Confederate Cooking

I don’t mean to speak ill of the deep fried, but sometimes in the South we get carried away. I’ll admit that there’s nothing like a pot full of oil crackling on the front burner to bring a tear to my eye, but it’s a fact that anything that will lay still long enough for us to roll in flour is likely to end up fried in enough fat to clone a cow.

Also, it’s important to know that there are just some things that were never intended to produce gravy. I had a friend who swore he could whip up a fine gravy from flounder drippings, but I just can’t imagine ladling fish juice over a hot biscuit on a cold winter’s night. Of course, I was doubtful about shrimp and grits, too, until I tried them, and now I’m an absolute addict, but it just doesn’t seem plausible to believe you can get a thick, rich gravy from a creature that lies as flat as a shingle on the ocean floor and has to have both eyes on one side to see.

On the other side of the cornbread, there are some items that turn up at the table with gravy that couldn’t have been come by naturally. Despite the boastings of “homestyle” gravy on every menu item from pot roast to potatoes, only some of these are the chosen few; those selections ordained to produce broth which is the fount from which scrumptious brown gravy flows.

As a dear friend from an undiscosed geographical location says as she lifts five pounds of ground chuck in the natural form of a free-range meatloaf (an 11 x 13 rectangle) from her oven, “grease isn’t broth.”