Eat Arkansas

Kat, that's a great list! My South Carolinian partner whose family hails from TN says that pulled pork in this state comes with sweet sauce that has less tomatoes than the one in TN. Of course, it never comes with mustard sauce.

I agree that pie seems to be one of the things that stand out in the Arkansas version of Southern cuisine, Kat.

I remember as a child that most restaurants serving down-home food had a large variety of homemade pies made on the spot or by a local person, all proudly displayed somewhere prominent in the restaurant.

It seems to be becoming harder to find restaurants like that now. I don't know if Three Sams in Mabelvale makes its own pies, since I've never had room for dessert when I eat there. But they surely do look homemade, and good.

I agree with your comment about purplehull peas, and one of the reasons I keep needling is that I don't think it has to be that way. That is, I don't think it has to be such that we search high and low for good local restaurants serving food long eaten in a region, cooked in the style of that region.

As you've also noted previously, why is pimiento cheese so hard to find at local restaurants? Why do we have to search for good, honest, proud-to-be-regional places that serve purple hull peas, fried cornbread, pan-fried chicken, okra and tomatoes over rice, smothered squash, and on and on?

They used to be everywhere. And they do still exist, but you have to hunt for them. Plus, they're usually not known as highly rated local institutions--and that's in contrast to other places in the South, which value such restaurants and give them a lot of local attention.

I'm all for the variety available to us in many other types of restaurants. But that variety need not obliterate what is good about our own local cuisines. And we ought not to allow those cuisines to be thrown away lightly and mocked, particularly by people who tell us their dollar-driven "local" alternatives do a better job of what we've done traditionally.

When it's clear that their claims are bogus, that they know nothing about the food they claim to be correcting, that they don't even respect that food. And that their real bottom line is $$$.

John Egerton, "Side Orders" (Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1990), p. 97:

"One of the fascinating things about food, over and beyond the eating of it, is the way it gets around. When you start asking why a particular dish or concoction is found where it is, you may end up with a long and winding tale of social history that is as appealing as the food itself. . . .

What is there about fried pies that makes these fruit-filled pastries so popular in the upper South but hard to find in the lower reaches of the region?

People in Arkansas seem to eat more peach or apple fried pies than anyone else, judging from the large number of cafes that serve them, and Tennessee and Kentucky eaters aren't far off the pace."

John Edge, "Southern Belly" (Atlanta: Hill Street Press, 2000), p. 27:

"Pies, pies, my goodness the pies. Coconut cream, chocolate meringue, pineapple cream, egg custard, lemon, pecan, chess, and apple. Arkansans are a pie-mad people. They also dote on stone-ground grits from the War Eagle Mill, battered deep-fried pickles from the town of Atkins, and sloppy barbecue sandwiches slathered with sauce from old man Shadden over in Marvell."

Edge, "Southern Belly," p. 29:

"Arkansas is a pie lover's paradise. In fact, I'll go out on a limb here and declare that Arkansas is the most pie-mad state south of the Mason-Dixon, a land where soft, white mounds of meringue soar heavenward from pie shells ringed with oh-so-flaky crusts, where tart lemon custards juggle luxuriantly with just the slightest prod from a fork."

John Egerton, "Southern Food" (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), p. 247:

"From hatching areas in Canada, mallards fly south through the heart of the country each fall, searching for warmer waters and feeding grounds. In the marshy flatlands of west Mississippi and eastern Arkansas, the ducks have been stopping to eat for decades, and legions of hunters have gone there to meet them. The rice fields of Arkansas are especially attractive to the birds, and the grain diet makes them singularly appealing to both hunters and camp cooks."

Egerton, "Southern Food," pp. 148, 153-5: "...Our focus is on the heart of the Southern barbecue belt, which we define here as including all of part of seven states: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee."

. . .

Egerton notes home-grown Arkansas barbecue traditions, such as a tradition "Daddy Bruce" Randolph established in Pine Bluff for many years, in which he invited the public to a barbecue party at which he offered ribs, beans, and slaw to the public.

