OT: What is....

From wikipedia...

Hoppin' John is the Southern United States' version of the rice and beans dish traditional throughout the Caribbean. It consists of field peas or crowder peas (black-eyed peas) and rice, with chopped onion and sliced bacon, seasoned with a bit of salt.[1] Some people substitute ham hock or fatback for the conventional bacon; a few use green peppers or vinegar and spices. Smaller than black-eyed peas, field peas are used in the Low Country of South Carolina and Georgia; black-eyed peas are the norm elsewhere.

Throughout the coastal South, eating Hoppin' John on New Year's Day is thought to bring a prosperous year filled with luck,[2] and it's eaten by everyone.[3] The peas are symbolic of pennies or coins, and a coin is sometimes added to the pot or left under the dinner bowls.[4] Collard greens along with this dish are supposed to also add to the wealth since they are the color of money. [5] On the day after New Year's Day, leftover "Hoppin' John" is called "Skippin' Jenny," and further demonstrates one's frugality, bringing an even better chance of prosperity in the New Year, it is hoped. [6] [7]

amy > Hoppin' John???

It's a black eye pea 'n' rice dish, a New Year's tradition in the deep south.

For those of us whose kinfolk came from a bit more westerly (namely, Oklahoma, SW Missouri and such) it's still black eyed peas for luck on New Year's Day, but cooked with whatever pork bits fit one's budget (hamhocks, sausage, ham, salt pork) and dished up over cornbread---at least in my family, meaning cornBREAD, not cornCAKE. (In other words, not *sweet* cornbread, which I find an utter baffling substance.)

The rice combination with the peas seems to require one (or one's kinfolk or one's ancestors) live closer to the coast than mine did; rice as a staple historically is a bit more coastal. (Ain't nobody ever accused Oklahoma of being any kind of coastal. :)

--pig

Oh my, Megan, you're absolutely right. On our travels we never ever choose cornbread or cake when very far away from our coast. They do indeed load it with so much sugar that you wonder why they don't put a chocolate frosting on it. Which, I guess, might be interesting but would not be cornbread. It's easy to entertain old folks and we do enjoy people-watching. We can easily identify who's from where just by their choices at a breakfast buffet. Anybody that puts 'white' gravy on anything tells right away where they're from. To us, flour that's not browned beautifully in a roux is raw. Probably a ridiculous mindset but still inedible. Polly

What on earth is WHITE GRAVY? And why would one have gravy for breakfast?

Gravy is made with the juices from the roast meat, and varies from rich gold with chicken and pork, to rich dark brown with roast beef and lamb. While a cold roast beef sandwich makes a fine breakfast, I can't see eating that with gravy. Breakfast steaks, chops and sausages get tomatoes and mushrooms with them, but not gravy.

In the South we often fry either bacon, or sausages patties for breakfast and I make gravy from the greese/fat that is left in the pan.

Gravy

hot greese sprinkle in flour and stir until brown pour in about a cup of milk continue stiring until thick spoon over hot biscuits, or sausage, or eggs

I love good white gravy, preferably over grits or biscuits [homemade of course!] Best I ever had was at 4AM at a Skelly truck stop in Oklahoma, while hauling my racehorses to Chicago from Los Angeles "back in the day"

G> In the South we often fry either bacon, or sausages patties for breakfast

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On Wed, 7 Jan 2009 02:15:05 -0600, Kate XXXXXX wrote (in article ):

Cream gravy made in the pan with sausage drippings. Sometimes includes the sausage or ham in it. Yummy over biscuits in the morning.

Maureen

I make my white gravy the 'low fat' way- no drippings for me! I use butter to start the roux! LOL

Leslie & The Furbabies in 'we LOVE Sausage Gravy and Biscuits' MO.

'Biscuits' being more like scones than cookies... OK...

Sounds like 'white gravy' is just an ordinary white roux sauce, the sort of thing we hurl cheese into and pour over cauliflower, turn green with parsley to go with steamed white fish, or make sweet and add chocolate to and pour over steamed chocolate pudding. Can't remember the last time I made it plain. I cannot imagine making it for breakfast and pouring it over bacon and scones. But then again, I come from a family where on Boxing Day the remains of the traditional Christmas Pudding got fried with the bacon and mushrooms for breakfast. Old Scots habit that. Very yum, but probably equally bad for the arteries and colesterol levels!

It wouldn't do at all if we were all the same, would it?

So a sort of white sauce made with sausage fat?

Sally at the Seaside~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~uk

Maureen Wozniak wrote:

ok, i Have had that, then...my granny called it something else..cant remember what, but it is one of my fav's. and i LOVE white gravy....my dad was from W. Va. and he loved it so much, he had to have his gallbladder out!!!

amy in CNY

I am from/ in Texas, You made me laugh when you made reference to rice being a "coastal" staple... I grew up in and around Houston, not too far from rice fields and not far from the coast... Although potato dishes were important, Rice dishes are prevalent.

I moved my little family up to the North East area of Texas,(south of Durant, OK) and most people up here eat their beans with pan fried potatoes, even in restaraunts! These potatoes are what I know and love as Cottage fries... It was so funny, we were helping some friends move, and the "FEED the HELPERS" dish were BEANS and Potatoes!... my famished growing boys knew beans were on the lunch menu and were looking forward to a filling meal...of BEANS and RICE and cornbread as a side... When bowls of beans were dished up with potatoes on the side, the boys started looking for the pot of RICE... they were so confused! this sparked a conversation about the regional differences in cooking...

Up here lots of people like scrambled eggs and Pork-N-Beans for breakfast... what's up with that??? !!!!!!

and cornbread, we love cornbread, we will eat cornbread for breakfast crumbled up in a bowl with milk and sugar(if the cornbread isn't already sweet enough) and heated up if in the mood

Colisa

People over here tend to think that the USA is the same all over... I know, on an intelectual level, that that is impossible, but it is nice to have it confirmed. I love these little local differences.

It shocked me that 'curry' was served in college (Co Durham, NE England) with chips and veg as well as the rice... To me 'curry' is something you serve with rice and naan bread, and little dishes of what we came to know as 'tukka-tukka' - chopped fruit, raisins, chutneys, grated coconut, various other things like cucumber rhaita... Not sure of the derivation of the term: it may be African rather than Indian, developed by the cross-fertilization process caused by imperial influences in the

19th C importing Indian civil servants to places like Kenya and Uganda. It came to us from an aunt who lived in Nairobi.

I'm from California originally and had the bacon version made just this way with biscuits and eggs while I was growing up. It's long been a family favorite but my oldest daughter now makes hers with sausage.

Judie

I remember having a friend in college who was a Sikh - complete with turban, and being horrified when he chose to have chips with his curry in the college restaurant.

He returned to India eventually and I always wondered if he had chips there too!

Sally at the Seaside~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~uk

Kate XXXXXX wrote:

So if tomorrow I decided to ring the changes for dinner and have Grits and Sausages (I still have some Grits left), I presume I fry the sausages (which will be the English variety locally made), make the gravy as below, (with my fingers firmly crossed) and serve with the Grits boiled (a bit like Couscous) and the gravy poured on top?

What do we have with them - anything else to make it authentic? I do know that your biscuits are our scones, and that our biscuits are your cookies!

Sally at the Seaside~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~uk

G> I love good white gravy, preferably over grits or biscuits [homemade > of course!]

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