The Distance Between Taste and Memory
Part 2 of my southern cooking project
This continues a personal reflection on southern cooking. But it’s more than that — it’s about food, memory, culture, and identity.
I recently wrote about biscuits, Parkinson’s (which I’ll ignore in this essay), and my mission to bring Southern food back into my life. If anyone read that essay (debatable, but hey, that’s cool), you’d know I grew up in South Georgia, well below the “gnat line” and just this side of the Florida line — where Florida isn’t really “Florida,” though most folks already know that (you won’t reach Florida for a couple hundred more miles).
Eventually, I grew up (also debatable) and moved around the country, but have lived in the Washington, DC, suburbs (manicured lawns, red-brick homes, Starbucks, Whole Foods, and lots (lots!) of traffic) since the late 90s.
Here’s the thing, though: no matter where we go, most of us never lose the memories of — or the taste for — the food we grew up on. It’s seared and marinated into our identity, whether we realize it or not.
My wife, Roula, and I have talked about this phenomenon through the years. She’s from the Levant region of the Middle East and introduced me long ago to authentic Mediterranean food, which I love. It’s become our culinary mainstay.
Still, a couple of years ago, I began to crave the kind of food that graced the Sunday dinner table at my grandparents’ house when I was young: fork-tender roast, sticky rice and gravy, snap beans or zipper peas, warm buttermilk biscuits fresh from the skillet (ah, the biscuits!), and sweet tea filled to the rim of our oversized tea glasses packed with ice.
I’ve already covered my quest for the perfect biscuit; now for the next installment.
Grits, Boiled Peanuts, and Fried Green Tomatoes.
No, grits aren’t the same as cream of wheat
Did I mention I live just outside Washington, DC? Southern ingredients here are treated less like groceries and more like artifacts from a lost civilization. There’s no Piggly Wiggly down the street stocked with lard for your authentic southern-style biscuits. Through diligence and patience, I managed to get on top of the biscuit situation. Then I ran into the next challenge: Grits.
Lewis Grizzard once wrote that grits are deeply misunderstood outside the South. He was right! Most of the country (and, like Lewis, I’ve traveled it “from Boston to Bakersfield”) confuses grits with cream of wheat. At best, you might find instant grits, which taste vaguely like warm Elmer’s school paste.
Real grits (the true stone-ground kind) exist on an entirely different level.
Finding them on the shelf was an expedition (because when you need them now, you need them now—ordering won’t do). I finally discovered some at Whole Foods imported from Edisto Island, South Carolina, tucked delicately between oat milk and organic chia seeds like museum pieces from a fading civilization.
I bought them immediately and made grits casserole, a dish I first encountered years ago (about 1983) at a brunch buffet in Savannah, where my family stopped on the way home from a vacation in the Low Country.
This masterpiece contains sausage, eggs, cheese, cream, and enough comfort to briefly make you forget every bad thing currently happening in the world. All held together by slow-cooked grits. Man alive!
Then I realized this little Southern food project wasn’t just about ingredients, cooking, or eating. It was about reconnecting to a place I once called home. Memories and identity.
Let me tell you about boiled peanuts
Now, if you didn’t grow up in the South, there’s a decent chance the phrase “boiled peanuts” sounds either confusing or vaguely threatening. But down there where I come from, boiled peanuts are practically sacred and sit at the intersection of each side of my family.
On my Daddy’s side, we’d eat them at the annual Thomasville, Georgia airport fly-in, where they were served out front of an airplane hangar. Hard to improve upon boiled peanuts and airplanes. On my Mama’s side, they were even more serious business. Uncle Gene ran the peanut stand at the Macon Farmers Market in Georgia, meaning there was family honor on the line.
Naturally, when I got on the Southern food bandwagon, I decided to make them myself.
This required ordering raw green peanuts from South Carolina because apparently nobody anywhere near here believes peanuts should be boiled under any circumstances. Once they arrived, I dumped them into a giant pot of salty water and proceeded to make the entire house feel and smell like a swampy feed store for the better part of a day.
At several points during the process, I became concerned I had made a terrible mistake. I started to pull the abort handle.
But then they were done, and I tasted one. Mercy!
Soft, salty, earthy — perfect alongside an ice-cold Coca-Cola (and not the diet kind), which I’m reasonably sure is the only lawful beverage permitted with boiled peanuts.
Them dern fried green tomatoes were pretty good
Biscuits—check. Grits—check. Boiled peanuts—check. It was time to take on fried green tomatoes. This presented a logistical challenge because one must first locate green tomatoes in Northern Virginia.
I visited three grocery stores and was met with either blank stares or that perplexed-but-intrigued head tilt my dog gives me. Eventually, I found some at Harris Teeter. Incidentally, it is also the only place around here where one can reliably locate White Lily self-rising flour. I assume they keep it in a vault after hours.
Now, I should confess that I don’t even particularly like tomatoes.
My daddy loved them. So did my granddaddy. They’d even eat tomato sandwiches, which remain one of the more baffling culinary traditions in American history. But me? I can generally take or leave tomatoes and usually prefer to leave them.
The last fried green tomatoes I distinctly remember eating were sometime in the late 1990s during happy hour with a friend from Alabama. They were on the appetizer menu, and my friend said, “Let’s get some of them dern fried green tomatoes.”
We consumed several baskets alongside enough Jack Daniel’s to impair objective analysis, so I was never entirely certain whether the tomatoes themselves were especially good.
We fried some up a few months back here in the Northern Virginia test kitchen, and, well—turns out they were indeed pretty good.
Roula liked them too, which gave the whole endeavor additional legitimacy.
Afterword
For a little while, standing in my kitchen making boiled peanuts, grits, or biscuits closes the distance between Washington and Georgia.
Of course, the journey continues. I’m on the hunt for a half-bushel of okra.
Good one