Well, under the overwhelming burden of proof, I’ll have to concede that y’all are right about the grocery-store people’s use of “y’all”. 
After all, “you and yours” isn’t a term or sentiment often (or EVER) used up here, so that translation would never occur to me.
rackensack wrote:
So to get back to the earlier question, is “beans and rice” a popular dish in Arkansas, or are y’all in the “beans and cornbread” camp?
We swing both ways. I’d say that my dad’s side of the family was more in the cornbread camp, being from the somewhat hillier areas of north-central Arkansas, while my mom’s family, having spent most of their lives around DeWitt, Reydell, etc. in the Grand Prairie area ate more rice. Thinking back on it, we ate tons of rice as a kid since we lived in rice country, but usually not with beans. We had rice as a side dish with nearly everything, probably as often or more so than potatoes and especially with duck, but when we had beans they were usually white beans, not pintos, and we had them with cornbread.
I cooked Grits this morning, of course. As I buttered and peppered mine, I observed with horror that my poor, tradition-challenged, Yankee (Pittsburg) born and bred wife had put not only milk and sugar on her Grits, be damned if she hadn’t added some sliced up strawberries.
I do love her, God bless her, and I suppose it is hopeless to re-educate her at this point. She is willful to a fault and will do what pleases her. She refuses my guidance on the subject of grits. I can do nothing against her own willfulness.
But now I have to fear taking her out to breakfast–what would I do if she perpetrated such an abomination in public? I cannot easily pretend to not know her–we come in together and we sit at the same table.
I am shamed before all y’all.
It may not be [i should know, i am from texas], but nearly every damn yankee i meet is surprised that i don’t talk like scarlett o’hara [which would be a GEORGIA-esque] accent].
[minor, but serious hyjack]
I mean this seriously: I despise the phrase, “red headed stepchild,” with a passion. growing up with red hair SUCKS, especially when you’re the only redhead in the WHOLE damn grade. Nothing else makes a person stick out more. I have only recently begun to actually ENJOY being a redhead [having left highschool behind] but more on that another time.
Please don’t use that phrase.
[/minor, but serious hyjack]
sorry, had to vent that.
Actually, this Georgian thinks Scarlett O’Hara’s accent is one of the worst fake Southern accents ever inflicted upon the movie-going public. (And there are plenty of bad fake Southern accents to choose from…)
LouisB wrote:
Pittsburgh??? Just be thankful she didn’t insist on serving scrapple with the meal! 
Finally, someone who willingly comes out and defines what real barbecue is. Any barbecue sauce with tomato is merely the infernal workings of some damn Yankee. Likewise with chicken on the grill. However much I prefer links, I cannot call them barbecue with a straight face. And any jerk who puts a cut of meat on the grill without the benefit of a decent dryrub is simply a waste of skin. My sauce is a molasses, mustard, vinegar and twelve spice concoction that rarely gets tried by my guests. One taste of my marinated, dryrubbed pork ribs and all you hear from them is animals noises 'til the platter is clean. It’s about then that I remember to tell them to try the sauce. I was blessed with the good fortune to work at a Silicon Valley company where the owner flew in 40 pounds of barbecue from The Rondevous in Memphis for their Christmas party. From that day on I knew that I could not rest until I had gained the ability to create that sort of food. And not a damn one of my thousand cookbooks has a recipe that even comes close. Shows what they know.
well… you did notice i said georgia-ESQUE, implying that it was not a true accent, but rather mimicing…
Okay, nuff sed 'bout the y’all stuff. It’s ALWAYS singular unless your’e inquiring about you and yer fambly.
Same with you’uns.
Okra: Only tolerable fried or in gumbo. That slimy boiled crap is hideous… even Southerners know that.
Peace,
TN*hippie
Saint Zero You mentioned red beans and how they are not pinto beans. Please look for Cranberry beans. I think that you also mentioned bean juice. This is also known as a bean “gravy”. When done right (from long simmered beans) it is heavenly. If you soak your beans, try using salt water so that they come up with a little flavor in them already. However, soaking them initiates the sprouting process and begins to change the chemistry of the bean. I avoid it and just start out my beans from a standing start.
Jab1: You mentioned Jimmy Dean Sausage. It is the only kind of packaged sausage that I have ever seen that is worthwhile. I prefer the Sage Recipe above any of the others.
Spoke: Fear not the Pickled Okra. If you like okra, and you also like dill pickles, hightail it to the Piggly Wiggly (we used to have them out west until Safeway bought them out) and get a jar of Talk O’ Texas Okra Pickles. They are instantly addictive and make a superb change up from regular pickles.
