What is Southern Food?

What is Southern Food? That depends on who you ask! For the many styles of Southern Food are as varied as the people of the American South. The Native Americans, Spanish, British, French, African-Americans, Irish and others who settled here each contributed to the exquisite mess of cooking styles we call Southern Food. In sum, Southern Food is not a single cuisine but rather a collection of cooking styles and ingredients.

"Soul Food" is the name popularized in the 1960's for what many Southerners know simply as "good home cooking". With heavy African influences this generic Southern style is a product of the antibellum plantation era and the poverty that followed the Civil War.

"Barbeque" is the Southern Food classic that grew from 19th century 'pig-pickins' in the rural Carolinas. This humble survival necessity evolved and spread across the South. Each locality added it's own distinct variation so that today one can tell where they are in the South by the style and taste of the local barbeque.

"Lowcountry Cuisine" originates in the 'lowcountry' region of South Carolina and Georgia, roughly between Charleston and Savannah. The marshes and woodlands provided a variety of foodstuffs that the melting pot of immigrants eventually turned into a Southern Food style as wonderful as the names of its dishes. How about some Hoppin’ John, or She Crab Soup or Limpini Susan or Frogmore Stew or Scuppernong Jam?

"Cajun Food" and it's cousin "Creole Cooking" sprang from the French and Spanish influences of early Louisiana to give Southern Food one of it's first identifiable cusines. Antoine's Restaurant opened in the French Quarter of New Orleans in 1840 and the first Creole cookbook was published in 1885.

These are just a few of distinct cuisines that are Southern Cooking. We are also home to many local delicacies like Mississippi's Hot Tamales, the Muffuletta Sandwich of New Orleans, Boiled Peanuts anywhere in the Deep South, Smoked Mullet along Florida's Gulf Coast or South Carolina's Barbeque Hash.

So next time someone suggest Southern Food you might want to ask exactly what they had in mind.