Southern Veggies

When I was a kid, we didn’t call them Southern vegetables. They were just vegetables.

In our family, we would hop into the car after church on Sunday and drive across town to my grandparents’ house, where we would spend the afternoon with Nannie and Pop. We would start with dinner, prepared by my grandmother and made up of the most delicioius vegetables you can imagine—stewed tomatoes, squash, lima beans, cornbread, mashed potatoes and gravy.

Afterward, my brother, sister, and I would play games and explore the neighborhood, but dinner was the main event. 

A few years after that we moved to Los Angeles, returning each summer to visit my grandparents and, of course, their vegetables. My mother tried her best to maintain Nannie’s tradition of Southern veggies, and she succeeded for a while. However, WeightWatchers did her in, and soon we were eating salads instead of fried chicken.

Years later, my wife Yvonne and I moved from Los Angeles back to Nashville and encountered something new that was really something old. The locals called it meat and three—a choice of one meat and three vegetables from a list of, you guessed it, Southern veggies. Some of the best meat-and-three restaurants were Arnold’s, Swett’s, Elliston Place Soda Shop, Sylvan Park.   

New arrivals to Nashville enjoyed this new food tradition. Whenever I saw them order it, I smiled. I suspect that Nannie did, too.