Did you go to Gayhart’s drug store while you were in Culpeper (one “p” please)? You should have run down to Fredericksburg (My Fair City) for some frozen custard while you were in the area.
I maintain that the true cultural difference between the South (I grew up in Kentucky) and the North (I live in Minnesota) is the food. In the South, the main ingrediants in any dish are SUGAR and/orLARD. Tea is sweet, okra is fried. Only the South could come up with Red Velvet Cake (which I think is out of Baltimore, which is Southern culture enough for the distiction). But if you don’t drink milk, you’ll do just fine.
In the North, food is dairy based. The North is where you get desserts that are a sponge cake topped with ice cream and whipped cream, and then a jar of hot fudge, then more whipped cream. You get beer cheese soup. Your vegetables are swimming in butter - why cook with lard at all, you can fry it in butter. Cream of mushroom soup is a legal requirement in a panty - what else would you cover a pound of hamburger in? Sugar is only a mechanism to change the form of whatever dairy you are using from a main course into a dessert.
No I didn’t- I’ve never been there in daylight.
Not meaning this as an insult obviously, but a (gay) friend of mine lives in Fredericksburg and says it has an unusual percentage of gay men and gay bars for a city its size. I haven’t been there in many years (through there, but haven’t stopped) but have a major childhood memory of it that’s going to be told at least once every third family visit.
[HIJACK] It was 30 years ago exactly (the year after Bicentennial) and “summer vacation” was synonymous with Virginia (my parents were history teachers and history buffs) and in one of those “seemed like a good idea at the time” things we took one of our dogs, Fritz the scarily brilliant dachapoo, with us.
Since it was too hot to leave him in the car, somebody always had to sit-out the attraction to stay with Fritz. Usually it was my sister, probably about 16 or 17 at the time, as she was
1- the person who had such a fit for him to come with us
AND
2- the person least interested in history
AND
3- the dog was nuts about her (he was technically a family dog but he considered himself her’s
In Fredericksburg however it was my brother. We’d just been there the year before during our Bicentennial pilgrimage and he couldn’t care less about seeing the Rising Sun Tavern again- he was more Civil War than Colonial-Revolution in interest (though now reversed).
Fritz had a fit while my brother was watching and walking him because he didn’t want to be outside or with my brother (didn’t have much use for men in general)- he wanted to be with my sister. He was, again, scarily intelligent for a dog, and he knew exactly where she had gone, and while my brother was walking him he got loose and ran to find her. We were on a tour of the Rising Sun Tavern (for those not familiar it’s an 18th century tavern that was once owned by Charles Washington, brother of the first George W.) when we heard the howling and barking through the windows from the lawn and the parking lot as Fritz tried to figure out how to get in and as my brother- who has both a slight speech impediment and a thick southern accent usually but could read news for the BBC when he curses- screaming “Get back here you goddamned son of a bitch before I hook your fucking balls to the jumper cables!” outside of the 18th century window followed by more sounds of a cursing teenaged boy and a temperamental dachapoo attacking each other.
To a person of course all of us stood poker faced- no idea who that idiot and that dog barking outside the window were. When a family from the tour later spotted us and made a comment about crazy pet-lovers or the classless dog-family and the know it all father who dominated the tour* with his encyclopedic recall of American Colonial history that he assumed everybody else was as interested in as he was, my father, Orson Welles, said something to the effect of (and since I imitate him well I’m called upon every Christmas or Thanksgiving to tell this story)
“Yes, that’s indeed my other son. And my temperamental dog. The boy has quite the vocabulary and his manners are a bit rural by some standards I suspect. On the other hand he’s 16 and last month he graduated valedictorian of a nationally recognized high school* so I grant him certain latitude. I can’t help but notice that your sons are wearing some sort of cartoon characters on their shirts and couldn’t answer any of the tour guide’s questions and that they addresses you with no respect. Perhaps you should consider acquiring a temperamental dog to boost their achievement level.”
Weird and irrelevant but true story.
[/HIJACK]
*True.
I simply must come to Minnesota to see this for myself.
Shame you missed Culpeper in the daylight - a nice town worth the visit.
As to the number of gay men in Fredericskburg, I don’t have any reason not to believe it. Someone on this board once described a certain brand of older men (some “confirmed bachelors” others who just couldn’t play the game anymore after being married for quite a few years) as “Gay Paw Paws” - I suspect that demographic what your friend is referencing. Of course, Fredericskburg has really come back in property values and downtown is full of shops, boutiques, trendy restaurants, etc so there may be a pretty big younger gay population as well. The steam room at the gym at Central Park would be a good place to start looking.
End hijack here
[hijack]What the hell are “pancake batter fried pork chops” and “fried corn”?[/hijack]
(I’m from NJ. “Tea” is hot. “Iced tea” is cold and unsweetened. “Sweet tea” is (a) unheard of, and (b) an ABOMINATION unto the LORD.)
Pork chops dipped in a pancake-batter like batter and skillet fried in vegetable oil. Your arteries clog on contact, but in spite of how it sounds they’re delicious.
