Southern Culture On The Skids "Banana Pudding"

When the weather is hot like this, and I'm hungry, I think about the years I lived in Virginia, and all the good, regional cuisine that came into my life.

Growing up in New England meant clams and lobster and baked beans and other foods that people in the rest of the country aren't regularly exposed to.

And growing up with Italian relatives meant homemade raviolis and pizzellas and such, which I'm sure were foreign to my Southern friends.

On the flip-side, I spent the first 25 years of my life, completely unaware that there was such a thing as Chicken & Dumplings.

Chicken in a pot of gravy, with flat flour "dumplings," without an ounce of fat being spared . . . Man, that is some good comfort food.

My roommate's Grandmother knew how much I savored the dish, and she'd make it for me on my birthday. No one cooks like Grandma. Even someone else's Grandma.

Somewhere in those years, I had a girlfriend who could not cook. Would not cook. Didn't really care too much about food. She was perfectly happy with pre-packaged and frozen and just-add-water meals.

But the one thing she could make, was Banana Pudding.

I think a large part of Southern cooking (and probably other types of regional cuisine) came from using the seemingly unusable. The scraps. The leftovers.

Banana Pudding is at it's best when the bananas are, as the song says, "Day old, and Bold!" and the Nilla wafers are a little bit stale.

And when the whole thing sits in the fridge for a day or two, and the wafers suck up the pudding and it all gets a little mushy, but with a skin on top . . . yah-friggin-hoo!

You know it's a bona fide American South cultural phenomenon, if Southern Culture On The Skids writes a song about it.


See the video on Youtube.