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Ambrosia Coconut A special-occasion salad, especially suitable for Thanksgiving dinner. This is popular throughout not only the South, but the Midwest as well, where it is also known as Millionaire Salad because of the luxurious nature of its ingredients.
Angel Biscuits Leavened with yeast, these biscuits are airier and lighter than the traditional biscuit that comes with breakfast. They make a great choice for the breadbasket at supper time.
Baked Beans The folks at the Dutch Kitchen especially recommend baked beans for summer's patriotic holidays. "What would be a typical picnic day for many is often celebrated at the Dutch Kitchen with family & friends."
Baked Vidalia Onions These tender, cheese-frosted globes of sweet onion dress up dinner the way a top hat crowns a formal suit. And yet, the moment you lay knife or fork to one, it unravels all over your plate and looks a horrid mess. The good news is that the mess is entirely delicious, and its textural balance of silky-tender onion and crumbly cheese and croutons is sheer pleasure on the tongue.
Basic Risotto Risotto was virtually unknown in America until a few decades ago, but it has become one of the most popular items on fine Italian restaurant menus. It is also called Arborio rice, and it differs from ordinary rice in that it is always slow-cooked with flavored broth (and sometimes other ingredients) until it attains a thick, creamy consistency and the rice is saturated with the flavors of its cooking media.
Black-Eyed Peas Black-eyed peas are a familiar sight on the Southern table – a good companion for country steak and mashed potatoes or a welcome fourth on an all-vegetable plate of collard greens, stewed apples, and okra. They are an essential dish for New Year's celebrations, as eating them will bring you good luck for the next twelve months.
Broccoli Salad A great dish for broccoli lovers, for here the florets retain their snap and flavor as they are highlighted by a bath of oil, garlic and lemon juice. The peppers and Kalamata olives make it a beauty.
Buttermilk Biscuits The only real way to learn how to make good biscuits is to apprentice with someone who knows how. Their art is less a matter of ingredients (which are generally uninteresting) than in technique, which is deceptively simple. This classic recipe for buttermilk biscuits is simple and easy; but give it to five cooks and you will get five different biscuits, each with its own character. The difference primarily is in how the dough is handled, or more exactly, how little the dough is handled. Generally speaking, the less kneading, the fluffier the biscuit. Please note that the recipe calls for SELF-RISING flour. Plain flour will yield biscuits that look like shot-glass coasters.
Caesar Salad The reason many restaurants make Caesar salad as a tableside event is that it never should be mixed in advance. If not served immediately, Caesar salad can get watery and its romaine leaves limp. Caesar dressing is customarily made in a large wooden bowl that serves as a kind of mortar for crushing the garlic and anchovies together. It is also possible to make the dressing separately and combine it with the lettuce just before serving.
Clam Cakes Clam cakes make any seafood meal sing. Serve them alongside fisherman's stews such as cioppino or bouillabaisse, or along with grilled salmon or swordfish or halibut. For a less ambitious meal, you hardly need a main course. Simply serve clam cakes and chowder or lobster stew, with strawberry shortcake or wild blueberry pie for dessert. There you have a genuine summertime Downeast feast!
Coffee Jell-O Talk about weird! ... and pretty wonderful in an old Yankee sort of way. Durgin-Park, the dowager of Beantown eateries, has been serving coffee Jell-O for as long as anyone there can remember. We guess it was invented as a matter of thrift: why throw away yesterday's coffee when you can make Jell-O from it? It is surprisingly unlike normal Jell-O, just barely sweet and, preferably, with a caffeine kick. Fresh whipped cream is an essential topping.
Collard Greens Of all the vegetables served at the buffet line of the Blue Willow Inn, proprietor Louis Van Dyke may give the most thought to collard greens, which he calls, "God's gift to the South." He believes that they are always best when cooked a day ahead, chilled and reheated – a process that gives them the opportunity to mellow, and for the good pork flavor to thoroughly infuse the leaves.
Corn Pudding Here is one of the greatest cold-weather party recipes in the world, a side dish that goes with almost any sort of roast, shrimp casserole, or chile. It is the most-requested recipe that we’ve ever served, and guests who try it once demand it on return trips. We learned it from an old pal, Ippy Patterson, who learned it from a lady she knew in San Francisco.
Cornbread Biscuits From the Blue Willow Inn, here is a recipe that makes biscuits ideal for crumbling atop a heap of collard greens or into a bowl of pot likker.
Cornbread or Corn Muffins There are two warm-bread drawers always filled in the buffet room of The Blue Willow Inn of Social Circle, Georgia. On the top are biscuits. On the bottom are corn muffins. The corn muffins have a starchy sweetness that is an especially good complement for ham, pork chops, or streak o' lean.
Country Cornbread Other than buttermilk biscuits and red-eye gravy, country ham's best companion is a corn cake. Known throughout the mid-south as cornbread, it is a batter-based circle of steamy starchiness that is griddle-cooked just like a morning pancake. It comes on the side of many meat-and-three meals and serves as a wonderful sop for pushing through gravy of any kind. Most Southern cooks use White Lily self-rising flour and self-rising corn meal; but if you can't get them, it's almost as easy to use baking powder and soda, as follows. This recipe makes 8-10 cakes.
Country Ham Biscuit Vandyland was a counter-and-booth sweet shop near Vanderbilt University in Nashville; a staff member once told us that its name came about when the owners bought what was then called Candyland and wanted to change signs with minimal expense. It was the ham biscuit that first won our hearts to this place, which finally closed its doors in 2006: classic buttermilk biscuits sandwiching sizzled pieces of quarter-inch thick country ham, each slice rimmed with amber fat.
