A Quote by Marcie Cohen Ferris
The core cuisine of Southern food is established in the plantation South, within the world of slavery. To understand the plantation table, we must understand the relationship of enslaved people to Africa, to historical trauma, and their central role in food production. Their voice is the most poignant, expressive voice in Southern cuisine.
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In studying food, you embrace everything. Food exposes the long, complex history of the South - slavery, Jim Crow segregation, class struggle, extreme hunger, sexism, and disenfranchisement. These issues are revealed through food encounters, and they contrast this with the pleasure and the inventiveness of Southern cuisine. Food is always at the heart of daily life in the South.
Southern food that appears in contemporary popular culture is so exaggerated that it's hardly recognizable to most Southerners. This enriching of Southern food - fatter, richer, more over the top - is what we typically see on TV, in Hollywood films, and in Southern-style or country-themed chains like Cracker Barrel. Southern food becomes a caricature, like characters and props in a reality TV show.
When I'm asked to define "Southern food," I usually turn that question back to my audience and ask them what they think. I hear responses like fried chicken, catfish, barbecue, collard greens, and sweet potatoes. These are excellent examples, because they are historically grounded. You can trace each dish back to the people who brought these food traditions to the South. Today, these foods are central to the core culinary grammar of the American South.
The South is about the abundance, beauty, and richness of Southern culture, but also its dark underside. The history of Southern food reflects the history of slavery, of poverty, of the negotiation of power.
Americans are experiencing a general hunger for authentic regional cuisine, of which Southern food represents one of the best and oldest examples.
For me, I love the flavors of Southern food, and people usually think of Southern food as heavy and fattening, but it doesn't have to be.
The good thing about Hyderabad is the variety of cuisine available. From Nizami cuisine to Andhra food to Telengana delicacies, you are spoilt for choice.
My father once said there's a correlation between a nation's cuisine and its people: England, nice people, nasty food; France, nice food, nasty people; Spain, nice people, nasty food; Italy, nice people, nice food; and Germany, nasty food, nasty people. And I've always thought that there must be something terribly wrong with the German character - and that there is, really.
My German heritage, it's through food. Growing up in Switzerland, the thing that I remember the most is the food. And so the way that I experience people and places is through that - through its food and cuisine.
I'm really drawn to comedy. I grew up in the South, so I'm drawn to all things southern, so my role in 'Getting On' has been fun for me to play something southern - I always feel like I understand those characters more because of where I was raised.
You see a lot of Baptist churches in Harlem, you see a lot of the same kind of cuisine, the soul food - there's a lot of places that remind you of its southern roots.
We have to convince people that the handouts - just taking a few little handouts, where you have a subsistent living, where you never grow, just get a little check and a few food stamps, it will keep you on the plantation for the rest of your life, that's not a life. That's not living. It is not good enough. It is not acceptable. We have to educate our people that that is no longer good. You have to get off the plantation, off the government plantation.
Only the French people say French food is the finest cuisine in the world. If you ask anyone else, they will tell you the best food in the world is Italian.
Speaking of food, English cuisine has received a lot of unfair criticism over the years, but the truth is that it can be a very pleasant surprise to the connoisseur of severely overcooked livestock organs served in lukewarm puddles of congealed grease. England manufactures most of the world's airline food, as well as all the food you ever ate in your junior-high-school cafeteria.
Near Marseilles in the south of France, bouillabaisse is a cult food. In Toulouse and Carcassonne, the bean-based stew cassoulet is a cult food. Spain has paella and a number of others. Italy has so many, its cuisine is practically defined by them.
If you want to be fully convinced of the abominations of slavery, go on a southern plantation, and call yourself a negro trader. Then there will be no concealment; and you will see and hear things that will seem to you impossible among human beings with immortal souls.
