Re: Speculative linguistics(*)

Lucy Kemnitzer wrote:
On Mon, 18 Jun 2007 07:25:24 +1200, zeborah@xxxxxxxxx (Zeborah) seems
to have said:
I still don't know how much of this was my father's family's strict
construction of manners, and how much was just a method of crowd control
(five kids; but we had the rules before all of them were born, so
probably the former).

What does meat and three veg mean when it's at its real home? I've
heard of meat and two veg, but in contexts where it sounds like one of
the veges is rice, potatoes, or pasta, which doesn't make sense to me
except in a wide-eyed ethnographically bemused sort of way.

As best I understand it, what the Cracker Barrel chain of restaurants serves as a "Country Dinner Plate" is pretty close to the canonical "meat and two", and a "meat and three" just means you get three vegetables instead of two. Online menu here:

http://www.crackerbarrel.com/menu-dinnerplates.cfm?doc_id=900

Or, cutting-and-pasting from that link, the basic idea is that it's a "one from the meat column and two from the vegetable column" deal, where the meats are:

Fried CHICKEN Livers
Hickory Smoked PORK Barbeque
Fried CHICKEN Tenderloin
Grilled PORK CHOP
Half Pound HAMBURGER Steak
Sugar Cured HAM
Grilled CHICKEN Tenderloin
Hickory Smoked COUNTRY HAM
Homemade BEEF Stew
Farm-Raised CATFISH Fillet

Also, off the rest of the menu, one could add to that: meatloaf, country fried steak (a "cubed steak" battered, deep-fried, and drenched in white gravy), roast beef, fried chicken, steak, baked chicken, turkey, and fried codfish. Meanwhile, beef stew is a bit unusual for the meat part of a "meat and three"; it's usually a meal of its own.

The vegetables are:

Whole Kernel Corn
Country Green Beans
Sweet Whole Baby Carrots
Fried Apples
Macaroni n' Cheese
Apple Sauce
Pinto Beans
Dumplins
Turnip Greens
Cole Slaw
Steak Fries
Mashed Potatoes
Breaded Fried Okra
Hashbrown Casserole
Vegetable of the Day

There are a few more anomalies on there; "steak fries" -- for the non-USians, big fat chips that are generally pan-fried rather than deep-fried -- are generally only restaurant food, and this is the only place that I've seen "dumplings" as a vegetable. Dumplings, in this context, are effectively lumps of biscuit dough cooked in chicken broth so that you get lumps of heavy cooked dough in a thick chicken gravy. Normally the chicken that produced the broth is cooked in with this as well, but for some reason Cracker Barrel also does the dumplings-and-gravy without the chicken as a "vegetable". And the fried apples are really more dessert than vegetable. But, other than that, it's all pretty standard.

Also common things on the vegetable column would be collard greens, mustard greens, kale greens, lima beans, black-eyed peas, green peas, turnips, sweet potatoes.... And we also sometimes did sliced fresh cucumbers, soaked in apple-cider vinegar for a few minutes. Or sliced fresh tomatoes, when they were ripe in the garden.

- Brooks


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