An englishman's guide to Southern Cuisine in North America

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This is a six step guide, but first of all, we have to get one thing straight: this isn't Mexican food. No tacos, no burritos, and a totally different kind of chili. The dishes contained in this guide are purely a product of the USA. Now...

1) If you value your arteries, stay far, far away. What isn't deep-fried is salted and cured. If you're like most people, and you don't give a flying damn, you might be pleasently surprised. Then again, once you find out what they're made of, anything that doesn't taste like vomit IS a pleasent surprise.

2) Never ask what Southern food is made of: You just might find out.

3) All Southern food goes equally well with whiskey, lemonade, and iced tea. Speaking of which...

4) Iced Tea has ice in it. This is occasionally an unpleasent surprise for Europeans. If you ask for tea, you may get hot tea, you may get iced; be specific. This is further complicated by the fact that hot tea is just called "tea." Americans don't drink a lot of tea, so we've never needed adjectives for it.

5) Country ham isn't just ham, in the same way Canadian bacon doesn't come in rashers. Country ham may start life with a curly tail, but after four months of salting and curing, it bears about as much resemblance to deli ham as to pork rinds. NOTE: good country ham is saltier and tougher than anything you've ever tasted in your entire life. If you look closely, you can see the crystals. Try boiling it.

6) Our biscuits are not your biscuits. American biscuits, especially southern ones, are floury round loafs of bread the size of your fists. You put butter on (or in) them.

7) A general guide to southern dishes:
-Cornbread: a bread made from corn. Goes well with butter.
-Collared Greens: sort of an acquired taste. Along with corn and -greenbeans, the only three vegetables we'll eat.
-Fried Chicken: Thanks to KFC, you know what this is.
-Chicken Fried Steak: Exactly what it sounds like. A piece of steak tenderloin (Or pork) battered with fried chicken batter. Tastes better than it sounds.
-Porkchop: another name for pork tenderloin. Occasionally batter-dipped.
-Grits: either corn or potato mash, fried, and sliced.
-Gravy: there are three different kinds: White, brown, and redeye. White gravy is mostly milk and flour, brown gravy goes with beef, and redeye gravy is mostly pig blood. There is a fourth kind; Chocolate Gravy, which goes well with biscuits. It is, indeed, made of chocolate.
-Sausage: like English sausage, but spicier, and round, so that it fits between the two halves of a sliced biscuit.

And, the coupe de grace:

Chitterlings, or "Chit'lin's": This makes suet pudding sound appealing. The small intestines of a pig, flushed clean with water (or not, depending on taste), stuffed with spices, pig's fat, redeye gravy, and cornmeal. Deep fry, slice, deep fry, batter, chop, fry, dice, and fry again. If you didn't know what it was, you'd probably like it.

There's even worse than that, if you have the stomach. For instance: they don't call those big baskets "Hog's Heads" for nothing...

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