Deep fried

I routinely tell people that the South leads the world in all kinds of health problems directly related to what we eat ’cause the South has the best food in the world.

People come from all over the world to eat Southern food and when they do, they get plenty. I’m told you can go to restaurants in New York City and spend more than $100 and get two jumbo shrimp.

I’ve watched “Iron Chef” a time or two. Lemme be a judge on that show. They’d set down a plate the size of a hubcab with a single pea on top of a piece of chicken skinnier than a chicken toe in the middle with some kind of “sauce” drizzled on it.

“This ain’t food. Somebody sneezed, is what happened. Now git back in the kitchen and fry me some chicken, put a half a hog in the pot with the peas and get me some cathead biscuits and sweet tea,” I’d say. 

For $100 in the South, you can get a bushel of shrimp, oysters, 20 pounds of catfish and probably a date with the cook who’s never been inside a culinary institute but can out-cook any professional chef and I’ll give whatever kind of odds you want on that. 

A lot of our food is fried. Fried is a food group. If God didn’t want us to eat fried food, we wouldn’t have fish cookers and be able to buy peanut oil in 5-gallon buckets. If God didn’t want us to eat fried food, we would not have catfish and chicken gizzards & livers.  

Southerners will fry anything. Dad once commented the late Soup Lindsey “would eat anything rolled in corn meal and fried. You could fry a corn cob and Soup would eat it.” Larry “Hawgin'” Fishbreath actually ate part of a fried corn cob. He ran out of ketchup and so wouldn’t finish it.

Recently, Ashburn had its annual Fire Ant Festival. This is important because it allowed me to indulge in one of the greatest foods on the planet – Deep Fried Oreo cookies. Excuse me. Deep-fried Oreos may well be the GREATEST food on the planet. My arteries are hardening at the very thought.

How many I ate is none of your business.

The key, so the lady told me as she fried up a stack of Oreos for me, is the batter. It’s not just any batter. It’s a special funnel cake batter she orders. No, she didn’t tell me where it came from. The Oeros are rolled in the batter, dropped in hot grease and fried until brown. They are yanked out, lightly coated with powdered sugar and – dang,  now I’m hungry.

Fried Oreos are not the only deep-fried food you can get these days. I have personally fried Snickers and avoided dill pickles. Once you’ve had a properly fried Snickers, you’ll never want another plain Snickers bar. I have eaten and fried bushels of green tomatoes, but I must tell you that the very best fried green maters are the little ones, about the size of a silver dollar. Cut ’em thin and fry ’em up. You will never want any other kind of fried green tomato.

I recently heard about fried cheeseburgers. But I must tell you this is not completely new. Years and years ago, Ellenton Baptist Church was having a supper meeting. We were cooking fish. One of the young’uns who did not like fish hauled a case of frozen hamburgers out of the freezer. Before anyone could stop him, he’d dropped a stack of frozen ground round into the hot grease.

It was good too. The burgers had a slight fishy taste.

What is new, to me anyway, is deep frying the whole thing. The burger is assembled, including buns and condiments. It’s tied together with string, dipped in batter and deep-fried.

I know what I’m having for supper.