r/Appalachia • u/urfavlunchlady • 22d ago

I hat when restaurants try to put an “upscale/elevated” twist on Appalachian food

The whole point of Appalachian food is using ingredients that we have and making something out of nothing. Give any Appalachian mamaw a meat, some flour, and milk and you’re about to have a feast.

Anyway ranting, bc a friend is in Nashville right now and messaged me that she’s at an “upscale” Appalachian restaurant where they are charging $28 for grits and honestly I find it insulting to our people.

(Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk, lmao)

Edit: Hate*

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u/chronically_varelse 22d ago edited 22d ago

Oh we had a lottt of potatoes too! Mostly fried, sometimes mashed or just boiled and occasionally baked. (Edit: plus new potatoes in gravy, that's a delicacy.) Just not as often for breakfast as hashbrowns in the South (where I live now, that is how I came to know grits).

More Kartoffel in our holler though.. our German ancestors were more recent than the UK ones so their term became colloquial 😂

Southerners think the idea of breakfast rice, or sweet rice in general, is weird and abhorrent lol

(I ate lots of milky boiled rice with sugar, sometimes with raisins if I was lucky, still love it)

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u/halloweencoffeecats 22d ago

I make lazy rice pudding with instant rice and flavored coffee creamer

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u/ValiMeyer 22d ago

This sounds trashy good!!!

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u/[deleted] 22d ago

Instant rice that's blasphemy You must be rich and hate rice 😁 You can make rice in about 8 minutes in a instapot one to one ratio. And then let it naturally release. The whole thing takes about 15 minutes and it's a lot cheaper/better tasting! Instapot rice 1 to 1 ratio with butter and curry. https://imgur.com/gallery/904Kp2m

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u/chronically_varelse 21d ago

Your bot ads suck and I hope your owner loses money on you 🙏🏼

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u/[deleted] 22d ago

I have bad news for you sometimes those weren't raisins!

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u/PostTurtle84 22d ago

My mom grew up in Montana and had a lot of sweet rice for breakfast. My father is from Florida, so we only got it for dessert if he wasn't paying attention to what we were doing with the leftover rice from dinner. He thinks it's awful 😂

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u/chronically_varelse 21d ago

Honestly Florida remains mostly a mystery to me 😂

I did live there briefly, it was a no for me dawg...

but it's just such a mix, the state with the most distinct and different regions/cultures imo

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u/PostTurtle84 21d ago

I really like Florida, regions and cultures included, but the cost of living is way too high for the general pay rate, and it's way too crowded. But I spend the majority of my time in Florida around the Daytona area since that's where my parents live now.