He also notes the well-established commercial barbecue traditions in Arkansas, surveying Stubby's and McClard's in Hot Springs, Sims' and Lindsey's in Little Rock/North Little Rock, Couch's in Jonesboro, and Dixie Pig in Blytheville. He indicates the diversity and variety of Arkansas barbecue, the distinctiveness (and differences from place to place) in its homemade sauces, and the perennial debate about beef and pork that shades to a preference for pork on the western side of the state.

Egerton, "Southern Food," noting distinctive finds at breakfast places around the South, says (p. 60) that B.J.'s Restaurant in Benton offered (he hadn't found this elsewhere) fried bologna and pork chops at breakfast.

Egerton, "Southern Food," pp. 62-3, notes that Jones Cafe at Noble Lake near Pine Bluff offered a genuine home-cooked breakfast that included biscuits, bacon, eggs, grits, and coffee, along with fresh coconut pie hot out of the oven--the first time he had ever eaten pie for breakfast.

Egerton, "Southern Food," p. 265:

"Only three Southern states--Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas--lack a coastal tradition, and they have compensated by harvesting catfish, crappie, bream, trout, bass, and scores of other freshwater fish from their many lakes and rivers. Catfish . . . is now a major agricultural product of Mississippi, and both Arkansas and Tennessee have begun to move into that market, too."

Egerton, "Southern Food," p. 146:

Egerton focuses on Murry's Cafe in DeValls Bluff, where he says the cook, Olden Murry, made his own meal-based and flour-based batters and breading for his seafood and meats. He found Murry's a "home-folks kind of place--the same staff serving consistently fine food to mostly regular customers in plain and unpretentious surroundings," an "invincible combination," Egerton found.

He notes that Murry bought his fish directly from fishermen who had just caught it in the White River, and then served plates that were "like advertising pictures--the crisp golden fish, long slivers of French fries, a mound of creamy cole slaw, a ring of fresh onions, a length of dill pickle, a pepperoncini pepper, a wedge of lemon, a smoking-hot corn cake that looked and tasted like a hush puppy's first cousin."

Egerton, "Southern Food." p. 102:

Discusses Sam-Ann's restaurant at Hollis, to which folks from Little Rock would derive three-hours on a round trip for a good meal.

Dinners were "built around Arkansas catfish, chicken, pork chops, and fried steak with gravy. Fresh vegetables grown on the place or procured from local farmers are served when available, and the iced tea is freshly brewed. The greatest asset, however, is Sharon Nugent's bakery. It provides the whole-wheat dinner rolls, the breakfast cinnamon rolls and pancakes, the brownies and cookies, and the delicious cream and fruit pies."

Egerton, "Southern Food," pp. 336-7, notes that Ozark pudding (chopped apples, beaten eggs, nuts, and sugar with a bit of flour and then baked), seems to originate in southern Missouri or northern Arkansas, and is seldom found in cookbooks outside that area--though I seem to recall Bess Truman popularized this Ozark dish when her husband was president.

There are 2 dishes I had to learn to make to keep my credentials as an Arkansan: green tomato relish served with fried catfish, and chocolate gravy for homemade biscuits.

For those wanting a glance at Arkansas foodways very early in the state's history--and perhaps with an "urban" (i.e., Little Rock, which could barely be called urban in this period) focus, and a focus on cooking in more affluent households, I recommend "Matters and Things in General," published by AR Territorial Restoration in 1974.

Mary Worthen, who has done so much to preserve Arkansas history, gathered this collection, which reproduces recipes that began appearing in the Gazette as early as 1819.

Some surprises: food snobs (and this includes many noted American food writers) have claimed that Americans didn't discover eggplant until Italian immigrants popularized it in the World War II period.

The Gazette published (p. 5 of "Matters") a recipe for it on 16 Nov. 1831, recommending that it be sliced and fried (my family ate eggplant, which we'd grown in our gardens from as early as 1800, per family diaries) precisely that way all during my childhood.

Food snobs also claim that Americans were very slow to eat tomatoes, because they considered them either poisonous or an aphrodisiac. These writers claim that Americans only took to tomatoes in the latter part of the 19th century, imitating fashions in big east-coast cities where tomatoes first became popular.

