Country Foods

The difference between cooking up North and down South is the ruralism of the South. It’s tempting to put a high nostalgic gloss on the pleasures of country cooking, but there are voices past and present to remind us of the costs of rural life. One voice, from 1856, is Sally Baxter Hampton’s, a New Yorker who married the owner of Woodlands Plantation near Columbia, South Carolina, and despaired of Christmas dinner. “In luxurious and well-trained New York households, Christmas preparations consist of little more than an order to the butcher, the confectioner, and telling the cook how many are coming to dinner,” she wrote, but here her duties were “daily and exhausting.” She had to measure and distribute all the ingredients needed for the day by the cook, to preside over the hops and yeast kettle for the Christmas loaves, to select the poultry and game, to direct the cutting of a saddle of mutton, and to supervise all the cakes, pies, and confections. “These are all necessary chores of the Southern housekeeper,” she said, “and I am afraid that as a Northern woman, I am woefully untrained for my job.”