Hard Times Created Southern Cruisine

How Survival Through Scarcity Created Deep South Cuisine

America's 'deep south' is a region that was developed through a long history of struggle, turmoil, and scarcity for many. Much of the food we associate with southern cooking comes from the need to simply survive. Let's take a look at a few ways that people who were forced to live on little became the creators of a culture of southern cooking.

When West African people were forced into slavery, they brought with them knowledge of foods and preparation methods that became what we know today as 'southern cooking.'  Think about okra, yams, chicken, and fish and you might think about the south, but those foods were a part of the West African's diet before slavery. Even though many of the foods of the south were familiar to the slaves, they were most often not allowed to cook and eat the best parts of the catch or harvest. Once on the plantations of the south, the abundance of these foods was not available to anyone but the owners.

In order to survive plantation life, slaves had to use what they could, which was most often what was leftover after the best cuts and pieces were used. Now, instead of cooking whole chickens or the good cuts of pork for themselves, they learned to use the waste after butchering to create meals. Chicken carcasses, pork bones, and innards were cooked in water until there was nothing left of them, creating a rich stock for soups and stews. Livers, gizzards, and necks all simmered together and provided nutrients and flavors for many dishes.

Rendering the fat off the scraps of pigs and other livestock was a long, slow, hot process, which was not especially desirable in the plantation kitchen, but was welcome in the slave kitchen as the rendered fat created rich flavors used for frying. The skin of a pig or chicken would be cut up and fried until crisp, then stuffed inside pockets of work clothes and eaten while in the field working. All of these cooking methods used to survive are well known today in southern cooking culture.

Cooking up a pot of greens is another good example of scraps put to good use. After the beets and turnips, for instance, were cut off the greens for the plantation owners' dinner, the greens were tossed aside. These were gathered up and simmered slowly, creating not only a good vegetable to eat but also a liquid known as 'pot likker' which could then be used for flavoring in soups or even for making cornbread.

The practice of simmering bones, shells, jowls, and whatever was left after removing the most desirable parts of the animal created probably one of the south's best loved dishes - gumbo. Creating a shrimp stock with discarded shells and heads is a well-known and much-loved nectar of the Gods created out of a dire need to survive. Every good gumbo has a rich stock as a base, and that stock is typically made by boiling the castoffs; the same method used long, long ago.

Every good southern cook today knows the value of using the skin, bone, shells, fat, and innards of any critter, and how to use every scrap cut from vegetables and fruits before the so-called 'good parts' make it to the table. These methods were very much born out of a need to survive during a time of scarcity. For this knowledge, modern cooks can thank the southern cooks of old.