But apparently remote and backwards Arkansans knew better, since the Gazette published tomato recipes on 24 June 1834, 14 Oct. 1834, 12 June 1835, and 24 Nov. 1835 (pp. 7-8).

Jlh, excellent point: Egerton does mention chocolate gravy twice as something unique to the mountain part of Arkansas. I had intended to post about that, for those interested in foods and foodways unique to this area, but you beat me to the punch--and I'm glad you did.

Because my roots lie from Little Rock south and east, it's a dish I don't know. But it deserves to be celebrated as part of our unique food heritage.

And I agree re: green-tomato relish. I can't imagine fried catfish (or beans) without it. In my family, it tended to be chow-chow, which was not as sweet as many green-tomato relishes nowadays, but we did enjoy the relish as well as chow-chow, when it was offered to us in various places.

Egerton, "Side Orders," pp. 201-202:

"Food has been too important throughout Southern history to be summarily relegated now to a lowly position of minor significance. It has been our livelihood, our preoccupation, and at times our very salvation. . . .

Now, as a consequence of many social changes, we have bought into modernism with a vengeance. No other Americans are more addicted to fast food than Southerners (indeed, many of the chains originated here). . . .

We meekly fall in step with all the fads and trends and movements--but we still produce more cookbooks and generate more cookbook sales than other Americans, and we still express reverence for our wise elders who cook the old-fashioned way, and we still associate traditional Southern foods with all the momentous occasions in our lives, from holidays to birthdays to weddings, anniversaries, and funerals. . . .

What this tells me is that traditional Southern food, though it is no longer the foundation of our principal daily diet, is still very much a part of our culture, and will remain so for a long time to come. It's our forever food. Country ham, pork barbecue, skillet-fried chicken, catfish, grits, corn, green beans, okra, squash, black-eyed peas, turnip greens, collards, sweet potatoes, biscuits, cornbread, yeast rolls, iced tea, boiled custard, coconut cake, pecan pie, blackberry cobbler, strawberry shortcake, peach ice cream, and all the rest, the best of soul and country, of Creole and Cajun, of coastal plains and mountain hollows--these crown jewels of the Southern kitchen are indestructible, and I don't expect to see the day when they have disappeared from table and memory, never to rise again."

An update on Ozark pudding: the information posted above about Ozark pudding as unique to the MO-AR Ozarks is from Egerton's 1987 "Southern Food."

In his 1990 "Side Orders," he revises what he has to say about this dish (p. 110). He finds a 1961 recipe for it in "Progressive Farmers' Southern Cookbook" calling it an "Arkansas favorite," but he finds no mention of it in old cookbooks in either MO or AR.

He concludes that the real source of this recipe is Henrietta Stanley Dull, who published a recipe entitled "Mrs. Dull's Apple Torte" in her classic 1928 "Southern Cooking," which is very similar to Ozark pudding.

And a final quote this evening from Egerton's "Southern Food," p. 48:

"Southern food by whatever name--home cooking, country cooking, Creole, Cajun, seafood, soul food, cracker cooking, low-country/hill-country/mountain food, field-hand food, tearoom food, slow food--is in danger of disappearing. There may be plenty of places that advertise this native fare on interstate highway billboards and dish up facsimiles of it in plain and fancy establishments dotted across the landscape, but only a small and diminishing number of them are reliable sources of authentic and traditional Southern food.

Almost every restaurant owner and home cook who does still specialize in the preparation of such food will acknowledge that the future of this rich and diverse cuisine is in jeopardy. The quality and availability of many foodstuffs is declining, they will tell you; the cost of good ingredients is becoming prohibitive; more and more people prefer speed, convenience, and ready availability over quality, and are losing the ability to distinguish real food of high value from its artificial substitutes."

Some very interesting points and ideas.

One thing that I didn't come into contact with until I was an adult was chocolate gravy. My roots are in southwest Arkansas, but it wasn't until I went to college that I was introduced to it. It still seems a little odd to me.

