Do You Sop?

Do you sop?  Do you even know what “sopping” is?  Southern folks over the age of 40 may chance being burned at the stake for not knowing, so we shall, once again, discuss a required southern tradition.

In our house, not just while growing up, but also while growing old, we sopped. Every meal involved some kind of sopping. It was as necessary to our southern survival as iced tea or corn bread, or even white beans with onions.

You see, sopping is satisfying. It is elemental in the making of a joyous meal.

To sop, you first have to have a strong piece of bread. If your biscuits are tender and flaky, they will not properly sop. They may be passable as a sopper, but it’s just not right when the bread falls apart. Sopping with a biscuit requires a certain type of biscuit, one that has a strong countenance, and won’t crumble, but will drag through the sop and reach your mouth in one piece. I personally find those biscuits almost impossible to make. I have tried and tried to make them like my Aunt Myrtle made them…big, strong, and with sopping capabilities that are rare these days. One can sop with a canned biscuit with some success, but for God’s sake, folks, don’t do it with the cheap ones! At least buy those big ole things with the chunks of butter in them…..do yourself a favor.

Our daddy was a professional sopper. He sopped at the end of every meal. It was always molasses and butter. The Mennonite molasses were the only ones he wanted.  He mixed it to perfection with a fork, admired it for a second, and reached for the last of the bread. For whatever reason, he always said, “How come you ask for MO lasses when you ain’t even had no lasses yet?” Then, laughing, he would sop it up, hand us all a bite, and supper would be over.

To define sopping, I will elaborate….it means that you are dragging a piece of bread through a pile of soft, delicious, juicy, liquid, or almost liquid, food. You look at it with love, and gently move it toward your mouth, which should already be open in case of a sopping fail.

Now, sop can be traditional butter and molasses, or butter and honey, or butter and jelly, as butter is a must for some soppers.

For others, it may be gravy or the juice left over from your white beans, your roast, or even your turnip greens. It may be a runny egg. It could even be the pink, acidic, perfect juice from a summer tomato.

Some people mimic sopping with scrambled eggs, but not if they are bouncy. If I did, I would not divulge this information to anyone who is a sopping purist. Remember the burning at the stake remark I made a few paragraphs ago!

Whichever it is, it requires a certain amount of talent.   Before you attempt sopping in a fancy restaurant, I suggest you practice at home until you perfect a technique, as it is possible you will have drippings and bread down the front of your nice outfit. You would not want to see disdain on the faces of waiters in white shirts, nor would you want to explain the excessive mess on the crisp, white tablecloths. I do suggest that if you are fool enough to do this, that you leave a twenty percent tip instead of a fifteen percent tip. Laundry costs money.

To assist you in learning a sopping technique, you may want to start with French bread. Did you realize that when you eat at certain Italian places, dipping your bread into the herbs and oil, that you are actually performing a southern tradition that is as old as the hills and hollers from which we came?  Now, I don’t mean southern Italy, I mean Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia, and for all I know they even sop in Kentucky!

When you learn to sop thick foods such as butter and molasses, you may graduate to thinner sops, such as Red Eye Gravy. I put this in capitals because it is a gift sent straight from the gods. To make it, fry some country ham until it’s almost burnt, then take out the ham and pour some really strong coffee into the left over grease.

The name “red eye” comes from the little round dots of grease floating on top of the gravy. They do, suspiciously, look like eyes. Mine are never red, but brown, which is probably irrelevant, since the name has stuck, and people wouldn’t know what you meant if you said “brown eye gravy.”

If your arteries do not immediately clog and cause you to have circulation problems, you will get to enjoy the ambrosia of the south. It is an acquired taste, I admit, and it was real easy for me to acquire, long, long ago. Our Daddy loved red eye gravy so much that he would shout, “SCAT, CAT, YOU GOT YOUR TAIL IN THE GRAVY!!” every time Momma put it on the table.

As a matter of fact, I have thought of my epitaph. My headstone should read..”Red Eye Gravy Killed Her And She Enjoyed Every Sopping Minute Of It!”