Garden & Gun's Southern Food Odyssey

The November issue of Garden & Gun, the best-named magazine in the whole world, was just sitting there like an undiscovered treasure on a magazine stand at Dayton International Airport this past Friday, the cover trumpeting 100 must-try Southern foods. I didn't well and truly need to crack the cover before knowing that I'd be buying a copy of the publication. I live for round-ups of excellent regional food items, after all, and this once looked like a doozy.

Penned by John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi at Oxford, the feature is pretty amazing. Edge's list of superlative Southern foods is broad, exciting, and—to me at least—repeatedly exotic.

Among the lip-smacking inclusions: pig's ear sandwiches at Big Apple Inn in Jackson; crawfish fried rice at Hank's Cajun Crawfish in Houston; trout caviar at Sunburst Trout Farm in Canton, North Carolina; Kool-Aid pickles at Eastend Grocery in Cleveland, Mississippi; fried green tomatoes at Arnold's Country Kitchen in Nashville; biscuits at Beacon Light Tea Room in Bon Aqua, Tennessee; and fried peach pie at The Varsity in Atlanta.

If the feature doesn't prompt you to begin to think about a culinary Southern road-trip, you're probably in the low-fat heart-smart camp. Which is fine. I'm not judging. I'm just pointing out the obvious.

Also cool: the online version of the article includes a handy food map.

Comments

[alexanderbasek]

I'd love to pair those foods with an amble down the bourbon trail profiled in this month's CNT:

http://www.concierge.com/cntraveler/articles/500072