5 Things Southern Cooks Always Do

Many cooks adopt the practices and habits of their parents and grandparents in the kitchen, but the lessons are exceptionally precious and lasting for Southerners. Whether witnessed from a stool by the stove or absorbed through the osmosis of thousands of weeknights and Sunday dinners, the kitchen wisdom established by our matriarchs and patriarchs gradually becomes our own.

From the way we cook to the things we can't bring ourselves to throw away, these are just five of the many things that a Southern cook always does.

1. Save Bacon Grease

When it comes to food, being frugal isn’t just about saving pennies, it’s about maximizing flavor. When Southerners cook bacon, you better believe we save that grease!

Smoky and salty, it trounces olive oil in the flavor department, and gives butter a run for its money. There are a multitude of reasons we love bacon grease, but it all comes down to FREE FLAVOR—and Southern cooks never pass up free flavor.

2. Recycle, Grandma-Style

My grandmother’s refrigerator was a maze of small, unmarked plastic containers who, in their former lives, were sour cream and butter tubs and lunch meat containers. Once she’d scraped every bit of butter from the tubs and gave them a good wash, they made the perfected lidded vessels for sending home Sunday leftovers.

It was her way of recycling, of making the most of what she had, and not wasting one single thing. I must admit that I do the same thing now, but with Ziploc bags. Until they come into contact with raw meat, I’ll rinse and reuse those suckers until the seals give out.

3. Freeze Ham Bones

Come Easter and Christmas, after the sliced ham is all gone, you better believe Southerners hold onto that bone. After every scrap of meat has been scraped from the bone, it’s practically a Southern Kitchen Commandment to pop that bone into a heavy-duty Ziploc and stash it in the freezer to add rich, hammy flavor to soups and greens.

If you’ve never made soup using a ham bone, give our Ham-and-Bean-Soup recipe a try—you won’t be disappointed.

4. Leave Butter Out

Unless we're making biscuits, Southerners can't abide cold butter. There’s nothing worse than trying in vain to spread a cold pat of butter onto a roll or a piece of toast, or waiting for a frigid pat to melt on a hot biscuit.

Room temperature butter is better for making most cakes and spreading on everything from cornbread to buttermilk biscuits. Because the winters are so mild here, Southerners can pretty much get away with leaving butter out all year long and rely on it being the perfect spreadable consistency. Butter may last longer in the fridge, but most Southerners prefer having soft butter at the ready at all times.

5. Play Favorites

Southern grandparents may claim they don’t have favorite grandchildren (lies!), but they sure do have their favorite kitchen gear. My mother and grandmother passed this practice down to me.

There's my favorite wooden spoon that's seen so much stirring, one side worn down.

Despite cabinets full of bowls, I have this one special cream-colored bowl (the smallest from an old Southern Living At HOME Gail Pittman Collection from the early 2000s) that I have replaced at least twice. It's the perfect size and weight for prepping just about everything.

And of course, there’s my favorite cast-iron skillet. I have nine iron skillets in my house, but there’s one girl I treasure more than the others—a vintage Griswold Iron Mountain nine-inch skillet that was cast sometime in the 1930s or 1940s. The others work fine for making cornbread, but she works best.

What habits and tricks did you pick up from your mamma and grandmother?