Summer Southern Cuisine

Food is no joke when you’re from the south. When someone asks you what’s your favorite summer food, you inevitably must explain the seriousness of the question. After all, people have been shot over less. Family members have been disowned for selecting the wrong fast food chicken sandwich. Food is synonymous with culture and one bite is instant nostalgia. Maybe in the 7th grade, you’d just garner a simple response of “pizza” or “hamburger”. As an adult, where there is a chance of potluck and barbecue invites, the answer requires thought. It’s a discussion. You must break it down. Make sure everyone agrees on all potential criteria. You have to make groups and battle them out on a bracket sheet. What is considered a summer food to one person, might not be to another person. Then, there is geography to factor in. A lobster roll in Boston may be all the rage, but in Texas, it’s the chili that may win the day. Sushi in Seattle may be the obvious choice, but New York slides in with pizza and fuhgeddaboudit. Each part of the U.S. has its hotdog style. How could you possibly choose one favorite summer food? In the southeast, there are five foods that every southern craves during the summer. Each one connects me to a special person in my life and conjures memories of the past.

Summer holds a special place in every child’s heart. Growing up in the 80s, when school let out for summer, I was flooded with an intense feeling of freedom. All my anxiety about school went away. I didn’t have to worry about homework or tests, and it meant vacations to visit family. Most of my extended family lived in north Georgia, around Atlanta, and the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Both of my parents would ask off work and plan a family tour for my sister and me. The whole trip would begin with us piling into a borrowed RV and culminate at the Corn Family Cookout.

My aunt Louise’s house was one important stop on our summer tour. We would spend days shopping and watching rented horror movies, while the adults socialized outside on the deck. During the days we snacked on junk food, but at night my aunt got down to business. The largest beef roast marinated in wine and garlic with collard greens and cornbread is the classic country dinner. You won’t find a single southern, who didn’t have this traditional meal at some point in their past. A granny or aunt, someone in the family makes it. But as crazy as it sounds, the roast wasn’t the star. The dish everyone fought over and went back for seconds was the fried summer yellow squash. No one has ever prepared fried squash like my aunt. I tried myself for years to figure out her secrets but to no avail. I would call her and repeatedly ask for the recipe.

“Oh, there’s no recipe,” she would respond over the phone.

“Yeah right,” I would think.

“I’ve made it so many times, I don’t really think about it.” She would continue. “Maybe, if you come by for a visit, then you can watch me make it. That’s how I learned to make it from your Aunt Edna.”

Hint! Hint! Hint! Desperation in my voice and the sound of sizzling burnt squash, I know she heard in the background, and I could never sway her. I got nothing. It wasn’t until years later, when I visited in college, did I finally watch her make it.

I watched her like a hawk, as I stood in her kitchen. She sliced the squash into quarter-inch thick medallions. She tossed them into a plastic bag and poured in the olive oil. Just enough to coat the squash. Then, she added a mixture of ¼ cup of cornmeal, a ¼ cup of self-rising flour, a teaspoon of salt, and a teaspoon of sugar. She dumped the whole bag into a large cast-iron skillet, with oil covering the bottom. She pan-fried it over low to medium heat, for about 15 minutes. It’s so good, but what made it special was the stories she told me as she was cooking. She told me she struggled when she first learned to cook. She even showed me a spot on the ceiling, where a pressure cooker “got away from her”, her words. Every time I cook summer squash, I think of her and remember her winking as she tossed the sugar in the mixture.

After a few days with my aunt, my family would pile back in the camper and travel to my grandmother’s house in Blue Ridge, Georgia. My Mamaw Kay grew up in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. She lived in a wood cabin with a stone chimney, that my Papaw BJ built for her in the 50s. My grandparents were farmers and spent spring and summer harvesting vegetables and preparing them for winter. My father would always work a few days in the schedule to check on Kay and help her with canning since my grandfather was no longer alive to take care of her.

My sister and I, along with my mom, would destring pole beans and break them apart. It was grueling work and time-consuming. We would start in the late morning and continue into the twilight. After hours of breaking green beans apart, we would barely put a dent in the huge drums of freshly picked green beans. No one complained and nearby cousins would stop by to help for a few hours. My Mamaw would homestyle can them, on the stovetop. She would have hundreds of glass mason jars on her dining room table. Once she filled them and they cooled, my dad would move them to the cool storage shed outback. We knew it was time to quit when the fireflies would creep out of the trees, and Kay would come out to the porch with two empty jars. Holes were drilled in the metal tops, and she would send us outside to catch a few lightning bugs.

