I have to tell you I never had considered the fact that anyone else had never tried a tomato sandwich. We called them mater sandwiches when I was a kid.  The tomatoes taste slightly different at various times of the year. Hothouse tomatoes and various types of tomatoes also taste different but I have to say the tomatoes that we got locally in Memphis were the best tasting tomatoes for the tomato sandwich of any place I’ve ever lived, so I didn’t eat them all that much after I had moved away, till one day I tried a slice of tomato from the ugliest tomatoes I had ever seen and they work perfect. I asked my wife if she wanted one and she said she’d never tried one. I was shocked that after 32 years I had never introduced her to a tomato sandwich. I had introduced her to fried green tomatoes and fried okra but I had let her down by not introducing her to the most delicious southern delicacy known to man. 

Of course, a lot of people may differ in their technique in preparing a tomato sandwich but here’s how I do it.  It has to be the regular white bread that we got as kids and real mayonnaise spread on the bread thickly, two generous slices of tomato a quarter inch thick are better and salted generously and then enjoyed to your heart’s content.  I never knew how lucky I was living in Memphis and enjoying the cuisine that Memphis had to offer.  I have always attributed the variety of delicious foods to the fact that Memphis is dead center of the south and was a major artery for the native Americans along the Mississippi River that early British, Irish and Spanish settlers and French Canadians used when fleeing from the tyranny of the British in Canada to Louisiana.  Because of the cotton plantations all around Memphis there were abundant slaves that brought their cuisine from Africa as well. I even think that my wife’s German family recipes influenced my cooking talents. So to summarize, we had the best of the Native American influence, the French Canadian influence, the Spanish influence and the African influence, and the best of these influences on our food in Memphis.  I don’t want to leave out the British and the Irish influence on the food that we know as Memphis cuisine.  I thoroughly believe that our mothers were influenced in some way by all of the blending of the cultural foods that passed through Memphis on its way south or west.  I have no proof of this other than to give you certain examples like a southern buttermilk biscuit. Where do you think the Southerners got the recipe for the southern biscuit?  I will give you my assumption by asking you to look at the recipes of the Scottish scone.  They mirror the southern biscuits in many ways. With a couple of exceptions they are identical.  Those exceptions are things that would have been difficult for the early Southern settlers to find, so the mothers and wives of the early settlers would have had to adapt and change the recipe to what they had on hand.  The same could be said of all of the ethnic cultures that passed through Memphis and there is some similarity to all of the foods that we serve on our tables today to all of the cultures and cuisines that were a great part in making up what I call Memphis fixin’s. 

My family came from farmers, wheel rites and trades people, but I think the earliest of my family were farmers and had pigs that they would raise to sell the better parts of meat to the butchers but they would keep things like the legs and feet, the head and the ribs that the butchers could not sell to those that could afford to buy their meat at a store.  Now you find such things like ribs and pig knuckles, ham hocks and other such meats that the farmers would make meals for their families with.  One of the biggest restaurants in Memphis that’s known worldwide serves the best dry rub ribs in the world.  If it had not been for the fact that the farmers could not sell these parts of the pig to the butchers, we might not have had the barbecued ribs that most of us love today.  So much of our culture has been blended and processed into what we know now.  I know all of you have had smoked or sugar cured ham and a biscuit for breakfast or you had biscuits and gravy. 

It’s kind of funny when you travel the United States and look at what the restaurants serve for breakfast and I’m gonna pick biscuits and gravy to make my example. I have seen in the western states that they use brown gravy made with either cornstarch or some other type of thickener for biscuits and gravy.  In the deep south, it’s what we call sawmill gravy which is grease flour and water, spiced with pork sausage mixed in to make the gravy.  As you travel up into the north east, it is just flour, salt, pepper and grease that makes up the gravy.  To give you a taste of East Tennessee cuisine, one of the main dishes that seems to have been a staple in the mountains of Tennessee is white beans and onions served together with cornbread and they don’t seem to use any other spices for their beans and onions.  I have to say that the restaurants and your tables in your homes serve way better food than you get here and like I’ve said to many people, you can’t get better food than you get in Memphis.  I even remember a place in Memphis on Park Avenue, I think, where they had a restaurant called the Barbecue Palace where you could get anything and everything barbecued and I don’t mean grilled on a grill, which brings up another interesting tidbit, in Canada if you put it on a grill that makes it barbecue and I’m not sure whether their wrong or I’m wrong but, to me, you can grill anything without it being barbecue. It’s the preparation and the sauce that makes it barbecue.  At the Barbecue Palace you could get their sample platter which had barbecued bologna, barbecued ham, barbecued beef brisket, barbecued pork shoulder pulled or chopped, and it even had barbecued spam which, from what I understand, is a Hawaiian delicacy. 

I really loved remembering the end of this school year picnics that we had at Charjean. All of our mothers would get together and make their most famous dishes trying to outdo one another and we, their children, would get the most marvelous meals ever created.  I remember the sweets, the meats, the vegetables, prepared in their family recipes for all of us to enjoy.  Our mothers did way much, much more than I have ever seen since those days for the parties that we had at school than they do today.  I can just smell the sugar cured ham that they prepared the way that their families had done for years. The aroma would just burst your taste buds wide open. 

They even went all out when we just made hamburgers and hot dogs with special mustards that they personally made, the ingredients that they put into the hamburgers and, one time, one mother even made the buns homemade herself. Who does that today?  I do still bake my own bread at times and there is nothing like homemade bread.  When we sat down to a meal at my house there was always either homemade biscuits or homemade corn bread and even sometimes there would be homemade yeast rolls.  My mother was not necessarily a baker when it comes to making homemade bread but my grandmother was and, Oh, what bread she made.  There are two smells in this world that will bring me to tears almost immediately because I remember my mother and my grandmother through those smells. One of them was homemade bread baking and the other was homemade fresh apple pie baking.  We lived right behind the apple orchard that later became Airways Junior High School and we could pick as many apples as we could take home and they were the green apples that I personally think make the absolute best pies because the blending of that tart sweet and cinnamon flavors along with the homemade pie crust were the most heavenly taste, well almost.

I personally think that the old cranked homemade ice creams that all of us were used to were absolutely the defining moment in sweet treats. 

I know all of you have your favorites and I’m sure they were passed down from one family to another or your spouse brought them into your family and it could even be possible that you picked them up from your neighbors or friends.  Food has defined the south as long as I can remember and I think that southern cooks have always been willing to experiment and adapt to their surroundings with new and exotic flavors.  If you are like me, I still long for the foods that my mother and grandmother made and that the ladies of our neighborhoods prepared for us when we were kids.