Can lemon chess pie solve all of America's problems? It might be just a teeny-tiny stretch, but anyone who's eaten a slice of this heavenly pie would not discount it.
I was flipping through a new issue of Bon Appétit magazine (which, friends will tell you, makes up a significant percentage of my leisure reading material, along with Martha Stewart Living), when I stumbled upon an article about the peace-enabling properties of Georgia's barbeque. The evidence? The author's experience reporting on a protest against the School of the Americas, which has allegedly supported a number of South American dictators. The author befriended a riot police officer, who pointed her toward the nearest joint, where she ate chopped pork and hand-cut fries.
The South is an interesting place, a seemingly monolithic entity to outsiders who are overcome with nostalgia for lush green plantation homes, sweet tea, church picnics, and chicken-fried steak. I grew up right on the border of the South and the North, eight miles south of Washington, D.C., in a place unsure about its cultural heritage.
When I was young, I was emphatically "not from the South," although my mother's family comes from North Carolina, where my grandmother still lives (and bakes). If anyone asked, I was from northern Virginia, a place demographically and geographically distinct from the rest of the state. School field trips involved outings to the Air and Space Museum, where I ate astronaut ice cream, but also to Williamsburg, Va., and Richmond, where we saw Jefferson Davis' house and talked about Arthur Ashe. I'm embarrassed to say that my 9-year-old self preferred freeze-dried sweets every time.
Now, though, I'm not so sure. We have Granny's homemade sweet pickles in the fridge, which I eat with relish (pun intended) and which are an aberration to anyone from North of the Mason-Dixon Line. Lobster remains a complete mystery to me, but give me crab cakes, a shrimp boil with corn on the cob, and some Old Bay, and I'm set.
The South is providing a wealth of new inspiration to writers and chefs, artists and musicians, as evidenced by Nashville's cultural renaissance and the increasing number of fried chicken shops popping up in New York City and elsewhere. People might be searching for a "simpler life," which the South supposedly offers, and as Bon Appétit editor Adam Rappaport says, being a card-carrying Southerner is suddenly cool (and I guess my Virginia driver's license, with its dogwood hologram, kind of counts), so I'm falling victim to this trend as well.
I won't romanticize the region too much, though. According to The New York Times, unemployment in the South is higher than in the Midwest or the Northeast, and racism—as evidenced by emerging trends in structural resegregation in some public schools—still exists in certain pockets of the region (though this can also be said about parts of the country). If they keep voting for Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, Southerners won't help any of the many social and economic issues plaguing the United States, but I might forgive them a little bit for just one more slice of pie.