Kansas kin coming for food
Awwwww. With Kansas kin a’coming I’ve been musing over menus. Most of the great and famous Southern restaurants known for food and atmosphere are gone. The restaurant that drew visitors looking for “South for the mouth” was “Aunt Fanny’s Cabin.” The 19th Century farm house was rustic without being a dump.
Celebrities left autographed pictures from the early 1940s through the last day in 1994. The original cabin became the Smyrna (Georgia) Welcome Center. “The Colonnade,” since 1927, has a loyal following for Southern food, not “Southern inspired.”
No restaurants are named for “Scarlet,” the willful, selfish, seductive, attentionseeking vixen whose moods and emotions changed like spring winds. Her Histrionic Personality Disorder made for an interesting, but not endearing, character.
Mid-Westerners eat things Southerners never see such as “runzas” which look like a Subway bun but with ground meat, cabbage, cheese, onion baked inside the bun. It’s all IN the bread. There is a Nebraskabased chain of stores built around the runza, named “Runza,” of course.
Pork tenderloin sandwiches are on menus all over Kansas. They show the Ger- man influence via the wiener schnitzel. Our favorite stopping place for a “pork tender” went out of business but we found two more.
Some Southern foods never made it across the Mississippi. My Kansas father-inlaw claimed to have never eaten turnip greens. Fed them to his cows and wouldn’t think of eating a soy bean in any shape or form.
There is probably more kudzu grown in the South than anything, although ac- cidentally. “The vine that ate the South,” growing a foot a day is nearly all edible. The leaves can be cooked like spinach, chopped and combined in a salad and the roots baked like a potato. We don’t eat it either.
A banana sandwich is made with sliced banana on bread with mayo and maybe peanut butter. The pineapple sandwich takes some planning because it must be thoroughly drained to avoid a soggy sandwich. Bread is smeared with butter, added mayo, then crushed pineapple. Make a round sandwich using pineapple slices and add a cherry half in the dimple. A Vidalia onion sandwich is so much better than it sounds. Bread, onion and mayo.
Peanuts are still green when ripe and green peanuts are for boiling. Most Southerners of “a certain age” attended a “peanut boiling” social. Peanuts and salt boiled together in a cast iron wash pot equals a good time.
Sassafras tea comes from simmered roots of the tree of that name and having it sweetened over ice is a hot weather treat.
Grits are considered a Southern food but today’s mushy grits are not worth eating. I grew up eating grits ground by my Uncle Guy at Phillips Mill. They were coarsely ground, chewy, with a distinctive corn taste. You rarely find them today.
These kin are not picky, will try anything once. It should be an interesting week.
Joe Phillips writes his “Dear me” columns for several small newspapers. He has many connections to Walker County, including his grandfather, former superintendent Waymond Morgan. He can be reached at joenphillips@ hotmail.com.