I have lived many places in this great country of ours, but I have never eaten a ripe summer tomato as tasty as those large red beauties grown on John’s Island soil in South Carolina. I don't usually dole out free Yankee kudos either, but I am obliged to admit that New Jersey tomatoes come close to ours. Like their Carpetbagger ancestors, however, I figure those Jersey growers marched down to Charleston and stole some of our tomato dirt to take back up north. History tends to repeat itself.

When I was growing up, summertime meant that local backyard gardeners came to our door each day selling quart jars of shelled butterbeans, Kentucky Wonder string beans, field peas, okra and ripe tomatoes.

Mama kept dollar bills and some change in the proverbial cookie jar earmarked for vegetables.

It was always a woman who came to the house, usually with a kid shyly peeking around her skirttail. Ever grateful that she wouldn’t have to sit on the front porch in the South Carolina summer heat shelling butterbeans, Mama never haggled over the price. She cooked ham flavored butterbeans, Daddy's favorite food, and a steamer of white rice almost every day. Daddy would rather have another helping of butterbeans than Mama’s chocolate layer cake, the best anybody ever baked.

When I took my then husband, the token Yankee in our family, to meet my relatives, he dared to bad mouth okra. He might just as well have peed on Robert E. Lee’s grave.

“What did he say,” hollered Aunt Polly who claimed to have a hearing problem unless food happened to be the subject of conversation. “Sounded like he said okra was slimy.”

That’s exactly what he'd said. And to make matters worse, he ignored me kicking the daylights out of him under the table. He kept right on digging deeper holes for himself that I wanted to crawl into.

He said, “I’ll never understand how you people can put those slimy things in your mouth, let alone swallow them.”

You people?

I looked around my mother’s large round kitchen table where six of my Southern born and raised relatives were staring holes straight through him. Uh oh, I thought. The South is fixing to rise again.

Aunt Polly swallowed a mouth full of butterbeans and rice, pointed her empty fork at him and warned, “You watch yo’ mouth, boy. Them's fighting words.”

I shoved a dish of macaroni pie at the Yankee. “Have some of this, Sweetie. It’s wonderful.”

Oblivious of the hostile glares being directed at him from around the table, and not realizing that Southerners never serve macaroni pie as an entrée, he proceeded to fill up his plate with it.

“I love Mac and Cheese,” he said, making almost the same Southern social blunder as when he’d asked for UN-sweet tea.

“Um,” I murmured. “It’s macaroni pie. Mama’s and Aunt Polly’s secret recipe that everybody in town would kill for.”

“Oh,” he said as though disappointed. “I like the kind that comes in the blue and white box. Make a note of that, wifey.”

Wifey?

Could things possibly get any worse? I waited for Aunt Polly to say something and she did. “Is he talking about that Kraft crap?”

Mama, striving for detente, glared at her and said, “Polly, did you eat the only pulley bone on the fried chicken? I told you it was for company.” My aunt put on her sanctimonious lizard lips and smiled. “Pass the okra,” she said, “and some more of that homemade macaroni pie.”

Fried chicken, butterbeans and rice, okra, sliced tomatoes with mayo, homemade macaroni pie, collard greens and lots of sweet tea. There's no better way to bring solace to a true Southerner in need of comfort food.

When the temperature hovers over a hundred-degrees and the smothering humidity is stuck at ninety-eight percent, those summer veggies grown under an unbearably hot sun, are what keep me from spontaneously combusting.

Oh, in case you’re wondering what happened to the token Yankee? You don’t want to know.