Other foods from my childhood that I consider Arkansas food: blackberry cobbler with both a top and bottom crust (not that strange cake-like mix that keeps cropping up on buffet lines places), mincemeat pies, ambrosia salad, rice with gravy, rice with sugar and butter, lightly salted tomato slices, turnip greens with bacon fat on cornbread, breaded pork chops in milk gravy, sassafras tea, butter beans, pan fried and battered steak (not to be confused with country-fried), fried egg sandwiches on white bread, pan fried apple fritters, peach preserves and watermelon pickles. Whether any of these items are specific to Arkansas or not I cannot be certain, but I know they're foods from my past that have roots in my family history.

Carry on...

A summer meal at my Nana's, (in NE AR) especially when she knew we were coming was likely to be corn, spinach salad, tomatoes, lima beans (butter beans--the TINY ones), greens of some sort (collard, mustard, turnip or a mixture) fried okra and smoked chicken or pork. If you just stopped by, you could probably have any of the above with no meat and she'd say "I'm afraid I just don't have anything to eat". Maybe cornbread, but probably not. Something about the women in my family. We just don't make bread. My Mom's biscuits are more like a thick cracker. Fried pies would be available if I could stay out of the blackberries and leave enough to make them with. A lot of "home cooking" foods were things Mom didn't make. (One of the downsides of having a home economist for a mother). I didn't have fried potatoes or biscuits and chocolate gravy until I was an adult. Catfish and fish frys were a big part of my growing up, but not my personal diet as I don't eat fish. That also limited my "True Arkansas cuisine" exposure, I'm sure.

My hub, however, makes really good cornbread AND good biscuits. He's from the NW part of the state and is big on cornbread and pinto beans. I think his grandfather ate them lunch and dinner every day. They also make strawberry shortcake with pie crust as the "cake" part, which I'd never heard of and am still not sure about.

Well, I have to say that I'm a bit torn by all this. As much as all those descriptions make my mouth water, I also realize that our lifestyles have changed so much, our diet has to change. We can't afford to eat fried bologna sandwiches and pork chops every time we turn around. We drive to work, sit in a chair, drive home and then sit on the couch. Some of us work out and go for crazy runs in the rain and heat to make up for some of it, but we'll never make up for enough to eat that fabulous slice of coconut pie after every buttered bread and fried vegetable-filled dinner. So, I'm glad that some of it is harder to find. I mourn the fact that I can't cook like my mother, and when she is gone, I might never have Thanksgiving dressin' worth eating again, but...I have an office job.

Kat, that's a mouth-watering list of Arkansas (and Southern) foods you recall from your childhood. What I remember most, and long to find again in restaurants (I used to know many places that cooked down-home food, but they're rapidly dwindling) are the many vegetables, cooked to perfection. I think the strangest trade-off we've made, culturally, as we gave up our traditional diet for something "better," is that we've given up what was clearly the key to our health--all those vegetables, eaten on a daily basis.

It's interesting that you mention rice with sugar and milk from your childhood. I do think that may be typical of Arkansas. Several of the books I cited yesterday note that, though AR grows more rice than many other states, we're way behind other states (especially in the Southeast) in our consumption of rice.

Family stories I heard as a child confirm that rice was not a usual Arkansas dish for many families. My mother and her sisters often laughed that they seldom ate rice except as a breakfast cereal, with sugar and milk, until they grew up.

My father was from Louisiana, with Georgia grandparents on one side, and he expected rice with many meals. So my mother learned to cook it and serve it for meals as an alternative to potatoes, which were ubiquitous on her family's table (Irish and sweet potatoes both).

The one strange exception where my mother's mother did cook rice was a dish she called gumbo, which mixed sliced okra, onions, peppers, and tomatoes, stewed them down, and then served them over Spanish rice, which was essentially a version of South Carolina's red rice.

EY, another wonderful list of foods from your childhood memories.

Quite a few histories of American food, and Southern cookbooks, mention that the Southern states in general did not have a strong tradition of bread baking. We preferred quickly made hot breads over light bread, which didn't keep so well in hot, humid Southern climates. When we excelled at baking breads, it was with biscuits and cornbread.