I forget who in the thread called okra the only near frictionless foodstuff, or whatever, but I just about had to clean off my monitor screen after reading that. Good one! NOW, go get yourself some REAL okra. I use small ones that are only 1-2 inches long. Cut the stems off, if you wish, but do not open them up at all. Cook them in a small amount of already boiling water and add some salted butter at the last minute. You will not get the revolting, slimy sci-fi prop material that is commonly served as okra. I know it isn’t fried (I’ll have to try it sometime), but it’s still good eats.
As to holding doors open for people, it’s what proper folk do anywhere in the states. It’s how I was raised and the farthest South I’ve ever been is Texas. A lack of politeness in a person is not a sign of where they’re from. It’s just plain ill mannered behavior, and unacceptable wherever it’s found. You will have to pry the door handle out of my cold dead fingers before I’ll stop doing this (especially for the ladies).
And finally, Baloo, hats off to you for creating some of the goldurnedest threads on the boards. You have a knack for bringing the wackiest people (read, “me”) out of the woodwork. We really need to get these recipes over to my Honky Soul Food thread that Balance cited earlier on.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=35358
If everyone behaves, I’ll even post my Barbecue sauce recipe. Promise.
Shy Ghost: I go down to Gainesville, Florida occasionally to see an old friend of mine, and I always have to stop at the Publix deli. Mmmmm-mmm! Bruno’s is a Birmingham, AL-based grocery chain that’s pretty damned good. A bit on the pricey side sometimes, but good. Ever see them?
Zenster: A bit more about the gentle art of barbecue (stomach rumbling the whole time: )
I can see we’re gonna get along fine. Folks that share the same taste in barbecue can’t possibly disagree on a whole lot!
Memphis is indeed ground zero for the “dry rub” approach to barbecue, and quite an excellent approach it is. But every barbecue joint down here has a different take on barbecue sauce. Some will offer exclusively dry ribs. Others will offer wet ribs. Still others offer dry ribs with a wet sauce for dipping. Note that this only applies to ribs. For the pulled pork that goes in sandwiches, only a wet sauce will do. Restaurants (and there are thousands of barbecue restaurants down here) all have different approaches to the sauce. The only things they have in common are, as you said, the vinegar base and the mustard. In my area alone (Montgomery, AL,) I can think of the following BBQ restaurants off the top of my head: Johnny Ray’s, The Smokehouse, Country’s, Sam’s, The Pink Pig, Fuller’s Char House, Big B’s, Mac’s, Brenda’s, and Moore’s. All of them have a loyal following, and all of them are excellent (if I do say so myself…I once went on a 2 week pilgrimage from East Texas to South Carolina tasting barbecue.) Here are some rules about barbecue here:
[ul]
[li]The quality of the barbecue is inverse to the quality of the building that houses the restaurant. In other words, the crappier the building, the better the food. There is a legendary rib joint in Tuscaloosa, Alabama called Dreamland that is a tarpaper shack, is in the absolute poorest part of town, and has feral dogs that lie around outside waiting to be thrown the rib bones. But I swear to God they have the best ribs in the world. Conversely, if you go into a BBQ joint with lots of oak, brass, and ferns, you might as well just walk right back out.[/li][li]Never ask what’s in the sauce. There are as many secret sauces around here as there are BBQ joints. Just enjoy.[/li][li]Most places have a mild and a hot sauce. Try the hot stuff at your own risk. In fact, I know of one restaurant that has a third sauce that’s so hot, they don’t even put it out on the table. You have to ask for it.[/li][li]Around here, if you talk about “barbecue,” people will assume you’re talking about a noun. Barbecue is always something you eat, never something you do.[/li][li]If the whole place doesn’t reek of hickory smoke, it ain’t barbecue.[/li][/ul]
Incidentally, I was in Tuscaloosa this weekend visiting my girlfriend, and we had breakfast at this little restaurant called the Waysider. I had two eggs, country cured ham, grits, strong coffee, homemade biscuits, and some killer red-eye gravy. The heart attack should occur before morning, but it was all worth it!
Howdy Y’all
I must agree with almost everything that has been said here so far.I am from Dallas (Plano for anyone that knows the area)but my “mama and daddy” were from Van Alstyne.Something everyone from here seems to be missing is when it comes to family affiliations is “oh she was one of the Jones girls”
etc.We had cornbread made from yellow meal,(I used sweet milk on it for dessert.)It was Okrey around here. Fantastic
pickled(try it with a cold beer)and when we went to visit mamaw and papaw we had fried chicken with cowboy gravy(grease running off of it)that you poured on the cornbread. We ate taters, some family from houston ate rice but they were the odd ones. Peach cobbler was the best ,but nana puddin was not bad.You said coke unless you wanted something other than tea ,milk or beer.Oh yeah no one has mentioned spam(quite possibly the worlds most perfect food)
Y’all be good
Beerman
When I was growing up, “dinner” was usually the evening meal and “lunch” was the meal at noontime. On Sunday, however, dinner was the midday meal and supper was the evening meal. Mom explained that “dinner” was the biggest meal of the day. It makes sense to me. When I was growing up, Sunday dinner was a BIG meal, and Sunday supper was usually leftovers.
