I try my best to keep the posts on this blog focused on Biblical topics; however, I have been reading my favorite author Mark Twain’s autobiography, and the guy puts thoughts into words like no one I have ever read. Last night I read as he reminisced about boyhood and all of the Southern food he enjoyed at the farm table. After all I am Southern Baptist, and though the primary focus of our denominational cooperation is for the joint purpose of missions, surely our name betrays that a traditional and proud culinary heritage is being protected by our SBC churches.
Have a chuckle at Twain’s evaluation of Northern attempts at Southern cooking:
For instance, corn bread, hot biscuits and wheat bread, and fried chicken. These things have never been properly cooked in the North – in fact, no one there is able to learn the art, so far as my experience goes. The North thinks it knows how to make corn bread, but this is a gross superstition. Perhaps no bread in the world is quite as good as Southern corn bread, and perhaps no bread in the world is quite so bad as the Northern imitation of it. The North seldom tries to fry chicken, and this is well; the art cannot be learned north of the line of Mason and Dixon, nor anywhere in Europe. This is not hearsay; it is experience that is speaking.
-Mark Twain, taken from Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography, pp. 113-4.
Oh lighten up, Yanks. Take a sip of that bitter unsweetened tea, and say a prayer for us depraved, grease-soaked Southerners!
