12 Old-School Southern Meals Johnny Cash Loved

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Johnny Cash might be remembered for his baritone voice and his propensity for wearing black, but he was a foodie at heart, too. Whether you're a die-hard Cash fan or someone who just appreciates good, honest cooking, you might be interested in the old-school Southern meals Cash loved. Growing up in Arkansas in the 1930s and '40s, he would have been raised on down-home Southern classics. And the "Man in Black" was known to cook for his own family later in life, as well.

Published in 2018, "The Cash and Carter Family Cookbook" — written by Cash's son, John Carter Cash — offered a rare glimpse into the meals that fueled this country legend. The book pairs family recollections with classic Southern recipes and lets the public get to know some of the musician's favorites. 

Using the cookbook as a source, along with other online references to his food preferences, we'll explore 12 of the music icon's favorite Southern meals. From the classic chili that the man himself loved to cook to his favorite recipes from his mother, his grandmother, and his wife June Carter, we're providing insight into the home life of Cash — plus you might pick up some tasty dinner ideas.

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According to Johnny Cash's son, John Carter Cash, his father was an excellent chili cook. It was such an iconic dish in his household that Carter Cash included the recipe in his family cookbook. The "Man in Black" must have loved this chili a lot for it to become his signature dish.

Cash's road life may have been fast and hard-driving, but his chili recipe demands time and attention. It starts with browning plenty of ground beef, plus sirloin steak or venison — something that sets this dish apart from other classic chili recipes. It then builds layers of flavor with onions, bell peppers, garlic, and a blend of chili powders and cumin. Beans also play a part here, with a combination of black, pinto, kidney, and chili beans.

It takes at least an hour of simmering and then, to finish things off, you throw in a handful of cornmeal. In an interview with NPR, John Carter Cash said he remembers his father tossing in random handfuls each time. "You didn't know how much was going to get into one pot of chili to the next," said Carter Cash. "However much it was — that was the specific texture and thickness of that chili." This chili isn't for weeknight shortcuts, but if you can carve out a Sunday afternoon, it's a taste of Cash's homeland.

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In the Cash family, cornbread was an everyday affair. It was one of Johnny Cash's favorites — when not enjoying it with meals like his chili, he enjoyed it crumbled up in buttermilk and eaten with a spoon. While the chili is the musician's own recipe, the cornbread eaten in his household came from his mother. This was the recipe featured in John Carter Cash's book "The Cash and Carter Family Cookbook."

While there are many ways to make this old-school Southern classic, the version eaten in the Carter Cash household was made with a mix of cornmeal and self-rising flour. It's a simple affair, with just salt and onion for flavor. The recipe also calls for buttermilk, which adds a nice tang. Whether eaten with chili, soaked in buttermilk, or any other way you want to enjoy it, this is a recipe that's been passed down through the Cash generations. Of course, you can still evoke the spirit of the icon by eating any cornbread of your choosing. We have a Southern-style buttermilk cornbread recipe that fits the bill.

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Johnny Cash loved fried catfish, his son John Carter Cash told fans in a Reddit AMA. Growing up in Arkansas, Cash would have been no stranger to the bounty of Southern rivers. Perhaps fried catfish was a fixture at family gatherings or regularly made its way onto the dinner table.

Good fried catfish is often dredged in a cornmeal mixture and served hot and deliciously crispy. There's no particular recipe that Cash used for this dish, but it's likely that many people in his life made their own versions over the years — his mother and grandmother, his wife, and even cooks and housekeepers as he became more successful.

The dish is a classic in the Southern states, its popularity spanning decades, each cook adding their own touch to the basic cornmeal coating. While exact recipes vary, the essence remains the same: a crunchy exterior that gives way to tender, mild-flavored fish.

In highlighting fried catfish among Cash's favorites, we pay homage to the kind of home cooking that shaped his early years and stayed with him through stardom. It doesn't matter where life's road may lead, many of us will always be drawn to the dishes we grow up with.

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Scripture cake held a special place among Johnny Cash's favorite desserts, a reminder of his early life steeped in faith and gospel music. As noted in the "Around the Opry Table" cookbook, Cash's preferred version was his mother Carrie's own recipe, one of the family's most treasured treats. In the Cash household Sunday services, hymns, and gospel harmonies were the backdrop to daily life. And Scripture cake blended food with spirituality, so it makes sense that it was among Cash's favorites.

