Your road trip just got a whole lot more delicious

The name may not come tripping off the tongue, but the Southern Foodways Alliance's Oral History Interactive Map is a great tool for planning your spring road trip, especially if your spring road trip revolves around food. And whose doesn't, when you come right down to it? And even if yours doesn't, how much McDonald's can you eat? That much? Really? Wow. But wouldn't you rather generate a complete route map with turn-by-turn directions to places like Car-Lot BBQ in Winfield, AL, where owner Kyle Guin makes his barbecue "the same way Daddy did it," or Solly's Hot Tamales in Vicksburg, MS, where Jewel McCain (above) describes her chili filling this way:

It's ground beef with six different spices in it, and it has the rendered grease from beef fat or kidney fat that we use in there, so they're not really health-conscious food. But they're good to eat and people don't care, they eat them anyhow.

Sure you would. The quotes, by the way, are taken from the extensive oral histories that annotate each stop on the SFA's map. Extensive oral histories. Now stop at Burger King. I dare you. (Via Serious Eats.)

• [Anonymous]

  Thanks for perusing the Southern Foodways Alliance website. For the correspondent who wondered why no Big Apple Inn of Jackson, MS, why no pig ear sandwiches, please allow me to direct you to our SFA film about the same, wherein ears are everywhere:
  http://www.southernfoodways.org/documentary/film/smoke_ears.html

• [Matt Staggs]

  Ah, dammit. Boing Boing profiles the foodstuffs of my home state (many of which I’ve never actually gotten out and eaten despite being a lifelong Mississippi resident) just months after I resolve to eat heathfully – - which sadly, doesn’t include pig ear sandwiches and fried chicken.

  Maybe if I step outside sniff the air really hard I’ll at least be able to smell the Three Sisters chicken. (I work just a couple of blocks away.)

• [lookinland]

  The really amazing thing here is that Ms. McCain is cooking chili filling in a white cable knit sweater and there’s not a spot on it.

• [That Evening Sun]

  Mississippi Delta style hot tamales are like manna from heaven rolled up in corn husks. If one is fortunate enough to be offered deep fried Mississippi hot tamales, then one has found one’s way deep into the Delta cuisine scene.

• [blackanvil]

  Remarkably useless, unless vineyards are your thing. I just plotted a route from northern virginia, where I live, down to Anderson, South Carolina — clearly a very long, very southern trip, one I take fairly often to visit Mom. Nothing but 3 vineyards in the database. I smell payola and advertising, not an oral history of food, or even a halfway-decent tool. Just more ways to get eyeballs to look at crap they don’t want or need.

  • [Bill Barol]

    Wow. Tough room. For the record, I plotted a route from Washington DC down to Austin and found more places than I could possibly visit. Sorry the thing didn’t meet your needs, but there’s no reason to cry foul.

• [Anonymous]

  Only one restaurant in Jackson MS and it isn’t the Big Apple Inn with their pig ear sandwich?
  That is a crime.

  • [That Evening Sun]

    It’s been years since I’ve had a sack of red hots, and I miss them.

    Fried chicken at Two Sisters Kitchen is an absolute must if visiting the old Bold New City. I can’t stress this enough. Corner of George St. and Congress St., in the shadow of the great halls of Mississippi legislation.

• [Anonymous]

  anything like this for the rest of the country? heading from seattle too vegas this summer and i’m thinking about driving.

• [Patrick Austin]

  FWIW, you can get a kml file of the restaurants reviewed at Roadfood.com and load that sucker on your phone. It will make you happy.

• [EH]

  I wouldn’t say there’s “no reason,” just that the jury is still out.

• [RexallWodehouse]

  The New Perry Inn? Nope.
  Um…The Varsity? Nope. Not gourmet, but holy cats, if you can’t find oral history there, man, you ain’t gonna find it.
  Anyplace that serves up Brunswick Stew? Didn’t see any.

  On the other hand – do make a side trip to visit Sweet Grass Dairy. Some of the finest cheeses I’ve had anywhere — Europe OR America.