Et tu, etouffée?

Back in New York, I still haven't written about the food Down South, which I wanted to do mainly so I could use the clever title (see clever title above).

So yes, there was etouffée. Both shrimp and crawfish were etoufféed for my pleasure (sic). This chiefly involves taking otherwise lovely shellfish (or shellbugs, in the case of the craws) and bathing them in fat and salt and browness. That all's then served over rice.

There was also a lot of pork products, which normally I'm all about, but they use parts of the pork-animal that aren't strictly edible. By people. The pulled pork, and the barbecue in general, is very good down there. As are the hush puppies, which if you've never had, you really should have. My favourite barbecue spot in the city is Virgil's in Times Square, which has both good barbecue and ridiculously good hish puppies (with maple butter dipping sauce), but that's pretty expensive. The barbecue down there is cheap, as is everything else--it's hard to beleive the difference in the costs of living.

I also ate a lot of fried okra. Okra's not a bad veggie, and was slime-free in my grandmother's preparation. A generous helping of pepper sauce went well with that, and ditto for the butter beans (which is what they call lima beans after taking one of the blandest, healthiest foods and adulterating it).

I ate a suprisingly large amount of not-surprisingly sub-par Chinese and Japanese food down there. I'm not sure why they even try. And prepared food from Wal*Mart.

The best foodstuffs had to be the fig preserves my grandmother had lying around. I ended up putting them on anything that the pepper sauce didn't go on.