I remember cornbread being always on the table when I was growing up. Light bread, not so much, and it was never baked at home. My grandmothers made biscuits first thing every morning, as they brewed their coffee and fried bacon and eggs. They were always there as a snack throughout the day, with butter and jelly.

What you say about the difference between NW and NE Arkansas patterns also makes me think that there are subregions within AR when it comes to food. I suspect that where there is a strong tradition of baking light bread, it's probably found more north of Little Rock than south of LR.

My brother's wife is from Faulkner Co., and her family did bake bread frequently. She expects it with a meal, and would find any celebratory dinner without hot rolls strange.

As I look at Arkansas cookbooks, I also notice regional patterns that may still be developing, as our foodways develop. For instance, more and more cookbooks from the southeast AR area now include many rice dishes. And many of those focus on rice prepared with duck--again, something that is regionally important in that part of the state.

And where catfish is now being farmed in AR, cookbooks now include more recipes for catfish. Or so it seems to me, looking at my collection of AR cookbooks from over the years.

Oh Come On, I think you're right: the traditional foods we've been discussing were developed in an agrarian context, and they fed people who worked hard on a daily basis, on the land.

I could not afford (healthwise) to eat the breakfast my grandparents ate every morning of their lives. They all grew up on farms, though all had made the transition "to town" as young adults.

But they continued eating what they had always eaten for breakfast: fried eggs, bacon and sausage, biscuits, grits, even fried bread. To them, a day didn't begin well unless it began with that kind of breakfast.

And yet they were all slender and healthy folks, well into their old age.

I have a pet theory about what is happening to our foodways and the impact of the transition on our health. The traditional Southern diet may have included a lot of bacon fat, but it was not as meat-centered as our diet nowadays is. It featured vegetables seasoned by meat (and bacon fat), rather than huge and daily servings of meat.

What we have instead, today, is far more meat than we really need for health everyday, and that meat brings with it huge doses of saturated fat (as well as hormones and antibiotics we don't need). And the more meat we eat, the fewer vegetables--when many studies show that eating a wide variety of vegetables is essential to good health.

I don't think it was our traditional diet at all that made us obese. I think what's causing our obesity is precisely the loss of that diet, for a meat-based, vegetable-diminished diet, with lots of fast-food enhancements, including all sorts of additives we don't need.

This is part of what makes me passionate (and, yes, angry) about our ignorance of the value of our traditional foodways, as we let the food industry convince us that what they're giving us is better.

I seem to recall that, before John Egerton wrote "Southern Food," which was based on eating his way across the South and then reporting on the experiences, he had his cholesterol and blood checked. After months of eating a traditional Southern diet that included large servings of pimiento cheese, and, yes, pies and cakes, he had it tested again, and the cholesterol was lower and his blood chemistry showed an increase in vitamins.

I think he concluded that the wide range of vegetables he ate on his food sojourn accounted for the spike in health indicators. And he also concluded that, though we do cook our vegetables a long time to maximize their flavor, we start with very fresh vegetables, which have a maximum of nutrients, and we cook them at very low heat that doesn't cook away the vitamins.

I think he may be onto something. Some of what we have traditionally eaten might need to be saved for special occasions (pies and cake every day may not be too healthy). But the core of that food tradition, especially the many good vegetables, served us well, I believe, and we're poorer for letting food moguls convince us that what they're offering is an improvement.

(I never had a fried baloney sandwich as a child, by the way--but I did have baloney sandwiches.)

I just noticed a mistake in my previous posting about AR barbecue, and what Egerton says about it in "Southern Food."

I say that barbecue shades towards a preference for pork as one heads west in AR.

The opposite is true (and this is what Egerton says): the preference shades towards beef as one moves towards TX.

I never had barbecued beef as a child--didn't even know it was an option. We frequently bought barbecue to bring home from Sims, and it was always pork. We also ate at the old Shack near the capitol, always choosing pork.

I do remember barbecue chicken, mostly from boxes given out at political events in south AR when I was a child--with potato salad, cole slaw, and barbecued beans. Somehow, we didn't even think of it as barbecue per se, though.