All the work was worth it. I’ve never had green beans like my Mamaw Kay made. I think it was the fact that they were grown and fresh-picked. Jolly Green Giant brand in the grocery store, never had the huge white pods inside their green beans. She made them every visit and I would have rather had them, than any dessert. You could have given me just a plate of my Mamaw’s green beans, and nothing else. To this day, I try to visit just to get a few jars to take back home. No matter how old I get, I’ll always remember catching fireflies on cool summer nights after eating my Mamaw’s green beans.

We would stay a few days, before moving on to my Great Aunt Edith’s House. My Uncle Roy and Aunt Edith live close by in Ellijay, Georgia. My Uncle Roy built houses and used the money he made to buy land. They owned a large yellow three-story house on the top of a mountain, that Roy built. There was also a small cottage house located in the valley of the mountain. A small creek cut through the property, and everything was covered in tall green grass. There were red clay roads covered with granite gravel that led to each of the houses. It was the most scenic place we would stay during the trip. They had the most rooms to house people for the event of the summer, the Corn Family Cookout.

I would try to convince my dad to leave Kay’s house as early as possible every summer. If there was one food to rival Kay’s green beans, it was breakfast at Edith’s. My great aunt would make a full breakfast, which consisted of bacon, sausage, hashbrowns, scrambled eggs, and biscuits with sausage gravy. Everyone in my family went nuts for the biscuits and gravy, but I was all about the blackberry jelly and honey butter. I put homemade blackberry jelly on everything. It was a best on the buttermilk biscuits with the honey butter mixture, but I also mixed it into my scrambled eggs. My sister would gag, and my mom would try to convince me to hold back, but I couldn’t help myself. I would grind the jelly into the fluffy eggs, and they would turn green and deflate. It was like they were candied. Today, it would be way too much sugar, but at a young age, I gobbled it up and asked for more. The most I could do was four biscuits, but I would have to lay on the couch for an hour afterward.

We would arrive a couple of days before the cookout. It was fine because we brought the RV to sleep in, instead of taking up the rooms of the house. The Yellow House was my favorite of all the houses my Uncle Roy built. It was beautiful and had the cutest rooms. The lowest level was made of river rock masonry. The middle level had a wide overhanging porch. My dad and cousins would sit on the porch and shoot at a pesky groundhog living below. The top-level had the best views. You could see over the mountains for miles. We did puzzles and went on hikes, but the most fun I had was walking down to the creek and wading in the cool water. My sister and I would walk down the shaded creek and hunt for secret blackberry patches. My sister told me that I needed to help resupply my Aunt Edith’s pantry since I ate so much blackberry jelly. I would gather as many as I could and carry them back in a basket for my aunt. I never left my aunt’s house without jars of blackberry jam.

If the mornings were great because of the breakfast, then the best night of the whole vacation was the cookout. My dad was an accountant for a chicken processing plant. He was able to get cases and cases of chicken at a discount. He would load up the RV with coolers of chicken packed in ice, enough to feed an army. Cousins would bring pork and hamburger meat and hotdogs. My dad was considered the head chef, and he cooked everything people brought. The night before, my dad would marinate the chicken in red wine, teriyaki, and minced garlic. He fried half and grilled the other half, and it was a drawl on which was better. Most people think of barbeque chicken for summer, but my dad’s teriyaki chicken was the best. I would rather have that than anything, including steak or hamburgers. My entire family would sit on the porch, watch fireworks, and stuff themselves. After the fireworks, everyone would retreat to the back clearing and roast marshmallows over a huge bonfire. I never made it to the smores, I couldn’t resist the second helpings of my dad’s chicken. My uncle told stories about growing up in the mountains. I loved hanging out with my family.

Although I had a hearty sampling of some of the best food my family had to offer, I have to say there is nothing better than boiled peanuts. Unlike the special occasion of Louise’s fried squash, or a few mornings at Edith’s house, Kay’s green beans, or even my dad’s Teriyaki Chicken; boiled peanuts were enjoyed throughout the entire trip. Gun to my head, and forced to choose, I would say they are undeniably my favorite summer food. Billboards begin as soon as you enter Georgia and continue all the way up to the mountains. We bought sacks of them every day of the trip. You would be hard-pressed not to find them. Everyone in my family loved them, and as good as they are, they’re even better when you share them.

I saw less and less of my extended family as I got older. For a few summers, I had the happy luxury of spending time with my cousins. Stacey, Mindy, Bethany, Tonya, Charlotte, and my sister would hide out in the RV, away from the prying eyes of our parents. We would tell stories and jokes. We came up with dance moves to Janet Jackson's songs. They all teased me because I was the youngest. It was probably the most fun I’ve ever had. To this day, I can’t go a summer without having boiled peanuts. I eat them and reminisce about how good I had it growing up in Georgia.