John T. Edge, who writes the United Tastes series on American cuisine for The New York Times, is answering readers’ questions and comments this week. Here’s the first batch:
Q: Is there a difference between country and chicken fried steak? And is one considered more authentically Southern?
John T. Edge replies: Country fried steak is, usually, battered and fried beef, smothered in gravy and simmered until solid crust and liquid gravy fuse. It’s a pan-Southern dish. Chicken fried steak is more specifically Texan. It’s pounded beef (oftentimes round), salted and peppered and battered and fried in a manner commonly ascribed to chicken. It’s almost always topped with or served alongside a puddle of creamy gravy.
Q: In Knoxville, Tenn., steamed sandwiches are prevalent and celebrated to a degree not seen elsewhere in the South, or the US for that matter. The Lincoln Fresh-O-Matic steamer seems to be the favored apparatus for this preparation, but I’m more curious as to how this sandwich gained popularity in Knoxville, which had numerous delis and shops serving up their own versions. Vick & Bill’s, Sam & Andy’s and Gus’s Good Times Deli come to mind as a few Knoxville outposts specializing in this Knoxville specialty. — John Scruggs
John T. Edge replies: Sounds like a talented steamer salesman hit Knoxville hard. Steamers are embraced elsewhere. Your story reminds me of the steamed cheeseburgers that appear to be omnipresent in south-central Connecticut. When I was writing my burger book I met a guy named Bob Giattani who sold something somewhat similar, the New England Cheeseburger Chest, which turned a hunk of cheese into a blob of oozing orange goo.
Q: A fellow Maconite here, wondering about Georgia-style barbecue sauce. My husband’s family was visiting from California (they are native New Yorkers) and we took them to the Jot ‘em Down barbecue shack here in Athens. We were all thrilled to try the seven or so different sauces that they offered (in squirt bottles at the table); most of them were variations on Georgia-style sauce, that is, very vinegary. (There was also one mustard-based sauce, and one that was thick with ketchup.) My father-in-law wondered if the vinegar was used, early on, as some kind of preservative, or if Georgians just had some kind of predilection for sour stuff. — Anne in Athens
John T. Edge replies: Defining Georgia barbecue sauce is tough. John Shelton Reed — who, along with his wife Dale Reed and a colleague William McKinney, wrote a recent book, “Holy Smoke,” on North Carolina bbq — once said “Southern barbecue is the closest thing we have in the U.S. to Europe’s wines or cheese; drive a hundred miles and the barbecue changes.” In other words, there is no definitive Georgia barbecue sauce. When it comes to sauce, there are mutations of mutations and they vary county by county. Same deal with Alabama bbq sauce. And Arkansas. And so on. All that said, middle Georgia bbq sauces tend toward a vinegar-ketchup mix, comparable to the sauces of the piedmont of North Carolina.
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