Fried Green Tomatoes Fried green tomatoes are especially dear to the people at the Blue Willow Inn because it was this dish that made them famous. A few months after opening, when they were still struggling to make ends meet, humorist Louis Grizzard came to dine in Social Circle. He was thrilled to find a restaurant that actually served the hard-to-find delicacy of fried green tomatoes, an old-fashioned dish his grandmother used to make. After eating ten slices, he wrote a column about them. "incredibly pleasing," he declared.
Fried Okra The full name of Ruth & Jimmie's, of Abbeville, Mississippi, was Ruth & Jimmie's Sporthing Goods & Cafe. Here you could buy a rod and reel, shotgun shells, live bait, gas from the pumps out front, and sacks of White Lily flour for making biscuits. And you could also have a great meat-and-three lunch. Ruth & Jimmie's is long-gone now, but we recall the old wood-frame shop every time we make the crunchy fried okra for which they supplied the recipe.
Garlic Mashed Potatoes The only two reasons we would consider NOT ordering garlic mashed potatoes with a Harry Caray’s steak are the alternative Vesuvio potatoes and the huge baked potatoes that are also available. Despite such temptations, mashed spuds are impossible to resist, especially if you get a whiff of an order being carried from the kitchen past your table.
Garlic Mozzarella Bread Chef Sissy Hicks of Vermont's Dorset Inn described this extra-luxurious garlic bread as "everybody's favorite." It's a good side dish for all sorts of meals or, with soup and a salad, a wonderful lunch
Giardiniera For many Italian beef eaters in Chicago, a lode of giardiniera atop the beef is as essential as the beef itself. Our recipe includes the "sport peppers" that are so popular at Chicago's beef and hot dog stands, but any small, very hot pepper will do. Obviously adjust this to your taste ... but giardiniera should not be mild!
Green Beans "In the South, mama always canned green beans from the garden," says Louis Van Dyke of the Blue Willow Inn. "That is why we always used canned green beans, even when fresh-from-the garden are available. "People come to the Blue Willow Inn to eat food like mama or grandmother made; and when it comes to beans, they have to be canned."
Haystack Potatoes We first heard hash browns called haystack potatoes at a great steak dinner in a tavern/restaurant called The Gardens in Walnut, Iowa. You can make these as crisp and crusty or soft as you wish.
Hopkins House Apple Salad The Hopkins House, famous for old-fashioned, eat-til-it-ouches boarding house meals, is no more. But during our last visit in 2003, we watched Margaret Pope and her son Mike cutting apples into chunks in the kitchen, then later sat down at the lunch table to discover the salad they were preparing. We love this concoction, not only for its brazen sugar content, but as culinary contraband – hail the Maraschino cherry! – and also because it exemplifies the candidly sweet (and canned-ingredient) salad found at so many southern buffet tables.
Horseradish Pickles Garnishing every plate at Porubsky's in Topeka, Kansas, are hot-hot pickles. They start as briney dills, then get doctored up as follows. Serve them with sandwiches, or as they do at Porubsky's, chopped up on top of chili!
Hot Bacon Dressing Dandelion greens topped with hot bacon dressing is a true Pennsylvania Dutch specialty. When the dandelion greens are not in season, a nice tossed salad will do. Many people like this salad before a hearty serving of Turkey Pot Pie.
Hush Puppies Hush puppies are a traditional companion for fried seafood throughout the South, and in eastern North Carolina, they come with barbecue. But there is no law you can't also serve them with a bowl of gumbo or of chowder from the Pacific Northwest or the Northeast. This recipe was inspired by the hushpups we at at a restaurant called the Catfish Place in St. Cloud, Florida.
Macaroni and Cheese The South is not unique in its love for macaroni and cheese, one of the true all-American comfort foods. At the Blue Willow Inn, it is one of the few items served every day, every meal.
Orange Salad Now run by a third generation of the family that started it in the 1930s, Carbone’s, of Hartford, Connecticut, is a deluxe restaurant, especially in the evening when the dining room is lit up by the pyrotechnics of tableside presentations of everything from steak Diane to bocce ball dessert. Perhaps the best loved dish in the house is Sicilian orange salad, so well-known to regular customers that it isn’t even listed on the menu!
Pesto Sauce Originally from Genoa, pesto is named for the pestle traditionally used to grind up basil leaves with garlic as the basis of the verdant sauce.
Spinach Cornbread Greens and cornbread go together as well as ham and eggs. This recipe, given to The Blue Willow Inn by Kitty Jacobs of Guidelines, Georgia, conjoins them in a luscious pan-loaf that is moist, high-flavored … and good for you!
Stewed Apples We had always liked desserts of apple pie, apple crisp, apple dumplings, and apple brown Betty, but didn't really know about having a side dish of stewed apples until we ate in the South. We have come to appreciate the luxury of tender, long-cooked apples as great companion for pig meat in of any kind – country ham, pork chops, even barbecue – and especially welcome as a syrup-sweet balance for bitter greens or tangy green tomatoes on an all-vegetable plate.
Tomato Chutney Nothing complements fried green tomatoes as well as this sweet relish, which takes full advantage of the ripe tomato's fruity nature. It is vivid red, a beautiful complement to the deep green color of the fried tomatoes inside their crust. This chutney is a great companion for almost any other fried, tangy, or savory food.
Waldorf Salad Hob Nob Hill in San Diego is one of the most polite, and most delicious coffee shops we know. With dinner, diners get a choice of salad: Waldorf, Caesar, spinach, etc. All come with a chilled fork! This recipe isn't actually Hob Nob Hill's, but it is the traditional way to make this kinda swanky salad, and Hob Nob Hill is all about tradition.
Yeast Rolls Any worthy southern meal offers a breadbasket, not just one kind of bread. At The Blue Willow Inn, you can always count on corn muffins and buttermilk biscuits; but for mopping gravy, sometimes a soft yeast roll is essential.