This dosn’t really belong in the pit, since it’s more of a reflection than a rant. . .
I was born in Alaska to a father from Alabama and a mother from Miz-sippi. Some of the time we ate like “normal people” but on the holidays they would bust out the traditional foods of their homeland, all of which absolutely nauseated me: #1 on the list: succotash. Of the corn-and-lima beans kind (many west coasters seem to put lots of weird stuff in it. Nope. Then no longer succotash.) I absolutely still can not STAND lima beans. The very thought drives me into a series of tics.
2: corn bread. Not the “sweet corn bread” which seems to be the only kind I can find on the west coast, which is slathered in butter and honey, but the other kind. Hate it. My hatred of it has passed over into the land of real tamales, too, and polenta. Just can’t do it.
3: Black eyed peas and hamhocks. EVERY New Years eve. The mere idea would make me feel ill, and I would spend new years either ill, faking illness, or devising ways of passing it to a doggie.
4: did I mention lima beans?
I mean, put all these things on a plate together and you have a holiday dinner that, in sum, tastes like adhesive paste and dirt.
So these were THE holiday foods. Now why, though, do I like many southern foods which we did NOT eat at holidays? Fried chicken, okra, baked beans, chicken livers, hush puppies, etc? I’ve even grown into brussel sprouts but the above list of foods is right out. Was there something about the odd emotional tone of the holidays at home (not a great domestic life) which set dinners off and killed appetite and bring bad associations? Do I need some kind of culinary therapy?
Well, besides the fact that lima beans and succotash are nasty, could it be something that was happening around the holidays? A slight tension in the air perhaps, or holiday depression that you now associate with those foods?
I wonder if it isn’t the idea that these were “holiday foods?”
If you had eaten them week in and week out, the way your parents would have while living in the South, you would have liked or tolerated them.
I grew up on that kind of food, having Virginia roots. But I can understand when Northerners I meet these days seem nauseated by some of them. While I long for turnip greens, cooked for hours with a little bacon grease or a piece of salt pork, then covered with green tomato “ketchup”, I can forgive others for thinking that isn’t food.
The OP is blasphemous. Real cornbread and blackeye peas are faith-restoring food; nothing that good could have come about in a purely random universe.
I don’t mind butter beans, but I can’t say that I particularly like them, either – they’ve always just been “there.” Well, before I moved to CA, that is. The only southern food that I don’t miss is grits; never could develop a taste for them. I’d always go with the biscuits-and-sawmill-gravy for breakfast.
Speaking of which, one morning I made biscuits and gravy for some CA native friends of mine, and they were duly impressed. But they acted as if they’d never had it before. How is such a thing possible? I can understand regional food to a point – blackeye peas don’t grow everywhere, so they’re not plentiful enough in all areas to gain a foothold. But everybody’s got biscuits, and everybody’s got sausage. How come there are still places in the US where people don’t get the most basic of wonderful foods unless they settle for Denny’s horrific approximation?
