Travel through America’s South and you’ll encounter dishes that sound almost mythical to outsiders. We’re talking about foods with strange names, surprising ingredient combinations, and flavors that seem to belong only to those who grew up eating them. The American South has always had a way of keeping its culinary secrets close.
Part of the problem is geography. Southern food is distinct for multiple reasons, one being geography and what crops can be grown, with great agriculture providing a lot of variety based on what’s available. These regional dishes emerged from very specific landscapes and communities, making them nearly impossible to find even a state away.
Frogmore Stew: A Lowcountry Boil That Confused Everyone
Frogmore stew is a South Carolina classic with a very misleading name, and while some folks do chow down on the big American bullfrogs that invade the deep south, Frogmore stew isn’t actually made of real frogs, and it’s not quite a stew either. Frogmore Stew is named after a Lowcountry community on St. Helena Island, which explains where the peculiar title came from.
Frogmore stew has roots in the Gullah culture, highlighting coastal South Carolina’s peak summer ingredients, as the Gullah Geechee people are descendants of Africans who were enslaved on the rice, indigo, and Sea Island cotton plantations of the lower Atlantic coast. The dish itself became famous through one specific story. Although there are many versions of this dish available, the name Frogmore Stew was first used by Richard Gay in the 1960s, as Richard Gay was tasked with feeding 100 of his fellow National Guardsmen in one sitting and so adapted an old family seafood recipe.
Named for one of the oldest Sea Island communities, the typical Frogmore stew recipe is simple with red skin potatoes, smoked sausage, ears of yellow corn, and plenty of fresh shrimp, and most recipes call for these ingredients to be boiled with certain seasonings, like crab boil, and the stew is normally served with hot sauce. Let’s be real, it’s messy. Once cooked, Frogmore stew is drained and served, and people eat it in bowls and plates at home, but if it’s a large gathering, the boil will be dumped across newspapers on a long table for easy communal eating and clean-up.
Comeback Sauce: Mississippi’s Secret Weapon
Here’s the thing about comeback sauce: it’s everywhere in Mississippi and practically nowhere else. The sauce began to appear in Greek restaurants in Jackson, Mississippi from the late 1920s, and as of the 1970s and 1980s it was still most commonly found in Jackson’s Greek restaurants, spreading from Jackson into other parts of Mississippi and then throughout the south but not well known outside of the southern US.
Comeback sauce traces its origins to the 1920s, when Mississippi and Alabama saw a large influx of Greek immigrants drawn to the mining and steel industries, and when those industries failed to live up to their promise, many Greek immigrants opted to open restaurants, turning cities like Birmingham and Jackson into hotspots for Greek cuisine. The first Greek restaurant in Jackson was called The Rotisserie, opened by Greek restaurateur Alex Dennery, and Dennery created a house dressing to serve with salads that he called “Kum-Bak” sauce, with the name alluding to the fact that the dressing was so good people couldn’t help but “come back” for more.
Comeback sauce is a dipping sauce used for fried foods or as a salad dressing in the cuisine of central Mississippi, in the United States of America, with its main ingredients being mayonnaise and ketchup or chili sauce. Honestly, it tastes like a spicier, tangier version of every secret sauce you’ve had at a burger joint, yet somehow better. The sauce was originally served as a dressing on iceberg lettuce or as a topping for saltines but eventually saw usage as a drizzle on crab cakes or tacos, a sauce for sandwiches, and a dipping sauce for crudites or fried foods.
Tomato Gravy: The Appalachian Breakfast Nobody Talks About
Tomato gravy comes from Appalachia, where it likely took the place of sausage gravy when there was no milk to be found but there were plenty of juicy, fresh tomatoes right off the vine. Think about that for a second. When families couldn’t afford dairy or meat, they created something entirely new from what they had in abundance.
It’s a very old Appalachian recipe, usually made with cooked-down tomatoes (fresh or canned), a little flour, a spoonful or two of grease, and salt and pepper, and it’s sort of an all-purpose dish. It begins with a simple roux made by cooking flour in fat, then canned tomatoes, often crushed or diced, are added along with milk, water, or stock and simmered briefly to thicken, and the resulting gravy is savory, slightly tangy, and traditionally served over buttermilk biscuits, grits, or rice for a filling breakfast or supper.
I know it sounds crazy, but tomato gravy represents something more than breakfast. The origins of the dish are deeply entwined with the history of the American South, particularly in the Appalachian Mountains, and it is a prime example of the region’s make-do culinary traditions, where resourcefulness was not a choice but a necessity. Southern tomato gravy, a frugal staple of Appalachian and Southern kitchens, is resonating with a new generation seeking affordable comfort food and a tangible connection to their heritage, sparking conversations about culinary history and economic resilience, often made with little more than bacon grease or butter, flour, milk or water, and canned tomatoes, with food bloggers and culinary historians noting that its appeal lies in its dual identity as both a practical meal and a powerful symbol of nostalgia.
Perloo: South Carolina’s One-Pot Wonder
It’s going to be a perloo, a one-pot rice dish, according to culinary experts. South Carolina’s perloo is the state’s lesser-known cousin to Louisiana’s jambalaya, yet it predates the more famous rice dish by generations. The dish reflects the deep rice-growing heritage of the Lowcountry.
Once Carolinian and Georgian planters in the American South discovered that African rice would grow in that region, they often sought enslaved Africans from rice-growing regions because they had the skills and knowledge needed to develop and build irrigation, dams and earthworks, and the rice-based dishes created by Gullah people are Charleston red rice and Hoppin’ John. Perloo fits into that same culinary lineage, representing centuries of agricultural and cultural knowledge.
What makes perloo different? It’s simpler than jambalaya, less spicy, and more focused on the quality of the rice itself. You’ll find versions with chicken, sausage, or seafood, all simmered together until the rice absorbs every bit of flavor. It’s hard to say for sure, but the dish seems to have survived precisely because it stayed local, passed down through families rather than exported to restaurants.
Too often, though, we talk about “Southern cuisine” as if everyone from Louisiana to the Carolinas cook and eat the same way, but in the new book “Taste the State,” chef and culinary instructor Kevin Mitchell and historian David S. Shields dive into the ingredients and dishes that make South Carolina food unique. These four dishes prove that point better than anything else.
The South guards its culinary treasures closely, keeping them tied to specific communities and landscapes. What do you think? Have you tried any of these regional specialties, or do you have your own hidden Southern dish to share?