The concept of Scripture cake comes from church gatherings in the South, where cooks encoded recipe ingredients alongside corresponding Bible verses. A line might read "Add 1 cup of Judges v:25" prompting the baker to look up the verse to find the ingredient to add. This turned baking into a spiritual affair. Of course, that doesn't tell you much about the cake itself, but Scripture cake tends to be white fruit cake. We're sure whatever version Mama Cash whipped up was delicious.

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There are some foods we know are Johnny Cash favorites due to family recipes and knowledge about the kinds of dishes he liked to cook. Other times we know that Cash liked a particular food just through anecdotes from those who spent time around him, however briefly.

One such story came from reporter Jeff Bobo in his story for the Kingsport Times News. Recounting some of his top moments as a journalist, he talks about the time he met Johnny Cash. Bobo was working the news desk when a tip came in saying that Cash was eating at a nearby restaurant. Being the only one on call, Bobo went down to see if Cash would talk to him. Cash agreed and Bobo interviewed him for a few minutes.

"I really couldn't tell you what he said or what I wrote in the article," Bobo says. "All I remember is he was very nice, and he was really enjoying his coconut cream pie." So, there we have it — coconut cream pie was something Cash would have picked from a menu of desserts. We appreciate the choice of this old-school classic. You don't see it around today as often as you once did, but maybe it's time for a comeback.

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Biscuits and gravy was something that was eaten regularly in the Cash household, according to John Carter Cash. And one of the gravies Johnny Cash loved was the tomato gravy featured in Carter Cash's "The Cash and Carter Family Cookbook." It's an unusual hybrid of sausage gravy and diced canned tomatoes. The recipe came from Maybelle Carter, the mother of Cash's wife June Carter.

Both Maybelle and June Carter were country music stars in their own right, but still found time to cook for their families. Maybelle Carter's recipe was said to be made with diced tomatoes that she canned herself, so you might not get quite the same quality using store-bought versions. Still, it's an interesting recipe.

Like regular sausage gravy, it contains sausages, of course, alongside a creamy white sauce made from milk and flour. But where it differs from the usual recipe is that it has diced tomatoes and sugar added, creating a pink sauce that combines the creaminess of the white sauce and the acidic brightness of the tomatoes. We imagine this would be the perfect gravy to eat with biscuits, so we're unsurprised that it's a Carter Cash family favorite.

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Pineapple pie is an important part of the Cash family's cooking history: it was Johnny Cash's mother Carrie's own recipe, later immortalized in John Carter Cash's "The Cash and Carter Family Cookbook." You might know other Southern classics like chess pie or pecan pie better, but this one deserves to be remembered. You get the brightness and sweetness of pineapples in a light custard filling.

The filling starts with crushed canned pineapple, though you could also use fresh. The pineapple is mixed with sugar, eggs, butter, and a little flour to help hold everything together. This forms a kind of pineapple custard that's poured into a pie shell and baked. It's actually a simple recipe, especially if you use a store-bought pie crust.

This pineapple pie is a family heirloom and one of the musician's favorites. If you're interested in trying some of the dishes he loved, this one should certainly be on your list. It may have even been made by his mother when he was a child, since canned pineapple has been readily available in the U.S. since around the 1910s to the 1920s.

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In "The Cash and Carter Family Cookbook," John Carter Cash remembers that fried bologna was one of his father, Johnny Cash's, favorite breakfasts. Carter Cash recalls the smell of it coming from the kitchen at his family home in Tennessee. Cash often served his fried bologna with eggs and biscuits in true Southern style.

Rather than making them from scratch, Cash would buy canned biscuits, which seems like a reasonable shortcut for a busy music star. When frying the bologna, he always made sure it was so crispy it was almost burned. His son says that he always loved crispy, well-cooked foods. After removing the bologna from the pan, he would scramble the eggs right in the drippings. He didn't beat the eggs before adding them, just scrambled them right in the pan, adding lots of black pepper and a little salt.

