Southern Regional Cookery: Side Dishes

Vegetables and side dishes are favorites in the South, where the traditional meal is seldom a series of courses in the French manner but a plate of complementary foods. The mistaken assumption that southerners overcook their vegetables was never true in the homes of the wealthy plantation owners and merchants of the South. Many eighteenth-century cookbooks note that one minute’s overcooking can destroy the texture, color, and flavor of vegetables. After the economy of the South was destroyed in the Civil War, most of the region remained poor for a long time. The people often ate poorly, oversalting and overcooking bland dried and canned vegetables. It is this cooking of the poor that fostered the bad reputation. Most vegetables grow well in the South, with its long growing season. Many cash crops—such as tomatoes, corn, and beans—can be grown twice in one year in the southernmost reaches of the area. Eggplant, okra, hundreds of varieties of beans, leafy green vegetables, squash, melons, sweet potatoes, and corn are favored. Sweet Vidalia onions, grown in southern Georgia, became popular and successful crops in the 1970s.