

Miss. food unique as state

6:07 PM, Jan. 28, 2014  |  Comments

A few weeks ago a national publication asked me to write a 500-word piece describing "Mississippi food." It was hard. For someone like me, who loves my home state and the cuisine of my state, it was almost impossible.

Quick, name two Mississippi foods.

Grits and catfish, right?

It's true, stone-ground grits and farm-raised catfish are two staples of the Mississippi larder. But Mississippi cuisine is so much more. An attempt to nail down this state's bounty to two stereotypical Southern items would do an extreme disservice to Mississippi's true culinary diversity. The cuisine and the culture of 21st century Mississippi have depth and breadth that go far beyond what many have assumed for way too long.

For example, in the Mississippi Delta there is a longstanding tradition of tamales - served in fine dining restaurants as an appetizer before a meal and also in the fields as a day laborer's lunch.

I have long held that agrarian societies produce the world's best food - not only the food they transport and sell to others, but the foods the locals eat. The dark, rich soil of Mississippi is ground zero for vegetable farming. The vegetables themselves are a treat, but it's the ancillary foods surrounding them - pigs, chickens and wild game - that grab the headlines. The French and Italians eat every part of the pig. We do, too.

Mississippi chefs were local before local was cool. John Currence on the Square in Oxford, Nick Apostle in the capital city of Jackson and Jeremy Noffke in my hometown of Hattiesburg have all been sourcing local vegetables and proteins from day one.

Barbecue gets sweeter and saucier the farther one travels the length of the state. In Southaven, dry Memphis barbecue is the norm. In the Piney Woods region of Mississippi (an area 60 miles due north of the Gulf of Mexico), the ribs can be served dry or wet, but the sauce is sweeter. It may get saucier the farther south one travels, but it will always be pork.

Crystal Springs in central Mississippi just reclaimed the title of "Tomato Capital of the World" from some town in Texas that had stolen the moniker for a few years. Now that the distinction is back where it belongs, let's take a minute to appreciate what tomatoes mean to our diets. On behalf of Crystal Springs, we say, "You're welcome, world."

Vardaman, in the northeast hill country, is the undisputed "Sweet Potato Capital." Its healthy, orange tuberous roots are so prolific that it's never had a Texas city try to steal its claim to fame.

The Mississippi Gulf Coast is the crown jewel of Mississippi cuisine.

I will always choose a salty Gulf of Mexico oyster over any variety of oyster from the Pacific Northwest or East Coast.

You want fish? We've got redfish, grouper, speckled trout, flounder, cobia, pompano, red snapper, yellowfin tuna and a few hundred other species swimming at our backdoor.

Marylanders tend to cop a superior attitude when talking about crabs, but in reality - from October through March - a large portion of what they are eating in and around Baltimore is crab shipped from Mississippi waters.

Where southwestern Mississippi borders Louisiana, Cajun and Creole flavors seep into the cuisine. The food down here just tastes better than other parts of the country.

We might not have the cultural diversity of some of America's larger cities - most with four times the population of our state - but no one should ever make the mistake of selling us short.

Mississippi is a culinary melting pot. Greek immigrants are the forefathers of the restaurants in the capital city of Jackson. Italians fed the Delta in the 20th century.

Authentic Vietnamese cuisine is plentiful in cafes along the Gulf Coast where Croatian fishermen have long made the Gulf waters their workplace.

True Mexican fare is abundant across the 382 miles of dirt and pine trees located between Memphis and Mobile, and Japanese cuisine - using fresh seafood from Mississippi Gulf waters - is thriving in small towns that used to house only meat-and-three diners.

We do love our catfish and grits, but there is so much more to Mississippi, and it is here for the tasting.

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