Curated playlist
Cuisine of the Southern United States
- OkraOkra, known to botanists as Abelmoschus esculentus, is a plant that most people meet only as a green pod on a plate. In parts of the English-speaking world it goes by the name lady's fingers. Those pods are green in most plants and red in…
- ColeslawColeslaw has a recipe on record from 1667, credited to a Dutch landlady. It appears in a cookbook called The Sensible Cook, or De Verstandige Kock. The author attributed it to the woman who rented him a room. She mixed thin strips of…
- American alligatorThe American alligator, Alligator mississippiensis, can make the surface of a pond appear to sprinkle. When a male bellows, infrasound from his roar sets the water above and beside his back jumping. Observers call this the water dance.…
- Fried chickenFried chicken appears in a diary entry from 1773, and the place is not Georgia or Tennessee. It is the Isle of Skye, off the coast of Scotland. The writer describes a plate of chicken fried in fat, a dish most people now link to the…
- BarbecueBarbecue first shows up as a noun in 1697, and it was a place to sleep. The English buccaneer William Dampier wrote that his party lay down for a night upon their "Borbecu's, or frames of Sticks". Three centuries later, the word names a…
- Soul foodSoul food is the ethnic cuisine of African Americans, and one of its earliest appearances in print is in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, published in 1965. The phrase itself was young. It took hold in the mid-1960s, when the word soul was…
- Head cheeseIn the stores of Alberta, Canada, the typical jellied meat on sale is labelled head cheese, whether or not any part of a head went into it. Head cheese contains no dairy at all. It is a cold meat terrine, normally made from the flesh of a…
- GritsGrits, the boiled cornmeal porridge of the American South, became Georgia's official prepared food in 2002. A bowl of it is simple. Coarsely ground corn is stirred into warm salted water or milk until it thickens. Yet this plain dish has…
- Krispy KremeKrispy Kreme is a doughnut company whose name is spelled wrong on purpose. The brand is a deliberate non-standard spelling of crispy cream, chosen for marketing effect. Its founder, Vernon Rudolph, lived from 1915 to 1973, and he did not…
- Chili con carneIn 1977 the 65th Texas Legislature passed House Concurrent Resolution Number 18, and chili con carne became the official dish of the state of Texas. The dish is a spicy stew built from chili peppers, meat, tomatoes and often beans. Texas…
- AspicAspic is a savoury jelly, and in the 9th century the poet Ibrahim ibn al-Mahdi thought one such dish deserved a poem. He described a gelled preparation of Iraqi carp as "like ruby on the platter, set in a pearl... steeped in saffron thus,…