The cuisine of the Southern United States is defined as the historical regional culinary form of states generally south of the Mason Dixon Line dividing Pennsylvania from Maryland and Delaware as well as along the Ohio River, and extending west to southern Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas.
The most notable influences come from English, Scottish, Irish, German, French, Native American, and African American cuisines. Tidewater, Appalachian, Cajun, Creole, Lowcountry, and Floribbean are examples of types Southern cuisine. In recent history, elements of Southern cuisine have spread north, having an effect on the development of other types of American cuisine.
Many items such as squash, tomatoes, corn (and its derivatives, including grits), as well as the practice of deep pit barbecuing were inherited from the southeastern American Indian tribes such as the Caddo, Choctaw, and Seminole. Many foods associated with sugar, flour, milk, eggs (many kinds of baking or dairy products such as breads and cheeses) are more associated with Europe.
The South's propensity for a full breakfast (as opposed to a Continental one with a simple bread item and drink) is derived from the English fry up, although it was altered substantially. Much of Cajun or Creole cuisine is based on France, and on Spain to a lesser extent. Floribbean is more Spanish-based with obvious Caribbean influences, while Tex-Mex has considerable Mexican and Native American influences.
Read more about Cuisine Of The Southern United States: Traditional Southern Dishes, Southern Cuisine For The Masses, Southern Cuisine By Region
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“Thank God for the passing of the discomforts and vile cuisine of the age of chivalry!”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“Thank God for the passing of the discomforts and vile cuisine of the age of chivalry!”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Thank God for the passing of the discomforts and vile cuisine of the age of chivalry!”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“You mean they could still be living in a primitive state of neurotic irresponsibility?”
—Terry Southern (b. 1924)
“The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“Perhaps anxious politicians may prove that only seventeen white men and five negroes were concerned in the late enterprise; but their very anxiety to prove this might suggest to themselves that all is not told. Why do they still dodge the truth? They are so anxious because of a dim consciousness of the fact, which they do not distinctly face, that at least a million of the free inhabitants of the United States would have rejoiced if it had succeeded. They at most only criticise the tactics.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)