salt and spices before they go in the pit and usually eaten as they are; order them 'wet' and they are brushed with sauce instead.

Which city is known for hot chicken from places like Prince's Hot Chicken Shack?

Nashville. As the Prince family tells it, a girlfriend peppered Thornton Prince's fried chicken as revenge for a late night out, and he liked it so much he started selling it.

What is a 'pig pickin''?

A whole-hog grilling event. The pig is split and laid flat over the coals for hours, and families hold one for weddings, graduations and holidays, while towns run cook-offs for prize money.

What do Southern cooks call the savoury broth left after boiling greens?

Potlikker. It is sipped warm like a soup, and in 1935 Huey Long gave the Senate his recipe for it during a filibuster that lasted more than 15 hours.

Hoppin' John combines rice with which legume?

Black-eyed peas. Eaten with collard greens on New Year's Day, the dish is said to bring a year of luck and prosperity; along the Lowcountry coast, cooks use smaller field peas.

Which sandwich did Garden & Gun call 'the South's most beloved'?

Tomato. Ripe summer slices go on soft white bread, and the best one, the magazine says, is eaten leaning over the kitchen sink with the juice running down your chin.

Boiled peanuts are linked to which 1866 song about Civil War rations?

Goober Peas. 'Goober' was a Southern word for the peanut, and the song jokes about Confederate soldiers cut off from their supplies with little else left to eat.

Country Captain is a Southern dish of rice and chicken flavoured how?

With curry. The dish began in the Anglo-Indian kitchens of British India, and General George Patton loved it so much that the Army put it in its ration packs from 2000 to 2004.

A cook in Columbus made Country Captain famous by serving it to which president?

Patton became another famous devotee.

Chess pie is traditionally made with eggs, butter and what?

Sugar or molasses. With so little else in the custard, many cooks add a spoonful of vinegar or buttermilk to cut the sweetness and a little cornmeal to thicken it.

Which shellfish, harvested mostly in Louisiana, is the classic filling of an étouffée?

Crawfish. The tails are 'smothered', which is what étouffée means, in a buttery sauce and spooned over rice; Louisiana supplies most of the nation's catch.

Which wild onion is an Appalachian spring staple with its own festivals?

Ramps. Foraged in early spring, they taste of both garlic and onion, and mountain towns mark the harvest with ramp suppers such as Richwood's Feast of the Ramson.

As of the 2020s, which state grows the most rice in the United States?

Arkansas. Its prairie and Delta farms grow close to half of all American rice, far more than the Carolina coast where the crop first made Southern fortunes.

Which state is home to Key lime pie and 'swamp cabbage'?

Its Caribbean-influenced fusion cooking is called Floribbean.

Which state is known for Burgoo, beer cheese and the Hot Brown?

Kentucky. Burgoo is a stew made by the kettleful from whatever meat was at hand, once squirrel, rabbit and venison, and beer cheese is a sharp Cheddar spread.

Which state has an official state meal that includes chicken fried steak, barbecued pork and sausage gravy?

Oklahoma. Its legislature adopted the menu in 1988, the only official state meal in the country; eaten in full it comes to about 2,700 calories, and a senator later proposed repealing it.

Which sweet onion may use its name only if grown in one legally defined Southern district?

Vidalia. A farmer near the town found in the 1930s that his onions had come up mild instead of hot, and since 1986 the law has kept the name for crops from that district.

Brunswick stew is named, by the strongest claim, for a county in which state, where a camp cook made it in 1828?

Virginia. Tradition says Jimmy Matthews stewed squirrel for a hunting party in Brunswick County in 1828; a rival iron pot in a coastal city of the same name is dated 1898.

Pepperoni rolls are most popular in which state?

West Virginia. An Italian baker in Fairmont began selling them in 1927 as a lunch that coal miners could carry underground in a pocket.

Which layered dessert is a Chesapeake Bay speciality alongside blue crabs?

Smith Island Cake. Islanders stack eight or more pencil-thin layers and bind them with fudge icing, which kept better than buttercream when the cakes went out with the oyster boats.

Which state declared grits its official prepared food in 2002?

Georgia. The state's citation calls grits a uniquely indigenous Southern food, first produced by Native Americans many centuries ago.

In the Charleston area, what were cooked grits generally called until the 1980s?

Hominy. A Charleston cookbook of the early 1930s served the city's breakfast shrimp over hominy, so the dish now famous as shrimp and grits long went by another name there.

The oldest known printed recipe for sweet iced tea, from the 1870s, called for which kind of tea?

Green tea. Most iced tea of the period was green, not black, and this recipe has the cook brew two teaspoonfuls at breakfast for tea poured over ice at supper.

Which soft drink was first mixed in 1886 by the Atlanta pharmacist John Pemberton?

Coca-Cola. Pemberton's bookkeeper, Frank Robinson, chose the name and wrote it out in the flowing script that the company still uses as its logo.

Which square of fried dough, buried in powdered sugar, is the classic New Orleans partner to chicory coffee?

Beignet. French settlers brought the fritter to the city in the 1700s, and Louisiana later made it the official state doughnut.

The Hot Brown is an open-faced sandwich of turkey and bacon under which sauce?

Mornay. The cheese sauce makes the dish a cousin of Welsh rarebit, and a hotel chef devised it in 1926 for late-night diners who were tired of ham and eggs.

Key lime pie filling is made with egg yolks, lime juice and what?

Sweetened condensed milk. Cooks probably reached for the tin because fresh milk and refrigeration were scarce on the isolated Keys until the 1930s.

What colour is the filling of an authentic Key lime pie?

Pale yellow. The colour comes from the egg yolks and from the Key limes themselves, which are yellow when ripe and give a pale yellow juice.

Which marshmallow-and-graham sandwich snack has been baked in Chattanooga since 1917?

MoonPie. The bakery's story is that a coal miner asked for a filling snack of graham and marshmallow, and showed how big by framing the full moon with his hands.

Which golf tournament is famous for the pimento cheese sandwiches sold at its concession stands?

The Masters. The sandwiches are so much a part of the week at Augusta National that patrons noticed at once in 2013, when a new supplier could not match the old recipe.

Chicken fried steak is usually traced to German and Austrian immigrants in Texas adapting which dish from home?

Wiener schnitzel. The Texan version swaps the veal and breadcrumbs for beef dredged in seasoned flour, fried the way chicken is and smothered in cream gravy.

Which bourbon cocktail has Churchill Downs promoted with its famous Derby since the 1930s?

Mint julep. It is bourbon, syrup and mint over crushed ice, traditionally served in a frosted silver cup, though most racegoers sip theirs from a souvenir glass.

Which pie do many Southern families serve at Thanksgiving in place of pumpkin pie?

Sweet potato pie. Enslaved Africans probably took up the root in place of the yams of their homelands, and their cooks baked it into a European-style custard pie.