I was asked recently if I knew where the north/south line lies, below which restaurants serve sweet tea and above which they don’t.

Presweetened tea is certainly a Southern delight. If you travel through Maryland, you’re not apt to find it offered, and if you go south, say to North Carolina, you are quite certain to have it as a beverage option. (The further south you travel, the greater the odds that you’ll have to specify that your tea is not to be sweetened, if that’s your preference.) 

So, if North Carolina is, and Maryland isn’t, fond of sweet tea, it would seem logical that Virginia may be the great divide in this cultural phenomenon. That puts “the line” for sweet tea probably in Virginia. The question is, where? 

For those with no more important things to do — and I suppose that now includes me, since I’m writing this — there is very little available research on this compelling cultural question, but it’s not totally without statistical underpinning. There once was a website, now defunct — I can’t imagine why it didn’t survive — that actually created a map plotting the “sweet tea line.” An anonymous statistician, or perhaps sweet tea junkie, allegedly polled what is probably the most effective food marketing organization in the U.S. — McDonald’s — from which to draw conclusions.

Supposedly, this seeker of trivial fact plotted the location of over 300 McDonald’s restaurants throughout Virginia, then determined whether they served sweet tea or not. What he/she discovered, if this survey is to be believed, is that a line runs — actually, meanders — more or less east to west through the heart of Virginia. It lies north of Hampton Roads, just north of Richmond (where everybody knows you can order sweet tea), then runs westward across the state, taking in Charlottesville, and bisecting the Valley of Virginia somewhere around Staunton. That means many of the good folks of Northern Virginia don’t know what they’re missing when they order tea with a meal, and the good folks south of Richmond probably have too high a lifetime sugar intake.

To verify this as a serious journalist, one would have to independently retrace the steps of this seeker of truth, and I have not done so. Nor do I intend to. The line seems to make sense but, frankly, I don’t know whether his/her research is worth a glass of iced tea that’s been sitting around too long. What I do know is that freshly brewed and sweetened tea is delicious. 

 

Other southern foods

Short Rows readers already know how strongly I feel about long-cure country ham, so I’ll simply say that the South would not be the South without salt-cured ham and bacon. Incidentally, Smithfield will never be quite the same without Genuine Smithfield Ham, just as Surry will never be the same without the Wigwam Brand Virginia Ham so lovingly cured by three generations of Edwardses (and, yes, they’re kin).

To go much beyond this would be a venture into dangerous, and potentially turbulent, waters, for every Southerner has their favorite Southern foods, and legions of Southerners can debate favorite recipes, ancient legends and so forth for hours.

Take grits, for example. Once a simple and inexpensive Low Country dish, grits now are served throughout the South, and shrimp and grits have become a national phenomenon, served in restaurants on all levels of the dining scale.

The origin of Brunswick stew has been debated ad infinitum, but Brunswick County holds steadfastly to the claim. After all, it provided the name. Locally, excellent Brunswick stew is cooked in huge pots by the Isle of Wight Ruritan Club, and local people keep their names on the customer list each year. As a matter of interest, let it be noted that not many folks still put squirrel in their Brunswick stew. It was once a staple ingredient, particularly during hard times.

You could almost come to blows over which cornbread recipe is best. From egg bread to thin, fried patties, there are as many ways to make cornbread as there are imaginative cooks.

One other dish sits right at the top of my favorites, and that’s clabber biscuits. My mother, all of her sisters and my grandmothers started few days without baking biscuits made with clabber from their family cows. They were an important part of the diet for farmers embarking on a day’s work. We have my mother’s clabber pitcher, my favorite aunt’s biscuit board and mixing bowl. They are treasured reminders of an era now gone.

Clabber, from which these delicious biscuits are made, is fermented (sour) milk. The milk has to be unpasteurized and unhomogenized. A reference I found for this column said that milk was kept “at a specific humidity and temperature.” My mother, aunt and grandmother would have found that hilarious. Their clabber pitchers sat in the corner of the kitchen or pantry and fended for themselves, summer and winter, hot or cold. The only gesture toward sanitation was a cheesecloth cover to keep the flies away. And their biscuits were incredible.

 

John Edwards is publisher emeritus of The Smithfield Times. His email address is j.branchedwards@gmail.com.