Barbecue meant pork and only pork to us, though we enjoy Texas-styled barbecue beef when we visit relatives in TX.

As a further contribution to this thread, I've gone through John Edge's "A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American South" (NY: HP Books, 1999), to extract all recipes from Arkansas. Since this book is not indexed by places, I may have missed some recipes--it's a laborious process to go through and note all those from any given Southern state.

The following are recipes Edge chose to include from Arkansas. I don't think he included these because they're unique to Arkansas, or even typical of Arkansas cooking.

I think he included them because he considers them outstanding examples of classic Southern dishes. To my mind, his choice to feature so many Arkansas recipes in a collection of classic recipes from all over the South demonstrates the importance of our traditional food. It's interesting that these foodways are appreciated by people outside Arkansas, when some of us with Arkansas roots want to mock our traditional dishes and suppress conversation about them.

Here are the Arkansas recipes Edge's book includes:

1. Cornbread from Georgetown, AR (p. 39, from "Concerts from the Kitchen," Little Rock)

2. Hush puppies (p. 53, from "Sensational Seasons," Ft. Smith)

3. Spicy hush puppies (p. 53, "Apron Strings," Little Rock)

4. Red cabbage slaw with lemon-celery seed dressing (p. 65, "Concerts from Kitchen," LR)

5. Orange and onion salad (p. 67, from ibid.)

6. Tomato salad (p. 68, "Southern Accent," Pine Bluff

7. Mustard-poppy seed dressing (p. 77, "Concerts from the Kitchen," LR)

8. Southern-fried corn (p. 91, "Southern Accents," Pine Bluff)

9. Fried okra (p. 99, "Apron Strings," LR

10. Squash pickles (p. 252, "Sensational Seasons," Ft. Smith)

11. Chow-chow (p. 255, "High-Cotton Cooking," Marvell)

12. Chess pie (p. 292, ibid.)

13. Sweet-potato pie (p. 295, "Sensational Seasons," Ft. Smith

14. Pecan tassies (p. 303, "Concerts from Kitchen," LR)

15. Banana pudding (p. 310, "Apron Strings," LR)

There's also a fascinating interview with Lawrence Craig of DeVall's Bluff (p. 172), who was invited to cook at the Smithsonian in 1997, and who comments on the contributions of black cooks to Arkansas cuisine.

Some notes:

1. The three hot bread recipes do NOT contain any sugar, and the cornbread recipe specifies the use of white cornmeal. This is in line with cllassic Southern cornbread recipes, which call for white cornmeal and no sugar.

2. Only the two salad dressings for fruit salads contain a tad of sugar. The others don't--again, in longstanding Southern tradition.

3. The fried corn recipe does contain a bit of sugar, which sets it apart from classic recipes for this dish. A WPA recipe for the same dish collected in MS in the 1930s on the same page does NOT call for any sugar. Fried corn was one of my family's favorite summer dishes when I was growing up. We were mystified by people who added sugar to it (or to salad dressings or cornbread).

4. The chow-chow recipe is almost exactly like one I have written by one of my great-aunts in 1908, from AR back to a niece in AL.

Yum....My friend Susan and I were just having this conversation about childhood food memories, she's from LR, I"m from NE Ar.
We both had rice with sugar and milk as a breakfast food, no chocolate gravy, never heard of that til I moved to LR.
Fried green tomatoes, has anyone mentioned that delicacy?
Pies..peach cobbler, with real crust.
My Mother made a wonderful wilted lettuce salad in the early spring, the dressing has sweet pickle juice and bacon grease as 2 of the ingredients! No kidding! It was great.

Nanc, we also relished wilted-lettuce salad in spring. I've heard people in some parts of Appalachia call it killed lettuce.

I think that, in the days before it was easy to preserve food, or to obtain fresh things year-round, those first green vegetables of the spring must have seemed extremely important to our forebears. They were a sign of things to come in summer and spring, and a taste of something new and green after the rigors of winter, and the dull, heavy food available through the winter.

We ate poke sallet, too, though some of our country cousins laughed when we'd come and pick their "weeds" to take home and eat. I think with poke sallet, there was the same longing for something fresh and green as soon as it came up from the frozen ground.

