They have never been ones to throw out the baby or the bathwater when it came to simmering greens or the venerable black-eyed pea, that glorious legume that attests to the South's essential unity by being celebrated from Athens, Texas to Hard Scrabble, Virginia. They wisely refuse to drain out all the goodness from a mess of vegetables in the pot, before serving it, as any average white woman will. As long as there's some smidgin of a soul-food approach to the cooking of vegetables in any Southern kitchen, you're safe. And then there are creamed vegetables no, wait. I'm talking about such things as blanching salsify, oyster-plant, and then making a cassoulet of the vegetable in a cream sauce.
Southern cooking means seafood, too.
But I won't. What I will say is that Southern cuisine, properly understood, is a function of Southern history for good and ill, the result of a synthesis of cultures even in the worst of conditions, and always fundamentally representative of the land and waters of the Southland. It's all a matter of roots, and as long as Southern food stays close to those roots and doesn't try to get above or go back on its raising, it's the best vittles a man ever got his own self outside of. Clocked if you feel daring. Judah P. Benjamin, variously Secretary of War, Attorney General, and Secretary of State for the Confederacy.