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I've often wondered if trends in cholesterol ingestion have successfully caught on below the Mason-Dixon Line. In the South, moderation in fat intake seems determined more by whether the Fry Daddy or Fry Granddaddy will cook that evening's chicken or catfish. Down here we take our frying seriously, so much so that it's become a rich legacy of where the South has been and where it remains. Fried chicken, hominy, beignets, pain perdu, green tomatoes, apples and potatoes, country-fried steak, fatback in lean (so to speak) times, spinach and okra, attest to the durability of a slap of lard in a well- seasoned skillet or the industrial-size deep fryer in a family-style restaurant. Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor's "Vibration Cooking" details a host of meats begging for the frying pan, and like a true Southern cook, she calls for bacon grease and a black skillet. Brains, mountain oysters, croakers, soft-shell crab and frog - all take well to a cornmeal massage and dip in the hot oil. Her recipes are interwoven with Smart-Grosvenor's stories of South Carolina, family and friends, proving that food and history are intimately linked in this region. Or as another archaeologist of Southern cooking, Richard Egerton, puts it in "Southern Food: At Home, On the Road, In History": "As long as there has been a South and people who think of themselves as Southerners, food has been central to the region's image, its personality, and its character." What is the socio-historical meaning of frying to Southerners? Was it some exquisite torment devised by menfolk to increase the Southern woman's burden in the blistering heat? Could be. Southern women have certainly "enjoyed" an intimate association with the kitchen and are revered for their finesse therein. But more likely the wonderful crispy delicacy of a catfish fillet steeped in oil, or a gaggle of greasy chicken parts was a means of disguising "low" animals and animal parts and, in the seedier tourist's vision of the South, a means of imaginatively skirting the issue of freshness. Testament to the cosmetic wonders of a coating of flour and egg, the bottom feeding, mean-ugly catfish springs most quickly to mind as a food benefiting from this culinary face-lift, but also the gray organ meat of chicken gizzards, livers, pork chops and the most inimitable sea-beast of them all: the oyster. Elvis, the South's sublime example of health-be-damned gluttony, appreciated the comfort quality of greasy Southern cooking. His parents, Vernon and Gladys, choked down an array of vegetables during the Depression and wanted for meat of any kind. Elvis, though, made up for their deprivation, downing an infamous, rich array of oily Gridiron burgers, sausage biscuits, french fries, Fool's Gold Loaf (don't ask) and a truckload or two of bacon strips in a bowl for convenient TV snackin'. When the oil content in a peanut butter and banana sandwich wasn't enough, Elvis said, "Fry it," and Gladys would be flipping her boy a Fried Banana Sandwich. History always has been registered in the South in food's paucity and abundance. During the Civil War, Egerton notes, a scarcity of meat led to mock foods, like faux oysters crafted from fried corn and egg that retained the pleasures of grease even in hardship. Regional epicureans also have a reputation for investing even the good-for-you vegetable with a life-threatening grease content. The classic example is okra, fried to disguise the goo that has been known to inspire great heartache when cooked outside the Southern provinces. Intrigued by his Tennessee roommate's nostalgic tales of okra past, a native of Albany, N.Y., had his mother boil up a mess of those fellas and sat down to a plate of little slime missiles. If only he'd known. Even our fried is raised on fried. A friend who worked at a donut joint swears leftover donuts would be sold by the barrel to a local pig farmer to fatten up his pork chops-to-be. And anyone who's ever had the pleasure of a Krispy Kreme glazed right out of the fryer knows how those hogs feel, savoring the sugar capsules that elevated fried to an art form. Certain foods, like the Krispy Kreme glazed and the hush puppy, actually push the definition of fried, from process to essence. Their greasy-through-and-through goodness could be plainly termed "fried." As in, "Pass me another helping of that fried, please." Why, some like the notion of frying so much they seem bent on inventing new excuses to practice the art. As a child, my mother enjoyed fried cherry pies, really just cherry pie filling wrapped in dough and deep fried. And even our lauded grits have been known to take a tumble in the oil. Whether food is pan fried in that treasured lard or deep fried in dark or light oil, this regional deep-fried decadence, even in the face of health-conscious doomsayers, is evidence that the South's never-say- die, rebellious spirit lives today, if only in the stomachs, intestines and arteries of its people.
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