I’m from Tennessee (born n’raised) and have lived there, Mississippi and Georgia since I finished college and have never heard that term.
Me?
I like grits (either cheese and a dash of Tobasco or sugar and butter), a good pecan pie, good fried chicken and the things that I can never remember the names of, but they always show up whenever there’s a church picnic, a death or any sort of potluck dinner - that stuff is the good stuff.
Cat Head biscuits are an Appalachian/Ozark term, I think. Flatlanders might be unfamiliar. The word comes from what the biscuits look like, as they are plopped onto the baking surface in a big dollop, as opposed to rolled out and cut into hocky puck shape.
Being Southern by birth and raisin’, I like most all of the dishes mentioned. I cook many of these things myself. I’m really good at making Catfish and Hushpuppies, Fried Chicken, Chicken Fried Steak w/ Cream Gravy, Blackberry or Peach Cobbler, real Grits (not those instant dishwater-tasting kind you get at restaurants), homeade biscuits & sausage gravy, beans, greens and cornbread.
…oh yeah, I think it was mentioned here before, but you CANNOT make proper biscuits with yankee flour, it’s too hard. White Lilly is really good. Since I live in yankee-occupied Northern Virginia, it’s kind of hard to find good flour…
Tomato pudding, bread pudding, greens (turnip, kreesy, whatever if it’s green and cooked), fried okra, Mom’s pickle’s (dill, grape-leaf, bread and butter, sweet), scrambled eggs w/creamed corn, peach cobbler, sweet iced tea, meatloaf, brussel sprouts, sweet cornbread, country fried steak, tapioca pudding, most any fresh veggies cooked with/seasoned with fatback or a hamhock, home-made sausage, the skin of fried chicken.
It’s Chicken fried steak, not country fried. Jeez. It gets the name from being dipped in egg and milk, dredged in flour, then fried like chicken.
Got it? Good. Don’t make the mistake again.
Chicken fried steak with butter (or lima) beans and mashed potatos with cream gravy. No better comfort food can be had. Add a bowl of Banana Pudding and I’m in heaven (and fat as a tick).
Bread Pudding makes any meal a special occasion. And don’t get me started on Pecan Pie.
Apple butter and biscuits country* fried steak with lots of gravy
fried chicken
pan bread (spoon bread, johnny cakes)
butter beans
black eyed peas
biscuits and sausage gravy
grits and ham
Fried catfish with Texas Pete. Absolutely heavenly.
Grits – especially grits made with a little bit of half-and-half and plenty of salt and pepper, topped with good cheese. They gotta be slow-cooked: quick-cooking grits are sub-par, and instant grits are the devil’s work.
Green tomatoes lightly dusted with salt-and-pepper flour and fried are superb. Some people like to coat them in a thick batter, which is unnecessary and gross. Make them light, and they rock.
Biscuits fresh from the oven, topped with butter and honey.
Okra, cooked any way you like it and then shipped in a lead-lined container to a country far, far away from me where it’ll be buried deep beneath the earth’s crust. That’s the best way for okra to be.
Low Country Broil (potatoes, sausage, corn-on-the-cob, shrimp boiled together for awhile then dumped on the paper-covered counter for mass comsumption)
Oyster roast (maybe not southern?)
Pig pull.
My grandfather is a semi-famous chef and he makes his own BBQ sauce that is incredibly good.
Yes, I’d forgotten about red velvet cake, always a holiday staple at my mom’s. And divinity! Haven’t made that for a long time! It’s pure heaven on earth, I tell ya.
Anyone else like pickled okra? Man, I can eat a whole jar of those like it was nothin’. Thoroughly addicting.
Cheese grits and homefries are always a good thing.
to paraphrase Lewis Grizzard: Let me explain something about grits to the Yankees out there. I’ll admit that grits by themselves taste like 20-year old wallpaper paste. But they compliment everything else so well. You can sop them up with the juice from your sausage patties. You can mix them up with scrambled eggs. You can serve them in biscuits with country ham and it acts like a glue and keeps the ham from slipping out.
Grizzard offered advice on how to cook grits, from what I recall…they have to creep over the edge of the pot a little bit or they aren’t done.
to complete my list: Fried Chicken, Fried (but NEVER boiled) okra, green beans with bits of ham and onions, cornbread, cooked cabbage with lots of butter and pepper, country fried steak with red eye gravy, biscuits, green bean casserole with French’s onions topping, applesauce…
Ok, here’s the scoop. Chicken fried steak is dredged in an egg and milk mixture, then coated with flour and fried.
Country fried steak is coated only in flour, then fried.
There. Hope that settles the issue. And for the record, I like Country Fried Steak. (insert tongue- sticking- out smilie here)
But I know how to make a mean corn bread, and I love me some Hoppin’ John come New Years, and my banana pie will rock your world. If there’s some Southern food that I rightly recognize as foul and nasty, there’s other Southern food that I pay proper respect to.
Cat head biscuits are, of course, biscuits as big as a cat head. My father makes the world’s best.
Sunday dinner at mama’s house:
Fried chicken
mashed potatos
corn on the cob
the above-mentioned biscuits with butter
sliced tomato or cucumbers in pepper and vinegar
sweet tea
lemon merangue pie