Inspired by Georgia
THE MEAL
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I’m so glad that I was able to make this meal during Black History Month! If you didn’t know, Georgia was the birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr. and other prominent leaders in the Civil Rights Movement.
Georgia is the largest state east of the Mississippi, and the youngest of the original Thirteen Colonies. Named for King George II, it’s home to the largest swamp in North America, but also granite mountains, timber forests, and a variety of other environments. The state nickname is “The Peach State,” and that’s certainly the first thing I think of when I think of Georgia, so I wasn’t surprised at all when peaches made up two components of this meal.
What I was surprised by was how small my grocery list was when it was time to make these foods! I really only had to buy buttermilk, sausage, tomatoes, and peaches. Everything else was pantry ingredients I already had! And it all turned out delicious—the epitome of Southern comfort food.
BUTTERMILK BISCUITS & SAUSAGE GRAVY
I’ve been wanting to make biscuits and gravy for years and just never got around to it. Making it from scratch was much easier than I thought and turned out even yummier than I expected!
They say biscuits and gravy have been around since the Revolutionary War. It was mostly made by sawmill workers in the Southern Appalachians, serving as a dense, calorie-rich, easy-to-make meal. All the ingredients–flour, pork, drippings, and milk–were affordable when other foods were scarce during wartime.
It’s since been adapted to include a variety of other ingredients, depending on where in the world you eat it! For this meal, though, I just stuck with the basics.
The biscuits only took three ingredients: self-rising flour, buttermilk, and butter! They didn’t need to rest or rise, and shaping them was a breeze. As you can see in the photo, I baked them in a cast-iron skillet so that the edges would touch and make soft sides. But you can also roll out the dough, cut out circles, and bake them on a baking sheet for nice round biscuits!
The gravy was only four ingredients: sausage, butter, flour, and milk. To make it, you just need to brown the sausage, then use the drippings and a little extra butter to make a roux with the flour, add milk, and let it simmer until thickened! It was SO EASY but was so delicious and filling. I can completely understand why this became a popular meal to feed Georgian families. 10/10 would make again.
FRIED TOMATOES
So when I was looking up popular foods in Georgia, fried green tomatoes kept popping up, second only to peaches. But then later I found out that they aren’t traditionally a Southern food after all! Fried tomatoes were brought to the U.S. by Jewish immigrants and were most common in the midwest and northeast. It wasn’t until the 1991 movie “Fried Green Tomatoes” sent movie fans to Georgia looking for the dish that Southern restaurants started making them more consistently!
So maybe they’re not a super authentic part of an iconic Georgia meal, but they are common enough now that I don’t feel too bad about it. Wherever they’re made, it’s usually to make use of green tomatoes that need to be culled from the vine either because of oncoming frost or just because there are too many to eat when ripe.
As you can see in my photos, I wasn’t able to find real green tomatoes. It’s February. But lucky for me, store-bought tomatoes are never very ripe or flavorful anyway. I found the least ripe tomatoes in the pile, and they worked just fine!
Making fried tomatoes is pretty simple—you just cut them thin, sprinkle them with salt to draw out moisture, let them sit, then pat them dry. Batter them with egg and a bread crumb/cornmeal mixture, then pan fry them. That’s it! Traditionally they’re fried in bacon grease, and some people eat them on BLTs, which sounds amazing. I’ll have to try that sometime. I’ve probably already mentioned this, but one of my least-favorite foods is cooked tomatoes, so I wasn’t sure if I’d like these. They weren’t my favorite, but they were fried and crispy, so that made them pretty enjoyable to eat! They’re a decent snack, especially if you do like cooked tomatoes!
PEACH SODA
As mentioned before, Georgia’s nickname is “The Peach State.” Peaches are the state fruit. However, Georgia isn’t the biggest producer of peaches, and peaches aren’t Georgia’s most lucrative crop or anything. Georgia does grow peaches, but the main reason why they’re associated with them is because Georgia needed to do some heavy rebranding after the abolition of slavery. They had to switch their focus from cotton to something with less negative connotations, and they settled on peaches.
Nehi Peach Soda is a soft drink invented by Claud A. Hatcher in Georgia in the 1920s. There are several other flavors of Nehi soda, but of course I had to go with peach! Making this soda was pretty similar to other sparkling drinks I’ve made so far—I just made a syrup with peaches and sugar water, then topped it off with sparkling water to make a “soda.” It was pretty good! My peaches were frozen so they didn’t have the strongest flavor, but it was still a nice drink to go with the meal.
(P.S. Coca-Cola was also invented in Georgia, so that would have worked for this meal too!)
PEACH COBBLER
My main use of peaches was with the dessert, which just so happens to be one of my favorite desserts ever!! Peach cobbler is so named because it was a pie “cobbled” together with canned fruit and clumps of biscuit dough. It was especially popular in the western frontier, made in Dutch ovens (the way my family makes it on camping trips). It’s gooey, syrupy, buttery, and amazing, especially with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, which I forgot for the photos but ate with the cobbler later!
Peach cobbler is associated with Georgia again because of branding. In an effort to sell more canned peaches in the 1950s, the Georgia Peach Council declared April 13th National Peach Cobbler Day. It’s now considered a classic Southern dessert, though its popularity is much more wide-spread throughout the country.
This was the most time-consuming part of the meal but still super easy—it just takes a long baking time to soften and caramelize the peaches and crisp the biscuit dough on top. It’s mostly a hands-off process, but the results are amazing. I’ve always loved peach cobbler and was so glad to have an excuse to make a pan all to myself. 🙂
How do you think I did? Let me know in the comments if you have any suggestions for improvement, and be sure to tune in next time for my take on a meal inspired by South Carolina! If that’s where you’re from, what do you think I should make to represent your state? Bonus points if you have reliable recipes or pro tips before I make the attempt! Thank you for reading!