What is Southern home cooking? A Panama City kitchen answers

Southern home cooking is the food a Southern family puts on the table on an ordinary day: fried chicken, gravy, biscuits, beans, peas and greens. Big Mama's on the Bayou, 620 W Beach Dr, Panama City, cooks it with biscuits and gravy, fried chicken and chicken and dumplings. Call (850) 784-6009 to confirm hours.

What does "Southern home cooking" mean on a menu?

It means the plate is built the way a home cook builds it. A main dish that is fried, baked or smothered, a few sides that carry as much weight as the meat, and gravy where gravy belongs.

Three habits show up again and again:

• The sides are not an afterthought. Beans, peas, greens, mac and cheese and fried okra fill half the plate.
• Gravy is a food group. Sausage gravy over a biscuit at breakfast, gravy over rice or mashed potatoes at lunch.
• The menu follows the day. Plenty of home cooks keep a weekly rhythm, and a Southern lunch counter often does the same.

Nobody enforces a definition, so you will hear different answers in different towns. That is part of why it works as a label for a menu: it tells you the style, not a recipe.

How is it different from soul food?

The two overlap a lot, and writers do not agree on where one ends. The most common framing is that all soul food is Southern, but not all Southern food is soul food. Tasting Table and The Root both publish explainers on the difference, and they point to different lines: seasoning, history and who a dish belongs to.

The name soul food is newer than the cooking. Food writers tie the term to the 1960s, and it carries a specific history that belongs to Black Southern cooks. We do not use it as our label. We call our food Southern home cooking, or country cooking, and we leave soul food to the kitchens that cook it.

What does it look like at the Bayou?

At Big Mama's on the Bayou in Panama City, the style shows up in a few ways you can point to on the menu.

• Breakfast. The biscuits are made by hand each morning and the sausage gravy is made from scratch, never from a bag. A whole biscuit and gravy is $7.99. Country ham is sliced thin and cooked crisp on the flat top. Cheese grits are on the menu too.
• The plate lunch. A meat and two sides is $13.99 on weekdays from 11 to 2:30. Fried chicken and country fried steak are on every day. The other meats follow a printed weekday schedule.
• The rotation. Monday is beef tips over rice, Tuesday meatloaf with tomato gravy, Wednesday chicken and dumplings, Thursday baked chicken and dressing, and Friday fish and shrimp.
• The sides. Mashed potatoes and gravy, rice and gravy, baked mac and cheese, green beans, cole slaw and fried okra are on every weekday. Peas, beans and greens change by day.
• The veggie plate. Four sides, and any dessert can count as one.

Reviewers on Google mention biscuits and gravy first, then country fried steak and chicken and dumplings. Our full menu lays out every dish with prices.

How do I order a Southern plate if I have never had one?

Start with the meat, since it sets the day. Fried chicken and country fried steak are always there. If you want something that changes, check the weekday schedule above.

Then pick the sides like a local would: one starch and one vegetable. Mashed potatoes and gravy with green beans is a plain, safe pair. Baked mac and cheese with a pea or bean of the day is the one most people double back for. A third side is $1.99 more if you cannot decide.

Dessert is a side on the veggie plate, and we make homemade desserts. Ask what is out, because peach cobbler and pecan pie are there when we have them.

What to order

For a first visit at breakfast, order a whole biscuit and gravy on a weekday morning. At lunch, order fried chicken with mac and cheese and green beans, then check the lunch menu for the day's other meat. On a weekend, call first: brunch runs from 9 on Saturday and Sunday, but the full menu is not published yet.

Order ahead on Toast if you want to walk in and walk out. Big Mama's on the Bayou is at 620 W Beach Dr in Panama City, with a free lot out front. Hours are still being confirmed, so call (850) 784-6009 before you drive over.