Southern food is fun. The whole point of food is fun. We should prepare our food the way we like, and Southerners do that. Ben Franklin is reported to have said “eat to live, don’t live to eat.” Southern dishes utilize a lot of vegetables, fried foods and crunchy food. And it is not, unfortunately, low fat. Southern food is not intended to be low fat. It is robust, stomach-filling, flavorful food. Southerners pride themselves in making dishes from scratch. That is, using all original ingredients, as opposed to pre-packaged food.

The south is well knowned for their barbeque. Of course when they say barbeque they mean barbequed meat, and usually it means barbequed pork. The pork is smoked, shredded, then slathered and swimming in barbeque sauce. The sauces are usually mustard based and tomato based, and both come with sugar, vinegar, and with what ever degree of hot sauce you want.

As far as actual cooking techniques, there’s pretty much just fire, smoke, and meat. Southerners use more smoke than fire, which distinguishes barbequing from grilling. We’ll keep the meat six feet away from the flames. As long as there’s smoke flavor from actual wood smoke rather than a bottle it is considered southern comfort.

The second most famous southern cooking technique is deep frying. Bread it and deep fry it, and you’ll find a Southerner who’ll eat it. Deep frying does wonderful things to food that other cooking methods don’t do. Fried okra may be cooked until it is slightly burned around the edges. This gives it a tasty crunch. Southern fried chicken is also cooked until it has a nice crunchy crust.

One of my favorite types of suthern cuisine is Creole style from Louisiana. The Louisianans are known for putting heat into most of their savory dishes. Easy dishes use Tabasco or powdered cayenne pepper; when cooking from scratch, diced hot peppers are added to the mirepoix.They understand the use of a mirepoixThe classical European continental technique is to sauté or sweat some aromatics, they deglaze the pan with wine, stock, broth, and drown the sauce with butter or cream; strain and serve with the meat that is naturally the centerpiece of the meal. Indeed, most south Louisianans will know the difference between the Cajun mirepoix (onion, sweet bell pepper, celery) and the French (onion, carrot, celery).