SC - serving brains

[Karen Lyons-McGann]

******
welcome brunch and served a whole bunch of deep southern foods that 
pretty
much no northerner would consider eating. *snicker* Little did she know 
that
my mom was raised on a small farm outside of a tiny town in a desolate 
are
of south central Iowa. I grew up eating brains, oysters and other ahem
variety meats that anywhere else goes into the dogs bowl. 
****

as a teen, I subscribed to "Food & Wine" magazine.  I recall reading an 
article about a food critic born and raised on a sharecropping farm in 
the south.  He observed that the rich and the poor have no problem eating 
"variety" meats and unusual animals.  It's only the middle class that 
gets grossed out.  They don't eat them because they associate them with 
being poor, the sort of stuff that grandma and grandaddy had to eat to 
get by. The sort of stuff they've succeeded in getting better than, but 
they haven't succeeded enough to find out the rich eat them too.  He went 
on to list a number of fancy, high falutin dishes that were simply more 
elegantly done versions of stuff he'd eaten growing up poor and black in 
the pre-civil rights era south.  He figured his granny could match skills 
with the best chefs using those ingredients. 

More recently, our local paper followed a French immigrant family around 
the NC State Fair.  Liver Pudding is a traditional food around here, 
which fewer and fewer people younger than my parents eat.  The article 
reported the 5 or 6 yr old son in the family as being terribly excited at 
finding a booth featuring "pate" in the building showcasing NC produced 
foods.  He munched on sample after sample while his parents spoke with 
the reporter.  The woman doling out the samples (who looked like the sort 
of granny the food critic might have had) was impressed at this adorable 
child happily eating what her own grandchildren turned their noses up at. 
  My children were too disgusted to even look at the picture (they'll eat 
liver, but not liver puddin.)

Anne

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