9 Georgia Traditions Every Newcomer Should Learn to Love

Order “tea” at a Georgia diner, and it lands sweet enough to stand a spoon in, no questions asked.

Ask for it any other way, and folks will assume you’re new in town.

These are the Georgia traditions every newcomer should learn to love.

Boiled Peanuts by the Bag

Boiled peanuts are the first sign a Georgia newcomer has crossed into different territory.

Pull off any two-lane highway, and you’ll spot a hand-painted sign next to a bubbling pot on a folding table.

A dollar or two buys a warm, dripping paper bag of them.

They’re soft, not crunchy.

The salt soaks all the way through the green shell, so you split it with your teeth and slurp the peanut right out.

Georgia farmers grow more than half the nation’s peanuts. That means raw green peanuts show up cheap all late summer.

Order a bag at a Friday night ball game or a boat ramp, and nobody blinks.

Give them a few tries.

The texture throws people off at first, then it hooks them for good.

Vidalia Onions in Spring

Vidalia isn’t a brand of onions. It’s a place where you can eat onions.

By law, only about twenty counties around the town of Vidalia can sell an onion under that name.

The sandy soil and low sulfur turn these onions sweet enough to bite like an apple.

State lawmakers made the Vidalia the official state vegetable back in 1990.

Every spring, Vidalia and Glennville throw festivals around the harvest, with onion-eating contests, a rodeo, and carnival rides.

Slice a raw Vidalia onto a burger, and you’ll see why folks always have these onions in their kitchens.

Sweet Tea With Every Meal

Sweet tea shows up before the menu does at most sit-down restaurants around the state.

It’s black tea brewed strong and sugared while it’s still hot, so the sugar melts all the way in.

Order “tea,” and you’ll get the sweet kind by default.

Ask for unsweetened, and you’ll get a look.

Back in 2003, a lawmaker even filed a bill to make it a crime for a restaurant serving tea to skip the sweet version.

It was an April Fools’ gag, written up as a misdemeanor “of a high and aggravated nature.”

Nobody voted on it. But many regulars wished they had.

Roadside Peach Stands

Roadside peach stands turn a summer drive through the middle of the state into a stop-and-go affair.

The Peach State nickname oversells the harvest a little, since California and South Carolina grow more.

Nobody cares much.

From late May into August, the fruit comes off the trees soft and dripping.

At Dickey Farms in Musella, the oldest peach packing house in the state has sorted fruit since 1897.

You can rock on the porch with a scoop of peach ice cream and watch the sorting belt run.

Eat a ripe peach over the sink.

A grocery store peach and a just-picked Georgia peach are barely the same fruit.

A Low-Country Boil

A low-country boil is how the coast feeds a crowd without dirtying a single plate.

Shrimp, sausage, corn, and new potatoes all go into one giant pot with a heavy load of seasoning.

Then somebody dumps it straight onto a newspaper-covered table.

Everybody stands around and picks.

Out on the Golden Isles and around Savannah, the shrimp comes off the boats fresh, so the boil tastes like the tide.

No forks required.

Wander up to a backyard boil near Tybee or St. Simons, and somebody will hand you a paper towel and a cold drink before they ask your name.

Brunswick Stew Season

Brunswick stew is the thick, smoky pot that shows up next to the barbecue at every fundraiser and family reunion.

It’s tomato-based, loaded with corn, lima beans, and pulled pork or chicken.

Folks in Brunswick swear their town invented the dish.

There’s even a 25-gallon iron pot on display with a plaque claiming the first batch was cooked in it in 1898.

Up in Brunswick County, Virginia, they call that nonsense and claim a much older origin of their own.

Let them argue.

You just grab a bowl and a slice of white bread to sop it up.

Waffle House at 3 A.M.

Waffle House started in Georgia and never strayed far from home.

Two neighbors, Joe Rogers Sr. and Tom Forkner, opened the first restaurant in Avondale Estates on Labor Day in 1955.

That yellow sign now marks nearly 2,000 locations, most of them open every hour of the year.

Learn the lingo.

Hash browns come scattered, smothered, and covered, and the cook calls your order down the counter in shorthand.

When a hurricane heads for the coast, even the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) tracks which locations stay open to judge how bad it is.

A 3 a.m. plate of eggs after a long drive is a rite of passage.

Pecans and Pecan Pie

Pecan pie earns its spot on the holiday table because the nut behind it grows right down the road.

Georgia has long been the country's top pecan producer, with the groves thickest around Albany in the southwest.

The trees stand in long rows and drop their nuts every fall.

Buttery and rich.

Roadside stands and country stores sell them by the bag, shelled or still in the shell.

Toss a handful into a pie, a praline, or a hot pan of butter and salt.

A homemade pecan pie beats any bakery version, and everybody's aunt guards her recipe like a family secret.

Greens and Peas on New Year's

New Year's Day comes with an order at the Georgia table: Eat your greens and your peas.

Collard greens stand in for folded money, and black-eyed peas stand in for coins.

Cook the peas with rice and a little pork, and you've got Hoppin' John.

Skip it, lose the luck.

Add a wedge of cornbread for gold, and some folks toss in stewed tomatoes for good measure.

The custom runs back generations across the South, tied to good fortune in the year ahead.

It's cheap, it's filling, and it comes with a promise.