erinja:

miamaslegi:"No, what kind of coke? A Dr. Pepper coke or a Coke coke or a Mountain Dew coke ..."

I have read about this, that Southerners call everything "coke", but never actually experienced it.

I have read that the Southern tradition of eating symbolic foods on New Year's has its origin in early Sephardic Jewish immigrants, because Jews eat symbolic foods on the Jewish New Year (carrots, pomegranate, fish head, raisins in celery for a "raise in salary", har har, etc., different foods depending on ethnicity). I eat symbolic foods for the Jewish New Year, but until recently I never heard about doing it for the 'secular' new year; in fact, I only learned recently that southerners eat symbolic foods for the new year.

Boston brown bread goes right back to colonial times. It's a steamed quickbread made of cornmeal, rye flour, and whole wheat flour. You normally steam it in a can, so it comes out cylindrical.

I live in Maryland, a few hours north of the "iced tea line", which runs somewhere through Virginia. We have some Southern foods that come this far north, but not hoppin' john. My family is from the north (and from England) so Southern cuisine is largely foreign to me. I've eaten grits probably once in my life, for example. Southern food seems to put pork in everything, so that puts a lot of it off-limits to me.

I have read, too, about symbolic foods for New Years coming from Jewish immigrants in ... Atlanta, Georgia, I think it was. I really found that very interesting reading as it was all completely new to me.

I grew up in a pretty poor, old-fashioned family, so what we ate - and what I still eat since I'm accustomed to - were the things people have eaten here for hundreds of years: cornbread, grits, lots of pork, beans, squash, sweet potatoes, okra, greens, deer, squirrel, possum, etc. I asked my mama once, a very long time ago, why we eat the things we do, and she said something to the effect of: Corn was easier to grow than wheat, hence cornbread and grits; people needed their oxen to plow with, but pigs grew fast and were cheap to feed, hence lots of pork; etc. I don't know if that's the whole truth, but it does make sense.

Again, I'm sorry for the divergence from my original question, but things like this are endlessly fascinating to me, especially as someone who's never been far away from home at all. I love learning about the little differences in people (and big differences!) - ways of speaking, traditions, common foods, etc.

Pork is cheap, which is why it was eaten by poor societies all over the world. Pigs can live on kitchen scraps, they get pretty big, etc. I think this is why Eastern European cuisine is so pork-based. Pig, cabbage, and root vegetables seem to be traditional staples in much of Eastern Europe!

I've heard of a small movement to get people to eat squirrel in England. I heard of it being called "tree rabbit". The large American grey squirrels have been taking habitat from the small indigenous red squirrels, so it's seen as being "very eco", as my British cousins would say.

Most people around here (DC suburbs) would be seriously put off by the idea of eating squirrel or possum, though deer hunting is pretty common here.

I've always been surprised about how many Jews are in the South. I always thought of Jews as being "northern" people in the US, but then I had a boss who was from some place in rural South Carolina, complete with appropriate accent, had a totally non-Jewish sounding surname, had a sister named something like "Betty Sue", one of those names that sounds very non-Jewish and very country. And then one day, it was a few days before Passover and my boss mentioned his pre-Passover house cleaning. It turned out they were Litvaks, Lithuanian-origin Jews.