Once everything was cooked, the eggs and bologna were served with a couple of biscuits. Butter and local honey went on the biscuits, while Cash liked ketchup on his eggs and bologna. Simple, sure, but this was among Cash's favorite foods. This is an easy dish to recreate, if you want to follow in the footsteps of the musician. You can bring it together easily enough, even without any kind of recipe.

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Cheese grits were a staple in the Carter Cash household. A Southern classic, they're traditionally eaten for breakfast or brunch, often with warm biscuits, but are occasionally incorporated into meals like shrimp and grits. John Carter Cash includes a cheese grits recipe in "The Cash and Carter Family Cookbook" that came from his great uncle Tube, Maybelle Carter's brother.

If you're not familiar with grits, they're ground cornmeal cooked up into a kind of porridge. They're warm, comforting, and delicious — an old-school Southern dish that deserves to be shouted about. The Carter Cash family recipe is a baked one. It involves first cooking the grits on the stovetop, then adding eggs and baking until firm. This kind of recipe has an almost custardy consistency from the eggs.

It's the kind of brunch dish that's filling and satisfying, while still being fairly simple to whip up. If you're looking to try something similar to this dish that Cash loved, our cheese grits casserole recipe fits the bill. It's cooked first on the stovetop and then in the oven with added eggs, so it should give you fairly similar results to this family classic.

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The Cash family has its own signature hash brown casserole, which may have been enjoyed by Johnny Cash, June Carter, and their kids for many family breakfasts. There are many ways to make hash brown casserole, but it always involves shredded potatoes or frozen hash browns, usually in a creamy sauce. Whatever recipe is used, it's part of the Southern culinary repertoire that sometimes gets overlooked.

We're not sure exactly what went into the Cash family hash brown casserole, but we know it was a dish Cash loved. If you're looking to make one of your own, you could try to recreate Cracker Barrel's hash brown casserole. This one involves making a white sauce with butter, flour, and half-and-half, and mixing it with frozen hash browns. This mixture is baked until cooked through, then topped with cheese and baked for longer until it gets melty and delicious. It's the kind of old-school breakfast dish we wish we saw on menus more often. You could even serve it as a side at dinner.

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If you were invited to a cookout with Johnny Cash and June Carter sometime after 1995, you might have been served Cash burgers — and they probably aren't what you expect. This meal might not be a true Southern classic, but it comes from the Southern barbecue tradition, with a twist. Cash burgers come from a handwritten recipe dated October 1995, invented by Cash and Carter.

Given some of Cash's other favorites, you might be expecting a classic beef burger. But, Cash burgers are actually veggie burgers. Whether they were invented for vegetarian guests or as a healthier option as the couple aged, we're not certain. But, we know these burgers were loved enough in the household to bear the Cash name.

The recipe consists of brown rice, beans, and a range of veggies, including roasted chestnuts, okra, bell peppers, squash, potatoes, and mushrooms. All these ingredients are cooked and then held together with tapioca starch as a binder. Next, the mixture is formed into patties and pan-fried. The recipe states that they can be seasoned any way you like, according to your preference. There's a note at the bottom stating that they're all organic. So, maybe this isn't quite what you'd expect from the name Cash burgers, but we appreciate that the famous singer was able to embrace vegetarian options, despite being a meat-eater.

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Pinto beans and ham hocks is an old-school Southern dish that Johnny Cash loved. In fact, it was one of his go-to dishes to cook, with his recipe featuring in "The Cash and Carter Family Cookbook." It's not a quick dish to make from scratch, so we imagine this was something he made when he was home from the road and making time to spend with his family.

In classic recipes, dried pinto beans are slowly simmered with ham hocks for flavor. This slow simmering infuses them with loads of great savory notes. They often also contain ingredients like onion and bay leaves to give them more oomph. If you want to make them yourself, there are substitutes for ham hocks, in case you can't find them. Smoked bacon or smoked pork shank work just as well. Or, if you don't eat meat, adding a touch of liquid smoke and some extra salt and fat will give you a similar effect.

We also know about Cash's love of pinto beans from a story by the late contributing writer Everett Vanover in The Mountain Eagle. Vanover tells of a time when Johnny Cash was staying on the Sampson Air Base, in New York. He ended up asking Vanover's wife, Estelle, to cook pinto beans for him, hearing that she was a great Southern cook. So, even when he was on the road, Cash couldn't stay away from classic Southern pinto beans.