9 Tennessee Foods and Drinks That Confuse Anyone Who Didn’t Grow Up With Them

Tennessee borders eight other states, tied with Missouri for more neighbors than any state in the country. Certain foods and drinks locals consume change at nearly every one of those lines.

A dish that’s second nature in Memphis can draw a blank stare two hours up the road in Nashville.

Neither one means much once you leave Tennessee altogether.

These are the Tennessee foods that confuse anyone who didn’t grow up eating them.

1. Nashville Hot Chicken

Nashville hot chicken is the Tennessee food that puts an outsider through a heat test the average fried chicken order never asks for.

The cayenne paste goes on right after frying, and it hits hard enough to fog up a first-timer’s sinuses two bites in.

Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack traces the dish to a 1930s revenge recipe.

A girlfriend spiked Thornton Prince’s fried chicken breakfast with pepper to punish him for staying out too late.

It backfired completely.

Prince loved the heat so much he built a restaurant around it.

Nashville hot chicken always lands on plain white bread with pickle slices underneath, a detail that confuses anyone expecting a bun or a plate.

The bread has one job: Soak up the grease and the cayenne oil before it overwhelms the next bite.

2. Goo Goo Clusters

Hand someone from outside Tennessee a Goo Goo Cluster, and the confusion starts before the first bite.

Candy aisles outside the Southeast rarely carry them at all, so many parts of the country have never had the chance to try one.

Standard Candy Company invented the bar in Nashville in 1912, layering caramel, marshmallow nougat, and roasted peanuts inside milk chocolate.

It was the world’s first combination candy bar, when every other bar on the shelf stuck to one ingredient.

Nothing like it existed.

A Tennessean handing over a Goo Goo Cluster expects instant recognition and usually gets a confused look at the name instead.

Outside Tennessee, it reads like a toy, not a candy bar.

3. Memphis Dry Rub Ribs

Memphis dry rub ribs confuse anyone who orders barbecue expecting a rack dripping in sauce.

Memphis pitmasters coat the ribs in a spice rub of paprika, brown sugar, salt, and pepper, then smoke them without a drop of sauce touching the meat.

Sauce, if it shows up at all, rides on the side in a small cup.

No sauce required.

Charlie Vergos’ Rendezvous helped popularize the style downtown, charcoal-grilling its ribs with the dry seasoning instead of the wet, sticky glaze visitors expect from barbecue anywhere else.

A first-timer pokes at the bare, reddish crust looking for the sauce that never comes.

The smoke and the rub do all the work.

4. Barbecue Spaghetti

Barbecue spaghetti sounds like a joke to anyone who didn’t grow up ordering it in Memphis.

Memphis pitmasters ladle pulled pork and a tangier, thinner barbecue sauce over a plate of spaghetti noodles instead of serving the two separately.

The dish started at a Memphis barbecue joint in the 1970s.

It never left the menu.

The noodles pick up the same charcoal smoke as the pork, so the whole plate tastes like barbecue, not pasta with a topping.

Visitors expecting red sauce and meatballs get something else entirely.

5. Meat and Three

How is a first-time visitor to Tennessee supposed to know the rules at a Nashville meat and three when nothing on the wall explains them?

The ordering system has no printed rules: Pick one meat, then three vegetable or side dishes off a steam table that changes by the day.

Nobody explains it out loud.

Regulars at Arnold’s Country Kitchen move through the line without slowing down, calling out fried chicken or meatloaf, then turnip greens, mac and cheese, and candied yams like it’s second nature.

A visitor freezes at the sight of the line.

Food writers often call Nashville the meat-and-three capital of the South, running on a vocabulary nobody bothered to write down.

6. MoonPie and RC Cola

A MoonPie ran a nickel in the 1930s, and so did a bottle of Royal Crown Cola (RC Cola), a coincidence that turned into a habit long before anyone called it Southern culture.

Chattanooga Bakery invented the MoonPie in 1917 after a bakery salesman asked coal miners how big they wanted their snack, and one held up his hands to frame the size of the moon.

The name stuck.

Pairing it with an RC Cola became a Depression-era habit, when two nickels bought more food than a hot lunch counter charged for a plate.

The custom got its own country song in 1951 and its own festival in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, first held in 1994 to mark the pairing's 75th anniversary.

An outsider sees a cookie and a soda, bought as two separate items.

A Tennessean treats the two as a single order, meant to be eaten together rather than one after the other.

7. Benton's Country Ham

Benton's country ham confuses anyone who grew up on a wet-cured grocery store ham instead.

Allan Benton has cured hams in Madisonville, Tennessee, since 1973, rubbing each one with salt, brown sugar, and pepper, then aging it for nine months or longer.

Some hang long enough to grow a layer of mold on the outside.

That's normal.

A first-timer has to soak and scrub the ham before cooking it, then slice it paper-thin instead of the thick steaks a supermarket spiral ham trains people to expect.

One bite is salty enough to send a newcomer reaching for water.

Chefs across the country order it anyway.

8. White Lily Biscuits

White Lily is a flour milled from soft red winter wheat, with a protein content far below a standard all-purpose bag, and it's the reason a Tennessee biscuit turns out light instead of tough.

J. Allen Smith started milling it in Knoxville in 1883, and the process hasn't changed much since.

That's the whole trick.

A home baker in another state follows the same recipe, the same butter, and the same buttermilk, and still ends up with a dense, chewy result.

The flour was the missing ingredient the whole time.

Bite into a biscuit made with true White Lily flour, and it pulls apart in feathery layers instead of fighting back.

9. Soup Beans and Cornbread

Beans are dinner in East Tennessee, not a side dish waiting on a main to show up.

East Tennessee households have simmered pots of pinto beans in their own broth, called potlikker, since the beans became cheap and easy to ship into Appalachia around the turn of the 20th century.

No meat required.

Many East Tennessee cooks crumble cornbread into the bowl or serve it alongside the beans, and a spoonful of chow-chow relish often lands on top for a vinegar bite.