Our wilted-lettuce salad always had onions "chipped" into it, as my mother said. And I remember her heating the vinegar in bacon grease, and crumbling bacon she had just fried into the salad. It was delicious.

I too forgot about wilted lettuce salad, but it was certainly an early spring favorite. I don't remember what lettuce it was, but it was only a springtime-straight-from=the-garden item. We had bacon in ours and radishes. I remember the dressing being a little sweet, but not super sweet. Dressing was made as you describe above. I have never seen that on a menu anywhere, but man would it be good right now!

EY, my memory, too, places wilted lettuce only in springtime. It may be that my mother added a little tad of sugar to the vinegar and bacon grease, but if so, it doesn't stick out in my mind. In general, we thought of sweet salad dressings as something that belonged elsewhere--in the places where people wanted their cornbread to taste like cake, and used yellow cornmeal to make it.

I remember being surprised (and, frankly, pretty turned off) the first time I spent much time in the upper Midwest and ate salads in restaurants. I found the salads tasted like desserts, with the super-sweet dressings.

I'm with John and Karen Hess in their book "Taste of America" on the way sweet tastes have been slipped into the American diet more and more, so that younger folks actually crave for things to taste sweet. As they point out, much of that was deliberate, to hook children on some junk foods early in life.

About lettuce and springtime in the South: I think there may also have been a feeling among many people that eating fresh green lettuce and any other edible greens that came up early was healthy, and helped tone up and purge the body after a stodgy winter diet.

It has also occurred to me, as I think about all this, that the reason people have sometimes concluded that Southerners did not traditionally eat salads is that they did not see lettuce on our tables after, say, mid-May. It wasn't there, because it bolted and stopped producing then.

But this is when fresh tomatoes start coming in, along with cucumbers, peppers, cantaloupe, onion, and so on. I never remember a summer dinner/supper when I was growing up that didn't have a wide range of fresh vegetables, along with a plate of sliced tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, onions, and cantaloupe to eat with the rest of the meal.

That was our salad, I now realize, when lettuce stopped growing. Of course, we could and did buy lettuce after it became widely available everywhere in summer and winter, and we enjoyed green salads frequently. But in summer, we enjoyed far more--and ate more often--what was fresh and available to us locally in that season, as it had always been.

I'm just seeing the quotes from John Egerton. I showed him the bbq, fried buffalo, fried pie and soul food joints I admire as research for one of his books back in about 1973 or 1974.

More recently, I had dinner with John in Little Rock about two weeks ago. He's working on a potential documentary film about the city (not about food). Where did we eat? Bossa Nova in Hillcrest. It was his second visit. He loved it.

max

I'm glad to hear you've helped John Egerton find some authentic AR food places in the state, Maxb.

Glad, too, that he finds Little Rock a place to come back to, and is working on a film about the city. I look forward to seeing it.

I grew up in North Little Rock. My parents and grandparents grew up in North Central Louisiana. So, while we considered ourselves to be from Louisiana, it was not until I moved back to Louisiana in the late seventies that I realized that even though we were raised on "Louisiana" food, it wasn't real Louisiana food because the food in Arkansas is just not the same. There is certainly nothing wrong with Arkansas food. Country cookin' or soul food is about the same down here as it is in Arkansas. You all are right about all the fresh vegetables I remember eating when I was growing up. And when we visited our grandparents in Louisiana, you just weren't that concerned as to whether or not there would be meat on the table at all. Purple hull peas, fried corn, steamed squash with butter and onions mixed in just so. And always tomatoes, cucumbers, radishes, and cantaloupe from my Papaw's garden. Most folks down here still eat like that, and it is not hard to find a restaurant in Monroe that serves all that and more. Rice is definitely a staple. People here eat tomato gravy. I never heard of choclate gravy in my whole life. Of course, I have been gone for many years. The only thing I can think of was that my grandmother, who had moved to NLR with us, sometimes made a sort of chocolate syrup that was poured between stacks of saltine crackers. A perfect blend of sweet and salty. YUM!!