I was not born in the South, which perhaps explains the fact that I don’t particularly like eating some of the Southern food staples such as collards, field peas and chicken livers.
And while I have come late in life to enjoy the finer points of grits, I suppose I will never be considered a true Southerner despite living in various parts of the South since I was 12 because, well, there simply is no way to put this politely: I don’t like tomatoes.
No juicy slab of Big Boy or Red Beefsteak on two pieces of white bread slathered in Duke’s mayo for this boy, no sir. Eating the devil’s fruit, unless it has been converted (and consecrated with some wine) into tomato sauce or sliced, diced and overpowered with peppers in salsa, is not going to happen.
This distaste for this ubiquitous Southern fruit was never held against me by my mother, who grew up on a North Carolina farm during the Depression and therefore ate any and everything put on the table (although she confessed to me more than once that she never did acquire a taste for possum).
And my wife, who knows her way around a ‘mater sandwich, no longer encourages me to try a slice or pop a cherry tomato in my mouth, having given up on that fight after raising two children with their own distinct and confounding eating preferences (I mean, what exactly is the difference between Kraft and Velveeta macaroni, other than one child will pout or sob if their preferred brand of cheesy noodle was not being served that night?)
On the other hand, there’s nothing that says summertime food in the South more than corn on the cob.
I was wildly naive and, shall we say, lacking the proper palate for appreciating the subtleties of corn varieties during my early years eating it off of the cob. In the Midwest at that time, all I remember being available was the large, fully formed, dark yellow ears with kernels you really had to gnaw at to dislodge from the cob.
Later, as I was indoctrinated into Southern cuisine, I discovered that what I had thought of as corn may as well have come out of a can when compared to the holy grail, the creme de la creme, the pinnacle of modern agricultural achievement: sweet corn. Preferably plucked from the stalk and immediately plopped into water that you already had boiling.
Ah, butter dribbling down your bare arms as you munched through row after row of indescribably sweet goodness, your teeth barely grazing the surface as the kernels graciously jumped off the cob into your mouth. At our house, my mom would cook vats full for our family of five. Because we weren’t allotted just one or two ears apiece, we consumed four or six (or, in the case of my sister, eight or 10). All other food on the table had to wait its turn to be eaten, because it’s corn, it’s gonna get cold (and then the butter wouldn’t melt on it), and my sister just finished another ear and is grabbing for the next best one available.
Poor Mom, she would get to nibble on an ear, then she’d jump back up and rush into the kitchen to empty another pot (this was before microwaves, which is how we cook ours now unless there is a hot grill nearby) and deliver its contents to us slavering beasts waiting impatiently for some more hot ones like we were hogs grunting and rooting around for just one more kernel in the slop, which I guess we kind of were.
Nowadays real sweet corn – I was always partial to Silver Queen myself – doesn’t seem to be as prevalent, but that just may be because we live in the mountains where, while we are geographically in the South, our weather and much of our culture and customs are uniquely our own. Most of what we’ve been eating lately is bicolor corn, alternating light and dark yellow like a checkerboard. I don’t know exactly what bicolor corn is, some sort of politically correct hybrid? Are you throwing in some dark yellow kernels to attract the non-Southerners who don’t know what real sweet corn is? Whatever, it’s still corn and it’s still good.
Second only to sweet corn in the summer panoply of great veggies are cucumbers. I remember as a kid helping my relatives pick and wash cucumbers when we visited the farm where my mom grew up and watching my uncles grade them for market, so I think I know a thing or two about cukes. I won’t say I eat them every day in the summer, but there are not many days that go by that I don’t if I have access to ones I know my uncles would have approved of.
F and I used to grow all these wonderful veggies, plus many more. Squash that would come so fast and plentiful you couldn’t give them away. Green peppers that you could watch turn red, snow peas that rivaled corn for their sweetness if you waited until right before dinner to pick them, green beans that you had to snap by hand but that forced you to sit and relax (preferably in a rocking chair) while you did it, just as you had to sit and shell those wondrous bits of beautiful greenness, butter beans.
We don’t garden much anymore, long ago surrendering to the critters that ravaged our rows of goodness just as we were about to harvest them. The deer, the rabbits, the groundhogs, the raccoons … just like the little masked bandit who recently has been nightly raiding F’s two potted tomato plants sitting on the deck right outside our bedroom door.
Fortunately, however, we don’t have to depend on grocery stores for most of our vegetative intake during the summer. We have a nice farmer’s market that offers a variety of locally produced food including all types of meat, supplemented by an online, virtual farm-to-table market available year-round (the High Country Food Hub). We have roadside produce stands that offer stuff that isn’t easy to grow in the mountains, like peaches and, another of our summertime favorites, okra. And we have a son who is a farmer who generously shares his bounty with us, perhaps as a way to pay us back for the thousands of ears of corn he ingested as a child.
The key to all this great food is that it is seasonal and it is fresh. If you are buying your vegetables during the summer in a way that they are not fresh – in cans, in bags, in the freezer section – don’t. Just don’t. Go find a place that sells fresh stuff. It will taste better, last longer, be healthier for you, and it will support your neighbors.
And unless it’s grown in a greenhouse, it will only be available for a sweet, short while. Just like summer.