Southern vs. Northern upper class food

Responding to Jason's question regarding the essence of what is known today as "Southern food."

Everybody is familiar with the traditional Southern fried food. This kind of food is seen almost too often on dinner tables in homes, fast food restaurant chains, and also in family-owned small restaurants. So I wanted to see if this idea of "Southern food" is preserved in more elegant and artful forms of food. After a short enough search on Google, I found a company called Debra Jane's Classic Gourmet Southern Delicacies. You can check it out here. It's not very functional though, because the company is more recent and I am guessing the website is as a result also very new. However, it does include several pictures of the Southern food that they offer! The most notable of which I've shown here.

The website says that this company is dedicated to "quintessential southern food." Since this company started recently (2007), I feel that it offers great insight into how traditional southern food is twisted and turned into the modern southern delicacies of fancy expensive restaurants. Although it is a modern elegant type of food, you can still see the influence of the traditional ideas of southern food. For example the very first picture is one of fried chicken (well at least I think it's chicken); my point is that it is fried and very noticeable. Also, the food in the middle pictures look so fresh, that it seems like the chef had just picked it from the garden! Again, a subtle idea of the farming and agrarian society of the traditional south. But I think the strongest sense of southern culture is that it's not like the abstract art of very elegant and fancy restaurants.

Here are some pictures showing how there is a different kind of elegant' upper class food, and it almost seems that the chef's forgot they were preparing food! It doesn't look filling at all, with all the small portions, which is in agreement with a profit-oriented and ungenerous philosophy on how to run a business, which seems to fit in with a northern city-like culture.

I close with a picture of a 'northerner' kind of upper class food from the Chicago gourmet 2009 that i got from this website.