Southern Regional Cookery: Pork

Pork is said to be the main diet of southerners, but that was not always so in all parts of the South. On plantations prior to the Civil War, pigs were often allowed to roam the woods to forage. They were hunted as game and killed in the fall and early winter. Much of the hog has traditionally been cured by either smoking or salting. Since the meatpacking industry was not well developed in the antebellum South, most farmers had to raise their own hogs. Some form of pork was served at most country tables, but it was used as flavoring more than substance. The country hams of Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and the Carolinas are salted, smoked, and hung to cure for a year. Slivers of the salty meat are added to biscuits with dollops of chutney and mustard; these “ham biscuits,” which are often leavened with both baking powder and yeast, are fancy little sandwiches that are ubiquitous at southern weddings and winter gatherings. Smoked neck bones, hocks, and jowls are added to pots of beans and greens; salt pork or fatback is used in many dishes. On New Year’s Day, hoppin’ john is eaten for good luck. It is traditionally cooked with a smoked ham hock and served with greens (for financial success), which are cooked with smoked hog jowl (called “butt’s meat” in some areas). Blood pudding was once common where the French settled, but it has almost disappeared from the area (except among backwoods Cajuns). Other sausages, souse or hog’s head cheese, and liver pudding (the southerner’s version of scrapple, with rice often replacing cornmeal as a binder) have also become rarer commodities but can still be found where Germans settled. Most of the pork eaten at home today in the South is lean meat cut from lean hogs and sold in supermarkets. (After the Civil War, most pork came from the Midwest.) Few butchers survive.