11 Foods Tennesseans Grew Up On That Confuse Everyone Else

A Memphis rib joint hands you a rack with no sauce on it.

You notice the same thing happens to locals at the next table over, and they never ask for a bottle.

That’s on purpose.

Dry ribs are one of many foods Tennesseans grew up on that confuse everyone else.

1. Meat and Three

Ask a Tennessean what’s for lunch, and “meat and three” covers the whole answer.

Out-of-staters hear a portion size.

But it’s a plate: You pick one meat, you pick three vegetables, and cornbread or a roll comes along without anybody asking.

Mac and cheese counts as a vegetable, which confuses out-of-staters.

Food writers trace the name “meat and three” to Nashville lunch counters that fed factory workers, though nobody has pinned the first plate to one kitchen.

Arnold’s Country Kitchen has worked that steam table long enough to collect a James Beard America’s Classics award in 2009.

You still carry your own tray.

2. Barbecue Spaghetti

Memphis cooks put barbecue on spaghetti, and anybody who didn’t grow up eating it needs a minute.

It’s noodles, pulled pork, and a sauce thinner than the sandwich gets, all in one bowl.

Brady Vincent cooked on the railroad before he opened Brady and Lil’s.

Barbecue spaghetti was his idea.

The Vernon family bought the place, renamed it The Bar-B-Q Shop, and kept his recipe going on Madison Avenue.

Nobody calls it Italian.

Order a rib plate around town, and Memphis kitchens often send spaghetti out as the side.

That stops a transplant mid-bite.

3. Chocolate Gravy

East Tennessee kitchens turn out a gravy of cocoa, sugar, flour, and butter, poured hot over split biscuits on a Sunday morning.

Say “gravy” to anybody from another part of the country, and they picture sausage.

This is breakfast.

Mountain cooks have never treated chocolate gravy as dessert, and a visitor watching a kid sop it up with half a biscuit takes a while to accept that.

4. Ribs Without Sauce

The ribs come out dry.

Order a rack in Memphis, and it arrives wearing seasoning instead of sauce, which rattles anybody raised in a sauce state.

Charlie Vergos found an old coal chute in the basement under his downtown diner in 1948 and turned it into a charcoal pit.

He mixed his father’s Greek seasonings with Cajun spices from New Orleans.

The place became Rendezvous.

Sauce sits on the table for anybody who wants it, and many Memphians never reach for the bottle.

Ask for wet ribs, and you’ll get them, along with a look.

5. Poke Sallet

Poke sallet starts as a weed along Tennessee fence rows and creek banks, and cooks have gathered it every spring for as long as anybody can remember.

The Tennessee Poison Center lists several toxic compounds in pokeweed, and the root is the most toxic part of the plant.

So, cooks pick the young shoots, boil them, pour off the water, and boil them again.

It takes two boils.

Tell a visitor that supper started out poisonous, and watch that fork hover.

What finally reaches the plate looks like turnip greens, tastes closer to spinach, and usually arrives scrambled with eggs.

The Poke Sallet Foundation ran its 48th festival this May at the Jackson County Fairgrounds in Gainesboro, with a full carnival on the grounds.

6. Hot Fish

Nashville hot chicken turns up on menus all over the country now, and almost nobody outside Tennessee has heard of hot fish.

The cook drops whiting or catfish in the fryer, paints it with the same cayenne paste, and lays it on two slices of white bread with mustard, pickles, and raw onion.

That white bread soaks up the grease, and it stays on the plate while the fish disappears.

You eat it last.

Bolton Matthews and his wife, Dollye, opened Bolton’s Spicy Chicken and Fish in East Nashville in 1997, working from a recipe his uncle Bolton Polk left him.

A first-timer usually asks where the bun went.

7. Red-Eye Gravy

Red-eye gravy is country ham drippings cut with black coffee, and that sentence alone stops many visitors cold.

No flour goes in it.

Cooks fry the salty ham in a skillet, pull it out, then pour coffee into the hot pan to lift everything stuck to the bottom.

What you get is thin and dark.

One story credits Andrew Jackson, who supposedly asked a hungover cook for gravy as red as his eyes.

The plainer explanation is what happens in the bowl, where the coffee settles into a dark circle ringed by ham grease.

Out on Highway 100 west of Nashville, the Loveless Cafe has been open since 1951, and its country ham plate still comes with red-eye gravy and two eggs.

8. Barbecue Nachos

A Memphis tray of barbecue nachos starts with pulled pork, cheese sauce, barbecue sauce, dry rub, and jalapeños over corn chips.

That's pork, not beef.

Most people walk up expecting taco meat and a jar of salsa.

The Memphis Redbirds trace the dish to the 2000 opening of AutoZone Park.

Their own site calls it the ballpark's top-selling concession, and in 2025 the team spent two games playing as the Memphis BBQ Nachos in tan and brown jerseys.

Order a tray, and you'll need a fork, since the chips underneath turn to mush about four bites in.

9. Leather Britches

Up in the mountain counties of East Tennessee, leather britches are green beans somebody strung on a thread with a sewing needle and hung up to dry.

They shrivel into something closer to a shoelace than a vegetable.

That's the name.

The Cherokee are said to have dried beans this way long before mountain kitchens had canning jars, and settlers copied the trick.

Cooking them takes an overnight soak and a few hours in a pot with a piece of smoked pork.

Supper starts the night before.

Hand a bowl to somebody from out of state, and watch them hunt around for the green bean they were promised.

Shuck beans is the other name for the same dish, and it tastes nothing like a fresh green bean.

10. Sorghum, Not Molasses

The jar of dark syrup on a Tennessee breakfast table is sorghum, whatever the family calls it.

Almost everybody calls it molasses.

Molasses is a leftover from refining sugar cane, while sorghum comes from sweet sorghum cane, a grass grown for the juice inside the stalk.

It's a different plant.

The Guenther family has been pressing and boiling it down at Muddy Pond outside Monterey for three generations, and fall is when the cooking happens.

Pour it over a hot buttered biscuit, and it tastes somewhere between honey and burnt sugar, which isn't what a maple syrup household expects.

11. RC Cola and a MoonPie

A MoonPie and an RC Cola make lunch, not dessert, and that pairing has confused visitors for generations.

The company's story is that a coal miner asked for a snack as big as the moon, and Chattanooga Bakery sold the result for a nickel.

Working men paired the cake with an RC Cola since both cost almost nothing.

That's lunch.

Residents of Bell Buckle, a town of about 500 people, throw the RC Cola and MoonPie Festival every June, and the crowd runs into the thousands.

A Double Decker MoonPie adds a third cookie and a second layer of marshmallow, in case a single MoonPie doesn't cover the drive home.

Tennessee's Official State Food

Lawmakers named hot slaw the first official state food in 2024, and much of the country has never heard of it.

It's spicy, not warm.

The heat comes from pickled peppers stirred into shredded cabbage with mustard and mayonnaise, and the bowl goes on barbecue sandwiches and hot dogs.

Cooks in Cleveland, Tennessee, trace the recipe to the concession stand at the old Star Vue Drive-In.

Memphis barbecue and Nashville hot chicken both lost the title to a bowl of cabbage.