I’m sorry, that just isn’t enough. Try this recipe:
Go to southwest.com, buy a ticket to Austin or San Antonio. Head west for 1 to 6 hours. Find a small town diner with a bunch of pickups in the parking lot. Order chicken fried steak. With tea. and Gravy. on second thought forget ordering gravy, it will be served in abundance anyway. Now finish your pie and go back north. Never tell anyone where you have been, we don’t need any more yankees coming here. Y’all have a nice day.
Mmm… I beg to differ. I have ordered, and been served, perfectly good chicken fried steaks as far north as Michigan.
Barbecue, on the other hand, seems to be beyond the abilities of Yankees, for some reason…
I first had CFS at a Denny’s in Nashua New Hampshire ten years ago. I still love it and get it at my local Travel Stop trucker joint in CT. Can’t find it much anywhere else, though.
I was born and raised lower middle-class in NH, one layoff out of the trailer park. I tend to like the simpler, peasant food, whatever region the cuisine is from. Call it my white trash origins juxtaposed with my curent love of multicultural exploration.
Martin
And Chester Fried is all over the North East
And we Damn Yankees call catfish “hornpout” I’m not sure why…
Have you tried it in KC or Chicago?
My opinion? It’s because black people DO eat watermellon/fried chicken more than other races.
Why do we characterize large lesbian women with having deep voices and riding motorcycles?
Because a pretty good deal of them do these things.
Why do we characterize the chinese with an accent? (i.e. OH SO SOLLY!)
Because many of them do pronounce it like that.
Stereotypes must come from somewhere.
Whoa.
Am I being whooshed?
ForumBot, explain yourself before you pull a Trent Lott and a mod hauls your ass away.
So. What do the petite ones with the high, squeaky voices ride? :wally
I think he already did. He makes the valid point that sometimes stereotypes are generated and/or perpetuated because they have some greater or lesser degree of accuracy with respect to the characterization that the stereotype addresses.
Many blacks are originally from the south and the food items mentioned in the OP are popular southern foods. It is not surprising that it may be true that blacks as demographic cohort do eat more watermelon and fried chicken then the rest of the non-black US in total, but I doubt that they eat more of these items (on a relative basis) than white southerners.
The main negative aspect of stereotypes is that although they can be somewhat accurate, they can also be highly inaccurate in specific cases, and when you use them to broad brush entire groups you can often wind up in an ignorant and/or bigoted position relative to the individuals in those groups you are dealing with.
Kind of like Koreans and dogs.
My theory for the name change is: Because people are stupid. I once ordered “chicken-fried steak” without noticing that the menu actually said “country fried steak” and got a response of “Uh…you know it’s *beef, right?” It’s possible that people thought the “chicken-fried” means that the meat contained or was chicken, thus gradually inspiring the “country fried” designation to pop up and start spreading.
As far as turnip greens, back on de plantation the master would eat the turnips and not the “greens” part of the plant. Ergo, the slaves would prepare it and eat it themselves, a dish that has continued up to the present day. I think this is true of collard greens too, but I’m not sure what would have been attached to the end.
When we lived in Cincinnati, this woman from Bulgaria would give us veggies out of her garden. She could not believe that we really didn’t care for turnips, but would take all of the greens that she was throwing away.
James Michner’s Poland describes how a woman makes sausage out of the parts of a hog discarded by the aristrocrats. There are probably many other foods with such an origin. Usually very good foods, I must add.
Clarksdale, Mississippi has a large black population and more Fried Chicken restaurants than you’ll see in any town its size. That is not a coincidence.
Just chiming in to support the minstrel show theory, and to provide additional evidence.
There is a very old minstrel song entitled “Watermelon Smilin’ on the Vine.” The song is about the joys of eating stolen watermelons, and it also incorporates references to most of the foods we’re talking about here. It is sung in a broad, stereotyped “black dialect.” Sample lyric (from memory):
Chicken and pole beans and gravy am good
Possum meat am very so fine
But give me, oh give me
Well Lord I wish you would
Just that watermelon smilin’ on the vine.
This song seems to have been hugely popular in its day, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it was a large factor in creating (or at least popularizing) the stereotype.
The “black kid eating a (stolen?) watermelon” image is a very old racist icon. It shows up at least as early as the late 1800’s on postcards and such.
Holy cow! I found a cleaned-up version of the watermelon song in the Girl Scout Song Book of all places (scroll down). Yikes!
There’s another version of it here.
Neither of these versions incorporates all the food references I have heard in other versions of the song.
I also found a reference to a 1936 recording of the song here.