There are several varieties of fried corn, but the kind I was referring to is:
-shuck and scrape the kernels from several ears-
-soak the kernels in water-
-mix with a touch of sugar (and sometimes a tiny bit of milk)
-melt butter in a skillet
-pour in the corn kernels/sugar/milk mixture
-allow the corn to stick to the skillet just long enough to scorch [vital step] then stir; ideally all of the corn should have stuck/scorched for just a few seconds.
I’m not limited to Southern food (my favorite food is actually probably Greek/Middle Eastern cuisine, particularly lamb and stuffed grape leaves), so it’s not total provincialism when I say fried corn (as described above- not the deep fried stuff they sell at fairs) is fattening and all that but delicious.
Far from being abomination, sweet tea and cornbread actually transform into the blood and body of Robert E. Lee, George Washington, Rosa Parks, and Robert Johnson when the Ultimate DVD of Gone With the Wind is raised. (It was once said that they transformed into the blood and body of Thomas Jefferson as well, but further testing showed it could really be any male Jefferson from that era.)
Sweet tea and real cornbread are the main things that almost tempt me to move down south.
Too bad my frosty northern European genes take one look at the average summer temperatures and shriek in terror.
With you there. Current heat index where I am is 104 degrees (F). Yesterday it rained for about half an hour- and not hard- and that was the first rain to touch my front lawn in almost 2 months. I’m from here and I shriek in terror. (My predominantly British and Swiss/German ancestry I fear overrules my family’s 3 centuries of tenure in the southeast U.S…)
You’re shitting me, aintcha? Because no way can this be for real.
Okay, I know you wily Southerners delight in nothing more than deluding us innocent Yankees with wild tales of imaginary foodstuffs that you pretend to eat. For example, you nearly had us fooled with that “okra” gag a while back till we finally caught on and realized that you were joking. (Snot stew? Puh-leeze.)
But this…hell, it’s not even subtle. I mean, it’s like Hey, Joe-Bob! Tell that FNG that when he’s on his way back from getting that bucket of prop wash he oughta stop by the cafeteria and get a takeout container of…uhh…“pancake batter fried pork chops”!
Because, after all, you are joking, right?
Right?
Please?
<whimper>
I have to say, I’m kind of appalled by this whole notion of making sweet tea on the stove. Everyone knows that you get a glass gallon jug, fill it with water, sugar, and five teabags, and let it cook in the sun for six hours. That way it’s so steeped and dissolved that small children go into hysterics at a distance of five yards from the sugar content. Yum!
Also, restaurant iced tea up in the Pacific Northwest comes to your table iced and unsweetened! Everyone knows that you can’t dissolve the sugar in cold water!
Don’t forget the Chicken-Fried Bacon.
I’ve never said this before, but this thread delivers.
Daniel
Well I, for one, can state that there is no cream of mushroom soup in my panties (I didn’t know it was a legal requirement 
), but YMMV. I might have a can in the cupboard, but only if there’s a pheasant in the freezer to be cooked.
I do prefer my iced tea unsweetened. All this talk about tea as syrup is making my teeth hurt. Sometimes I do add sugar and milk to hot tea.
Actually this one’s going out of style. I’m one of the few people I know who absolutely loves boiled okra (and it’s one of the few things I can’t stand the fried variety of).
And for when you want to be not even subtle in the morning but just don’t have the time, there’s always Jimmy Dean’s Chocolate Chip Pancake Covered Sausage (on a Stick).
But the cultural differences can end in food the same way as the Civil War ended: by both sides putting aside their separate viewpoints and coming together to agree that Lutefisk is more disgusting than anything you could ever fry in lard.
Actually, lard is almost unheard of now- it’s still sold in stores but even down here the cholesterol thing relegated it to the specialty aisle, and when it’s used it’s usually a tiny amount in an old recipe [my mother used it when she made cracklin’ bread, or cornbread with bits of pork rind in it, just for tradition’s sake]. What’s interesting though is that I have a ledger from a general store my great grandparents ran 1919-1921 and lard appears on literally every single individual’s account and with almost every order- they must have had a reservoir of it outside.
Sampiro, I’m very impressed. That may even beat the wrapped, frozen, crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I saw in a HEB in Waco for stupidity. For all those Moms who don’t have have time to make Wonderbread sandwiches.
Real lard is one of the best-tasting fats in the world. The only thing better for frying potatoes is duck fat.
Oh, and the first time I had sweet tea I think my teeth feel out.
Damn. That one wins the Southern Food Stereotype bingo game in one fell swoop. (“Sugar”? Check. “Pork”? Check. “Onna stick”? Check…)
You realize, of course, that somebody now needs to fry lutefisk in lard just to see what happens.
Was just going to chime in and mention this. When I moved into my apartment almost 2 years ago, I bought a 4lb bag of sugar. It’s still in the pantry. Unopened. Which reminds me, I should clean out the pantry. Anyway, the only thing I really used the sugar for was Sweet Tea, and when I grocery shopped after the move, I decided to get a bag of Splenda and try it in my tea. I haven’t looked back since. I’m also a coffee drinker and now I won’t have it if my office is out of Splenda. Some good stuff!
It’s a breakfast corndog!
Do you find yourself stuffing packets of Splenda into your pockets before going to a new restruant or one that you know doesn’t have it on the table?
No?
Hi, my name is UncleRojelio and I’m a Spendaholic.