Southern Comfort

I mean as in foods we eat in the South that give us so much comfort, not the whiskey. Growing up in West Virginia we always considered ourselves southern and not northern, I mean we have a southern accent, we enjoy all the foods enjoyed in the south and we even have the same catch phrases,

Bless her heart!

Food has always been a means of comfort to us, when we are having a bad day that big ol’ slice of pecan pie or that overflowing bowl of banana pudding always took us away from ever was troubling us. In West Virginia we have our own comfort foods we get back to time and time again. I know for me my favorite meal my mom made me, usually on my birthday was meatloaf, roasted potatoes and creamy tangy yet sweet coleslaw. My grandma Reed I think cooked a pot of pinto beans every day if not every other day, we cousins called them Dewey Beans, for a reason of course. Dewey was a local man that my family took under their loving wings and helped him by giving him a home, fresh cooked meals – his favorite of course were her pinto beans. Dewey helped my grandparents out on their small farm and was well, very much family to all of us. I often think about those days and remember him bellying up to the table for one of my grandmothers’ meals that always included beans cooked low and slow and seasoned with some type of smoked pork, usually fat back. Along with a platter of fried pork chops, chicken – most always “shake-n-Bake” cornbread, or a bread we called splatter bread that she would bake by mixing up a batter and dropping by the spoon full onto a hot pan and baking, fresh vegetables from the garden, cucumbers and onions dressed in vinegar and oil with just enough sugar to take the bite out of the sourness. Ahhhh I would give anything to have one more of those meals. I’ve tried to replicate the recipes I grew up on, but they lack one very important ingredient, the ones who made them the best. We ate like royalty on plain southern country food, but we were always happy. I remember other dishes such as sauerkraut and wieners – something we introduced at our Proctor Family Reunion, a couple of years ago and the pan is always wiped clean. My grandma Proctor was an excellent cook given that she had any one time about ten mouths to feed. She once told me that she with such a big family they ate everything they grew or raised, and nothing ever went to waste. Grandma Proctor canned enough stuff in the summer that she could have easily fed a small village. All of us grandkids always reminisce at the reunion about the cellar (with the snakes) and the fields of vegetables we always helped Grandpa hoe and harvest. My brother and I would make a meal from pinto beans with cornbread, sweet pickle relish and onions topping it, and most often a squirt of ketchup. I’ve already told in other posts about her noodles, chocolate upside down cake, but my favorite sweet memory is of her were her fried pies. They were always filled with a sweet and tart apple filling with apples picked from their orchard, fried to perfection and usually devoured as soon as they were cool enough to grab. So many of our memories center around food and the comfort it brought us. Last week I had to travel to Montgomery, Alabama on business, needless to say I was excited to be going to Dixie, just for some southern comfort food. I ate at a barbeque restaurant called Jim and Nicks that was recommended to me. I knew they would have foods I have been yearning for! I ordered Brisket with Collard’s, Macaroni and Cheese and Sweet Tea. The brisket while a disappointment was soon forgotten with one bit of the greens and mac. They served baskets loaded with hot cheese biscuits which I smothered in a soft honey butter and along with the greens (loaded with smoky flavor) and mac – the sides took me home and reminded me of my childhood. The sweet tea was perfect too, there’s just something about sweet tea south of the Mason-Dixon that makes it taste so much better. I even took a serving of banana pudding back to my hotel and it didn’t disappoint either. Here in Metro Detroit I’m lucky that there are so many soul and southern style restaurants, serving all the normal staples that the proprietors brought with them when moving here. My favorite is Gus’s World-Famous Chicken, an institution in Memphis, Tennessee. There are three locations in Detroit and one just a couple miles from me serving up some of the best fried chicken you’ll ever eat. Crispy and spicy on the outside, moist and juicy on the inside. The sides are all the typical favorites and I always order a three-piece dark meat with collards and their to die for baked beans. So what ever you love about Southern food whether it be fried chicken, country ham, catfish, crawfish, barbeque, boiled peanuts, deviled eggs, pickled eggs, fried or stewed potatoes, okra, pinto beans, green beans (half runners!) fried squash, black-eyed peas, succotash, turnip-mustard or creasy greens, poke sallet, burgoo, chow-chow, ramps, grits, buttermilk biscuits, cornbread, hushpuppies, cracklings, pimento cheese, sorghum molasses, apple-butter, fried pies, hummingbird cake, pecan-apple-elderberry pies, banana pudding, peach or blackberry cobbler, all which was paired with the house wine of the South, Sweet Tea. My list could go on and on. However; no matter how eccentric the rest of the nation thinks about Southern foods, as Julia Sugarbaker portrayed by Dixie Carter once said … “We have never ate dirt!”
I’m thinking of my sweet grandmothers and all the meals they prepared where their most important ingredient was love!