A Side Order of Ham

While it is not often a considered point, you should be aware that grocery stores, thankfully, are a bastion of regionalism in a 21st century America that is becoming less regional and more national.  This nationalization is a process my father somewhat affectionately (okay, it’s more sarcastic than that) refers to as homogenization.  In other words, every place is starting to look like every other place, geography aside.  Sure Colorado doesn’t have an ocean and South Carolina doesn’t have 14,000 foot mountains, but the red brick strip mall with the Bed Bath and Beyond, Best Buy, and Borders are indistinguishable, save the meager landscaping that cooks in the asphalt fueled sun of the respective parking lot.

For some reason, grocery stores have at least superficially bucked this trend.  Even today, you can tell what part of the country you are in based on the grocery chains.  Out west, we have the Safeways and the King Soopers.  In the midwest, you have your Cub Foods, Red Owls (are they still around?), and Rainbow.  Down south, we have been provisioning our journey at Winn Dixies, Food Lions, Publix, and the greatest of all grocery store chain names: Piggly Wiggly. 

Names aside, these stores also deliver differences inside.  Sure you have all the big national brands of stuff, but you also have uniquely regional offerings.  Take sausages for example.  Now being a born Minnesotan, I happen to enjoy sausage (as if this statement need be made).  In Colorado you can get excellent Chorizo, made locally, that will bring forth sweat from a gringo’s brow merely upon opening the package.  Where else do you get Polska Kielbasa if you are not in the upper midwest?  In Louisiana, we found a tremendous smoky, spicy Andouille that made gumbo, breakfast eggs, and everything in between taste like the bayou. 

Winding your way through the aisles of an unknown grocery store is a mini exercise in trying to go native.  In a small way it is like arriving at the airport in a foreign country for the first time.  You have to be able to find your way around and get to where you are going.  In the south, this means you must navigate side orders.  Side orders are big business in the south.  In fact, they have whole restaurants built around the concept.  There are these dining establishments called “Meat and Threes,” in which you apparently hurriedly select some random main dish in order to get on with the serious business of choosing your 3 sides.  This can be a challenge because the choices are not minimal.  Everything from normal, well understood offerings such as mashed potatoes, fries, and vegetables, to things such as grits, collared greens, white beans and rice, and enough cole slaw and potato salad choices to stun an ox.  You got your mayonnaise based potato salad, your mustard based potato salad among many others, along with your creamy slaw, your vinegar slaw, and your yet to be identified by this northerner, southern slaw.

Yes, southerners take their sides seriously (as would be evidenced by their lingering feelings about the Civil War, or as the South Carolinians call it The Recent Unpleasantness).  This serious selection of side orders also appears in the grocery stores where you can walk past a cooler display the size of a Chevy one ton truck filled with nothing but sides (but you cannot find tortillas to go with your beans and rice, because that is not how you eat beans and rice here.  It is a different thing).  Folks, they are SIDE DISHES!  They are an accoutrement to the main offering.  They are the nifty afterthought you dig in to after you have stuffed yourself with a big cut of beef, pork, or chicken.  They are the dish you mention to your spouse on your drive home from the picnic: “say Helen, Ethel sure looks good after she got that goiter removed.  Oh, and did you taste the Johnson’s potato salad?  What is that spice they use?”

Strangely enough, at the same time we were discovering all these sides, we were discovering a great song while listening to XM Kids radio with Maggie.  The song is called Starfish and Coffee and was no doubt written by a frustrated southern restaurant menu designer looking for new side dish offerings.  It has become a favorite song of the trip and its refrain goes like this: “Starfish and coffee/maple syrup and jam/butterscotch clouds, tangerines/a side order of ham.”  No doubt there is some potential there for an intrepid southern restaurateur.

All kidding aside (get it?), these sides can make for seriously good eating.  When we arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, we were quickly steered towards a new restaurant in town called The Glass Onion.  This restaurant was apparently opened by some folks from New Orleans who were displaced by Katrina and decided to make a new home in Charleston.  If you go to Charleston, go there.  I quickly settled on braised pork belly with locally made Anson Mills grits, and collared greens.  Heaven.  For all you Iowa pork farmers reading this (yeah, right), this is what you should do with your pigs.  Forget bacon, give me a slab of bacon four inches thick.  Crispy on the outside, melts in your mouth tender on the inside.  This is not your “other white meat” low in fat, lean pork.  This is have your cardiologist on call pork, and in one bite you will see why they call it soul food.  Oh, and the grits, macaroni and cheese, collared greens, green peas, and rice where darn fine as well.

A quick word of warning, The Glass Onion’s menu is a side sneaky, in that it only purports to offer about 7 sides, which range from grits and greens to cornbread, homemade pickles and vegetables.  This is a ploy.  It is mere trickery.  For placed on another part of the menu there is a section entitled “Soups, Salads, and Other Stuff.”  This section is a hidden land for side orders.  In fact, there is only a single salad selection and 1 quasi-soup offering here: Gumbo.  Outside of that, there are more sides.  Deviled Farm Eggs are $ .75 each, fried chicken livers are 8 bucks or 5, depending on size.  And don’t forget the macaroni and cheese and french fries with béarnaise sauce, they are also available.  Serious sides y’all. 

Rather that sweat these differences (and you do sweat down here), we should rejoice in them!  You can still really find out where you are by how people fill their stomachs, and this is an activity I am really fond of, so it all works out very well.  While it may be true that we are becoming more and more homogenized, I have yet to find locally milled grits at Schaffer’s grocery store in Nisswa, Minnesota and we remain the better for it.