What is the difference between Southern and Northern US food?!
Thank you!
Answers: I am doing a project on Southern Food and I have to tell the difference between Southern and Northern food. For example, Southern people use more vegetables in their food than Northerners. Please help me. If you know of a website that has information on this subject, please post it.
Thank you!
im a southern cook, so i can help you out with that more than northern. southern got a lot of its staples from native americans and africans.
There are many staple dishes that came from people living in poverty, such as chitlins and pigs feet.
veggies and rice are main foods, always have been, because they have been readily available with all the farms. We use a lot of corn products when cooking, like corn meal and hominy, and a lot of the backbone of southern cooking is just based on whats available out there, whats growin right out of the ground.
Also, meats that can be cooked for a long period of time while working, like bbq can cook all day long and not need to be tended to.
A lot of southern food is oriented around multiculture- food that the rich and poor and black and white share.
We eat a lot of fruit dishes, such as cobblers and pies and jellies, because fruit grows very well in the weather down here. same with the veggies.
we also use a lot of fat, because we keep a big mason jar full of drippins on the stove : )
incorrectly though, a lot of people associate southern food to be all deep fried and gravy smothered, which is not true.
we use inexpensive meats, and veggies grown in our own backyard, because its easier for a family on a budget to feed 6 kids.
we use fresh ingrediants, dont like using things from cans or already partially prepared, what a waste of money!
our food takes a lot of time to prepare and tastes amazing because it was made with love.
southern cooking is not just a cooking method, it is a way of life!
I've included a list of food that us true southerners cannot live without!
hot sauce/ grits / hush puppies/
cornmeal mix/ hoppin jon/ collard-turnip-mustard greens/
sweet tea/ bbq/ boiled peanuts/ sweet taters/ pecans/
buttermilk/ okra/ oysters/
hellman's mayo/ cole slaw and potato salad/
sliced tomatos/ green tomatos
fish and shrimp/ COMPLETELY homemade breads and pastries and biscuits/ jams/ jellies/ relishes/
banana pudding
fried pickles
.. both of my parents are from the north, and we're both raised in the north and south switching back and forth. There are several northern dishes I love very much and love to cook. After extensive research, and concluding the influence on New England, northeastern u.s. cooking influence is from the settlers wanting to cook and eat pretty much ANYTHING that they weren't cooking and eating in Britain, because they wanted to rebel from the British. The style of cooking here is pretty native, as they were introduced to America's food because of native americans, and pretty much designed their own style of cooking, to cook whatever the British were not eating.
My Mom was a good Southern girl and my Dad is a Yankee. When I was growing up there was never a Thanksgiving that we did not have a table that was not just a groaning board, but one ready to collapse.
Dad had to have roast turkey with a sage & potato bread stuffing. Mom had a baked country ham and a cornbread and oyster dressing baked separately from the turkey in individual patties.
Dad had mashed rutabaga. Mom would have died before that ever passed her lips. Fruit salad was much more her style. Dad had to have mincemeat pie; it would not have been a holiday for Mom without Pecan. In fact, the only thing that they ever agreed on was the mashed potatoes (as long as they did not contain onions, Yankee style) and the Sweet Potato Pudding, which my Yankee Dad loved from the first bite.
Northerners have a much longer winter than folks who live down south, so many of the foods that are traditional here in the north are warming, hearty things like soups, stews and baked beans. In fact, because so much of New England has a Puritan religious background, many of the dishes traditional to New England are dishes that were put in to cook on Saturday night before sundown and left all night until dinner the following day. The Puritans allowed no cooking on Sunday.
In both the north and the south many of the traditional foods were first taught to the settlers by American Indians. The two areas have a substantially different selection of native plants though. Cranberries and blueberries abound in New England and in the old days butternut and hickory trees were very common. In the South you'll find things like persimmon and paw-paw that don't grow here and pecans instead of our butternuts.
As far as vegetables go, Southerners don't so much eat more vegetables as they do different vegetables. Yams, a staple in the South, were not much grown in New England because they have a longer growing time to maturity than many places here have a frost-free season to grow them in and they do not store long enough to last through a hard New England winter. The same is true of many older strains of vegetables like collards that are ubiquitous in the South and practically unheard of in the North.
On the other hand, in a week or two we will start harvesting sugar from the trees here in Vermont - something unheard of in the South - and many of the things that we grow here don't do well in the far South because they do not have enough cold weather.