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Originally Posted by DNSB
Do red beans and rice, crawfish étouffée and jambalaya in New Orleans count as rice in the southern States? I remember enjoying them on a couple of trips pre-Katrina (along with quite a few other memorable meals).
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Yes, they do!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dr. Drib
I've never liked rice, and culturally it's not part of a Southerners' diet (U.S.A.).
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Apache
As a child I remember my grandmother fixing chicken and rice and have always considered it a southern dish. It is prepared like chicken and dumplings except you use rice.
Apache
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Dr. Drib's personal experience is atypical for the American South, as rice has been an integral part of a Southerner's diet in the USA since the
Middle Passage stage of the African slave trade (ca. 1600-1800). Jocelyne Sambira discusses this topic in her AfricaRenewal article published by the United Nations, titled "
Slave trade: How African foods influenced modern American cuisine":
Quote:
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[...] many do not acknowledge Africa’s contribution to the American cuisine. Can you imagine America without rice? Most of North Carolina’s economy is based on rice production. This grain used to be called the “Carolina Gold” but the real story of how it arrived in the Americas is very interesting. During slavery, people were plucked from rice-producing regions. Casamance, a region in the South of Senegal where my parents are from originally, is one of them. There were several raids there to find slaves who knew how to cultivate rice and they were shipped to the Carolinas or Mexico. The grain never existed in these regions before the arrival of slaves. There are two “families” of rice in the world. One of them is from Asia and the other from Africa. The African rice, whose scientific name is oryza glaberrima arrived in the Americas on the slave ships. That is why the “middle passage” or journey of slaves from the African coast to Europe is important because it helped transform the culinary landscape of the Americas. It’s a part of history that is not talked about often.
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Yummly, for example, lists
2,227 "southern style rice" recipes which include include various protein-and-rice dishes (such as chicken and rice as Apache mentioned, and/or rice with beans, red meats, seafoods, vegetables),
Hoppin' John, rice-as-a-dessert dishes (such as rice pudding, called "sombi" in Senegal), and a variety of Cajun, Creole, Southwestern, and Tex-Mex dishes (although some people categorize those last cuisines separately from "Southern" cuisine, despite their regional anchors in the American South).