4.17.2006

Country Sauce

I like "country" food, the food i grew up on: bacon, eggs, grits, pancakes, sausage, pimento cheese sandwiches, white bread, barbeque, potato salad, fried chicken, meatloaf, turnip greens, mustard greens, collard greens, mashed potatoes, country ham.

i'm proud of that food, and i relish in, what to some folks, is the "wierdness" of it. I like remembering sunday dinners at mama dene's (my paternal grandmother)house when we would have country ham with red eye gravy. i think it's cool that i got a chance to eat that food, as cooked by a real native, without a single hint of irony.

"You want some more red eye gravy?"
"Yes, please."

You'll notice that the list above has quite a bit of pig in it. bacon, sausage, barbeque, country ham. Pigs are important. I like pigs. my mother's maiden name is pigg. I like associating with pigs--holding small pigs, going to see the big pigs at the state fair, hearing pigs grunt, watching pigs on reruns of Green Acres, frying up pieces of pigs in a skillet.

Well, last night Alison and i were at the local Pig (gly Wiggly) buying up a stock of groceries, and i noticed in the meat section a local product that i never seen before: i think it was called Country Sauce.

Everywhere all over this great land people use the t-total outta pigs. Pennsylvania has got scrapple, tennessee (and i guess other places) has souse or head cheese, Mexico has choriso, and on and on. Everything but the grunt.

Well, Country Sauce, even for this aficionado of all-things-pig, was pretty amusing. Here is the list of ingredients for Country Sauce:

Pork Snout, Pork Head Cheese, Pork Feet, Pork Cheek, Pork Tail...and the amazing last ingredient? simply "Pork."

Lawd-a-mercy!

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

What's for dinner grandpa?

Anonymous said...

[Anonymous 2]:

1) Where are the pork rinds and 2) is knowing about or having purchased picked pig's feet from a store a sufficient condition for being a country bumpkin. [i've only bought them once, but they're in the grocery store where i'm from].

Alison Piepmeier said...

an answer, full of irony for anon. #1:

last night we had proscuitto and caramelized pears on romaine lettuce.

and for #2:

i forgot the pork rinds. i like those ,too. however, and i say this with all respect, pork rinds, pickled pig's feet and those white buckets labelled "chitterlings" might be cause to bump one from regional "bumpkin" up to different ethnicity. (whenever i bought pork rinds and an r.c. at the food town back on lischey, i was always given props for "eatin' like a brother.")

Kenneth Burns said...

George H.W. Bush purported to like pork rinds, but that may just have been because he ran out of cucumber sandwiches.

Biffle said...

ALL Southern food is "eating like a brother."

Anonymous said...

Shredded BBQ pork is quite tasty. Used to eat pork rinds with my dad as a kid. Love homemade country ham bisquits. However, nothing tops (for me) green beans that have been pressured cooked for eight hours with a big ol' ham hock. - Sarah M.

The Mom said...

I ate pickled pigs feet purchased from a store when I was 5 or under with my teenage sister (Aunt Shirley - 11 years older than I) in rural Iowa...country is country is country in some things.

Anonymous said...

Ah! I had to leave most of the southern food I grew up with behind when I quit eating meat. But I noticed you didn't mention fried okra. Every summer I plant my own okra and then fry it and eat it in large quantities for lunch every day. As Charlie Shipley would say, "you can't beat that with a stick."

Anonymous said...

A little behind, but wanted to add my $.02 cents, anyway... [this is also not meant for casual dinner conversation, though I do believe it is historically correct]

Its one thing to buy pickeled pigs feet, but another to *make* them. You must buy [or even better, raise] a hog then clean and process it yourself to be *truly* country. An indicator of someone of genuine country origin is a cleaned, but stained wooden knife used for cleaning hogs. That's at least according to my grandmother, who would recount cleaning hogs and making sausage with cleaned intestines serving as the external portion. The ham and meat would also go in the smokehouse and be covered with a lot of salt for preservation.

Mike

mary said...

I missed out on the pig chat. darn. I always loved pork rinds growing up and... always hated how pigs feet looked wraped in plastic at the store.