Also, Thanksgiving dinner was served in the early afternoon. Thanksgiving supper was a continuing event that sometimes stretched out over several days, and consisted mainly of consuming Thanksgiving leftovers.
Beans were usually pintos, great northerns, or navy beans, cooked with generous chunks of ham or salt pork in it (anyone else remember salt pork?) Beans were served with cornbread and greens (sometimes it was spinach, but usually mustard or collard greens). Once we were no longer poor, dad insisted we have beans and cornbread at least twice a month. Mom didn’t like them because they were “poor food”, but dad liked the taste of them. So did us kids.
~~Baloo
The red beans and rice thing stems from a debate my wife and I have. I insist that Red Beans and Rice is the only way to serve it, whereas my wife insists it’s pinto beans.
WE haven’t let this stand in the way of our marrage, tho. 
Next time someone tries to serve me black beans and anything, tho… grrr…
I know about Plano. Twenty-five years ago, it had about 5,000 people and it was a nice place to stop for gas on the way to Oklahoma. Now it’s the fourth-largest city in the D-FW area, after Dallas, Fort Worth and Arlington. (Grand Prairie used to be #4.)
That’s what my Daddy’s mama called it. She also said “piller” and “foller” for “pillow” and “follow.” She always had her own garden and raised her own okrey and poke salad and spinach and taters and corn and muskmelons and honeydews and watermelons and black-eyes and snap peas and greens and pinto beans and onions and…
I am so homesick. And I miss Grandma and Papaw so much… SNIFF
Yeah, especially with a scoop of home-made vanilla ice cream on top.
True. Though both sides of my family were rather strict Methodists and the only beer-drinkers in the family were looked down on. (They wouldn’t be too happy with my sig line, either.)
The only way I’d eat Spam is fried and then the grease drained off. Straight out of the can, it’s just too greasy for me. Frying it helps the taste, too.
ABOUT GREENS (For all a’ y’all): Is it spinach or is it turnip greens or is it poke salad or something else? And do you put hot (tabasco) sauce on it? This past summer, I went into a bar-b-que place in Lancaster, TX. and ordered sliced beef, tater salad (with boiled eggs), spinach, iced tea and banana pudding. I said, “Y’all got hot sauce for the spinach?” and they said, “Of course.” Not having hot sauce for the greens would be like not having butter for the biscuits.
Butter’s good on greens, too.
It’s 10:00 AM and I’m already hungry.
See, this just proves that Texans are Southerners after all (though they sometimes try to deny it). The same pronunciations are heard in North Georgia.
We ate either turnip greens or collard greens. Tabasco sauce on greens was not done. Instead, we used “pepper sauce,” made by pouring boiling vinegar over fresh hot peppers, and then using the now-spicy vinegar to season the greens.
Which reminds me of a story:
I was visiting a girlfriend in Los Angeles, and while I was there, she took me to a so-called “soul food” restaurant (i.e. Southern cooking). I ordered greens, and while pouring pepper sauce on them, I noticed I was being watched intently by my girlfriend and her female friend, who was also along for the meal. They explained that they had been coming to this restaurant for months, and were happy to finally find out how the pepper sauce was supposed to be used.
-Remembering Rock Hudson’s line (to Elizabeth Taylor) in Giant:
“We Texans like a little vinegar in our greens!”
We Georgians do, too.
Ditto for we Alabamians. One of my dad’s favorite culinary experiments used to be to try out new peppers for his pepper sauce. Once he told me, “these are supposed to be pretty hot. I’ll only fill the jar half full of them and use the milder ones to cut the heat a little bit.”
They turned out to be habaneros.
Big ouchies.
Southern Food…
Pepper sauce. Mmmm… Made with a mix of Chili Petins and habeneros and vinegar. Nectar of the gods…
And I cannot believe that no one has mentioned chicken gizzards.
My girlfriend (a midwesterner) just moved here to Central Texas (well, Austin, like a little bit of California in the middle of Texas. But close enough). She is still adjusting. Took her shooting this weekend, that freaked her out. But I gotta get her ready for sitting in a deer blind this fall…
She also ordered a Bloody Mary this weekend at a bar. Damn near choked. I guess they do not use as much Tabasco up nawth… Hehe