Limited Edition Foods

It’s hard to get excited about much when it is so hot, but the readers of the Arkansas Times blog have been offering some interesting suggestions for dishes to cook when it feels like you are cooking a bit yourself. Not surprisingly, most of the suggestions center around vegetables and foods that are about as far from the typical processed and preservative laden limited edition food as possible. This comment about flavoring vegetables with meat was particularly interesting:

To beat the heat, we have to retrieve some of the logic of Southern food, as our foreparents cooked it. Our traditional foodways make sense in our climate, given our land, given the ethnic blend that makes us who we are.

The traditional Southern table was vegetable laden, and the vegetables came either fresh from the garden or fresh from vendors or the market — or from country cousins who brought care packages to city ones. It was not only picked fresh: it was cooked fresh.

The tired old cliche of over-cooked fat-laden vegetables misses the point of our traditional cuisine. Those “overcooked” vegetables were hundreds of times fresher than anything we can buy in supermarkets today. They were raised with a minimum of chemicals. Their inbuilt nutritional value was higher than anything we get in our lightly cooked “fresh” vegetables today.

Whether our foreparents knew of Jefferson’s famous dictum that meat should be eaten as a condiment, they practiced it, especially in summertime. With the abundance of fresh things from the garden, meat made its appearance on their tables mostly as a seasoning for the vegetables — the crowders, purple hulls, Kentucky wonders. A little pork sliced into the beans or field peas gave them the taste and mouthfeel of a meaty dish.

The eggplant and summer squash breaded with cornmeal was fried in meat drippings, adding more of a meat flavor to a meal revolving around vegetables. The cornbread and fried corn, the okra and tomatoes served with rice — all were seasoned with enough bacon grease to give them the flavor of bacon, without actually including meat.

When meat is not the main dish around which everything else revolves, it makes sense to add meat or grease as a seasoning. It’s also not as unhealthy as eating huge portions of meat at each meal.

Arkansas, food, vegetables