Southern Comfort

I know no other way of life except the Southern way of life. And I don’t care to know another way of life. But unfortunately, the south has been inundated with the you-know-who and it shows.

The Northern invasion ruined a lot, not just Atlanta.

Especially, and sadly, our food. (And I'm not even going to get into what those EYE-talians and them from JAY-pan, etc. have done to our food. Do you know they don't even serve potatoes with their meals??)

I’m sure you’ve heard the old saw about the Yankee who is down south and about to order breakfast. When he asks about the special of the day, the waitress mentions grits. He says he doesn’t know what that is, and he’ll just skip it, but she insists it comes with the special. So, he says, “Well, I guess I’ll try it. But since I don’t know if I’ll like it, I’ll just take one grit this time.”

Speaking of grits, I was raised to eat them with butter and sugar. My South Georgia friend was raised to eat them with butter, salt and pepper. And of course, there’s the messed-with grits, with cheese and stuff put in them.

People cannot leave good enough alone, apparently.

Growing up, for breakfast at one grandparent’s house, you had biscuits, sawmill gravy (raise your hand if you know what sawmill gravy is), and eggs, fried. Fried how depends on how busy my granddaddy was cooking the meat. They might be sunny side up, they might be runny as the creek in the back yard, or as hard as a rubber ball. Didn’t matter, you ate them. There was also bacon, sometimes sausage. Homemade blackberry and apple jelly and butter were always in the center of the table.

At my other grandparents house there was oatmeal first. Didn’t matter if you disliked oatmeal, you ate a bowl of it before you got your biscuits, scrambled eggs and bacon.

At home, breakfast was whatever I got thrown at me on the way to school.

And another thing that’s been ruined is chicken. There was, in the not so distant past, no such thing except fried chicken. And now there’s chicken whatever. I admit some of it is good, but it’s a lot like sin: good going down, and fun while you’re at it, but awful when it's keeping you awake in the middle of the night because it was just too spicy a thing for how God made you. 

Stay away from both as much as temptation will allow.

And tea. Dear lord. When I was growing up, you had tea. If you were fortunate enough to go to a restaurant you ordered tea. Not hot or cold, not sweet or (please don’t make me say it) unsweet(ened) tea. And you didn’t have to worry about a nasty old lemon hanging off the glass, either. If you wanted something icy cold to drink that tasted like lemon, guess what you ordered?

Like, duh.

If I wanted to horrify Yankee kin, I could say words like okra and squash.

And remember eating watermelon straight from the branch, (as in creek) where it had been kept in the frigid stream all day so it would be cold by mid-afternoon when July was an inferno?

What about homemade ice cream from an old wooden, hand cranked thing that only a grown man could turn toward the very last?

No soft drinks except “co-cola”, Nu-grape and  Nesbitt’s Orange. “Pop” was what your cap gun did.

And contrary to popular belief, not everything was cooked with lard. 

Some things were cooked with butter.

So there.

Don’t you dare sit there, all smug, and tell me food is much better for you now.

Really? Why did my grandparents live to be eighty-seven years old? That’s right. Lard is a preservative. It’s a pretty tightly kept secret, so I’ll ask you not to pass it along.

The you-know-who folks might get ahold of the information, and then where would we be, Scarlett?

They’re annoying enough as it is.