Dining on a budget? Just whip up some necessity mess or a potato bargain. That’s a pork, onion, and potato stew popular in Eastern Massachusetts. Or how about some Georgia ice cream? It’s a North Florida term for grits. Martha shares a generous serving of fun food names from the Dictionary of American Regional English (on Twitter as @darewords). This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Playful Regional Food Names”
You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
Grant, have you ever had a potato bargain?
I don’t think so. I paid the usual price.
I’m not talking about shopping.
I’m talking about a food term that you hear mainly in eastern Massachusetts.
Oh.
It’s an economical stew consisting chiefly of pork, onions, and potatoes.
And because it’s so economical, another name for this mixture is necessity mess.
A necessity mess potato bargain.
Yeah, isn’t that great?
I didn’t know that.
Where’d you find this?
I found it in the Dictionary of American Regional English.
Where else?
Oh, very nice.
You know, foodies look at recipe books,
And they’re sitting there sighing over the luscious photographs.
Well, I flip through the pages of the Dictionary of American Regional English
And look for food names.
What else you got there?
Well, I was going to ask you if you’d like some ming-mang on your necessity mess.
Ming-mang?
Ming-mang.
That sounds vulgar.
It’s not.
It’s a term in the Ozarks for butter and molasses or butter and gravy.
And here’s another one for you.
One-eyed Susan.
Any guesses?
No.
It’s kind of pie maybe.
I don’t know.
A cookie?
No.
It’s a, I don’t know, ribeye.
You’d have it for breakfast in central Wisconsin.
Kind of Danish.
I see where your mind’s going.
No, it’s a fried egg.
Oh, a one-eyed Susan instead of a black-eyed Susan.
Very nice.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And one of my all-time favorite comfort foods, as you may know, is good old grits.
And I love the nickname that I found for grits that’s used in the northern part of Florida.
They refer to grits as Georgia ice cream.
Love it.
Oh, nice.
That’s very great.
Because you load it up with cream and sugar, right?
Yeah.
Or molasses, a little bit of brown sugar.
Or garlic and cheese.
Grits are awesome.
I know a lot of Yankees who don’t like grits, but grits are awesome.
And so is the Dictionary of American Regional English.
The Dictionary of American Regional English, by the way, is on course to publish its final volume.
They’ve been working on this for more than 30 years.
When it comes out, we’ll share a lot more with you about it.
Absolutely.
And in the meantime, you can watch their Twitter feed, which is a lot of fun.
You get all kinds of great words on there.
Twitter feed is Dare Words, right?
Yes.
Check it out.
If you’ve got a question about regional English or anything that occurs to you at all,
It can be grammar, spelling, punctuation, or a dispute that you had over saying something or writing something correctly.
Our number is 877-929-9673.
And our email address is words@waywordradio.org.
