It has been brought to my attention that down south there is a cultural expectation to revolve everything around food. We celebrate with food, and we mourn with food. We share holidays around food.
Some refer to themselves as Foodies. From what I can decipher, a foodie is a food snob. They do not cook with a premade roux or cake mix. Everything comes from scratch, and they do not just eat anything out of a can. Food seems to be a rite of passage and a valid extension of one's identity.
When there are new people in the neighborhood, we bring them a basket of food. When a person has had a tough day, we pop something in the oven as a sweet surprise. Food seems to be a universal language that goes without interpretation. The right food at the right time makes life better or at best manageable.
Recently I have published some of the recipes my grandmother clipped out of the newspaper or jotted down in her handwriting. They were shoved into a small box in her old office. It is not so much the recipes, but the words in her handwriting that bring me a smile and set my memories into motion because just like now, many of my memories of past loved ones did revolve around food.
Some years back a dear friend lent me a book I still thumb through on occasion. It is titled Being Dead Is No Excuse: The official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral. The author breaks down the recipes among the Methodist ladies, the Episcopal ladies, and simply the ladies of the Mississippi Delta --- specifically Greenville. The book is humorous and entertaining. Reading it brought back many memories of my past, eating these dishes as we gathered with friends of old and extremely distant family members, some of whom I had never seen before in my life. Total strangers old and gray hugging me and pinching my cheeks. But there was the reliable fried chicken and those deviled eggs waiting once the awkward moments passed.
I now work with a young lady who moved from Las Vegas with her husband and two toddler sons. I am often teaching her the ‘Life in the South 101’ course. Much of which revolves around food. When I recently posted a Mexican cornbread casserole, she asked me what the Mexican part was other than the Taco Seasoning Mix. My answer, "I have no clue, but I am not a Foodie."
This past week I received a phone call from my neighbor across the street. She and her husband are a good bit older than us. They are retired, and I seldom see them. But being that our properties face one another we do pass off waves as our riding lawn mowers pass in the afternoon sun. So, when she called just after dark to offer to walk over her homemade chicken salad with roasted pecans and fresh grapes, I was surprised but happy to accept her offer.
I welcomed her into my home with her cute little container of tasty morsels, relieved that I had finished putting out my Christmas decorations. I offered her something to drink as I put the chicken salad in my fridge. She then told me that my foster dog had been peeing on her front porch --- not once but four times.
My refrigerator door was not even closed yet when I froze and immediately understood. Down south food revolves around everything even a nice way to say, "Keep your dog out of my yard."
The next morning when Clay was leaving for work, he looked at our dog and said, "Scrappy, stay in this yard. We don't need anybody's chicken salad."
But I must say, it was delicious!
