The Best Down Home Southern Foods To Complement National Buttermilk Biscuit Day

National Buttermilk Biscuit Day is a holiday that comes around every May 14th and celebrates a bread product that’s popular all across the United States, but is especially popular in the Southern U.S. It’s a food that can be eaten with a little bit of butter, made into breakfast sandwiches by the addition of meat such as ham or sausage, or topped with jam. It’s also the bedrock ingredient in the popular Southern dish called Biscuits and Gravy. For people who might not be familiar with this traditional breakfast dish, it’s typically made with buttery, fluffy biscuits (savory scones for our British friends) that are served with a milk (or cream) based gravy that’s made with sausage, sausage drippings, flour, and milk. It’s a dish that’s popular in U.S. states such as Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, and Tennessee, but it can certainly be found in locations all around the world — with local variations, of course.

Although biscuits are a pretty popular food item, we don’t think that a lot of people are celebrating National Buttermilk Biscuit Day. That’s probably because people think that in order to celebrate a particular food holiday they have to eat nothing but that particular food. We’re here to tell everyone that this is definitely not the case. You don’t have to celebrate National Buttermilk Biscuit Day by eating biscuits all day. Sure, we love buttermilk biscuits too but we’d be constipated for a week if we ate them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

To encourage people to observe this holiday we thought that we’d give our readers a little bit of advice that will help them think of it in a different way. Instead of thinking of this day simply as a day that celebrates buttermilk biscuits, we can use this holiday as a celebration of Southern food. Biscuits can factor into the celebration, and even be the main focus of it, but this holiday doesn’t have to be all about them.

So, how do we celebrate this day as a day dedicated to Southern foods? First and foremost, we can go over some of the foods that we feel are the best representatives of the food heritage. Below are some of the Southern foods that we’ve enjoyed over the years and believe will serve as the perfect complement to National Biscuit Day. Let’s enjoy the following foods with a nice tall glass of Southern iced tea and have a little bit of fun.

Biscuits & Gravy

Okay, we can’t talk about Southern foods and this particular holiday dedicated to biscuits without at least talking about Biscuits and Gravy. This is a food that can be eaten for breakfast, lunch, or dinner and is probably one of the best Southern comfort foods ever to be created. It was originally designed to fill up field laborers before they put in a back-breaking day of hard work, so it’s supposed to be a high-calorie food. Of course, since most people aren’t probably working in the fields all day, they might want to keep the portion of this food pretty small.

Smothered Pork Chops

There’s a reason why Smothered Pork Chops is a Southern cuisine classic. It’s delicious and is super easy to make. Perfectly cooked bone-in pork chops with mushroom gravy are absolutely heavenly. Especially when you pair it with a couple of buttermilk biscuits, mashed potatoes, and/or cornbread. Now, be honest. Doesn’t that just sound delicious?

Crispy Fried Chicken

Another classic Southern dish that pairs well with biscuits is Southern Crispy Fried Chicken. Take some chicken pieces, soak them in buttermilk, coat them in seasons and batter, and fry them in vegetable oil or shortening. Now, that’s not an exact recipe for making fried chicken. It’s just a general synopsis. However, a quick look on the Internet should give people all of the Southern Fried Chicken recipes they could ever want. The hard part is finding the one that they like the best.

Country Ham

Although hams are enjoyed all over the world, we feel that Country Ham is a unique dish that’s enjoyed by Southerners. This heavily salted ham is smoked using red oak or hickory and is enjoyed all across the South. In North Carolina, they’re not smoked and are known as Salt n’ Pepper Hams. In Missouri, a U.S State that straddles the Midwest and the South, country hams are usually made with brown sugar and tend to be less salty and milder than hams produced in Kentucky and Virginia. No matter what type of ham a person enjoys, there’s nothing like a few buttermilk biscuits to complement them. Especially when you use the ham to make ham and biscuit sandwiches!

Southern-Style Breakfast

You don’t have to have biscuits and gravy to have a Southern-Style Breakfast. People can also enjoy the biscuits without gravy, although we have to be honest, gravy does make everything better. A Southern-Style Breakfast generally includes eggs, bacon, sausage, grits, and hashbrowns or fried potatoes. Yes, this breakfast can be quite heavy, but it’s a great way to start your day.

Red-Eye Gravy With Ham

Okay, technically we’re still talking about breakfast, but we decided to go ahead and include this dish because it’s so iconic. Red-Eye gravy is a thin gravy that often goes by a variety of different names. It’s called Poor Man’s Gravy, Bird-Eye Gravy, Cedar Gravy, Bottom Sop, Pan Gravy, Coffee Gravy, and Red Ham Gravy. It’s made with the drippings from a country ham that’s mixed with black coffee and often served over ham, biscuits, and grits. Delicious!

Chicken Fried Steak

Chicken Fried Steak is another Southern dish that pairs well with buttermilk biscuits. It’s basically a piece of beef that’s been pounded flat, coated with seasoned flour, and then pan-fried or deep-fried. It’s then usually covered in a milk-based gravy. This dish was brought to the Southern U.S. by German immigrants settling in the region. It’s basically just the Americanized version of Wiener schnitzel — a breaded veal cutlet that was often served with a creamy sauce called Rahmsauce. Over the years, the dish would become Chicken Fried Steak in the U.S.

And that concludes our article on The Best Down Home Southern Foods To Complement National Buttermilk Biscuit Day. Yes, we know that we didn’t cover every single Southern dish that pairs well with biscuits. That would be impossible to do. However, we do hope that we covered the dishes that complement these biscuits the best.