Earth Foods

“These people live so much upon swine’s flesh,” William Byrd complained during his eighteenth-century travels through Virginia and North Carolina, “that it. . . makes them likewise extremely hoggish in their temper, and many of them seem to grunt rather than speak in their ordinary conversation.” The earth foods of the South are variations on the theme of hog and hominy and how to preserve them in damp southern heat. Barbecue, country ham, and grits all spring from Indian methods of preserving meat and corn by fire without the aid of salt. “For preservation, a barbecue is erected,” a European traveler to the South wrote in the early nineteenth century, “and the fish are smoked over a fire.” Since the discovery of salt, Europeans had preserved foods by pickling them in brine, but here were men who “barbecuted” their game and fish by dehydrating them with mere smoke.