Meat and three
Meal in the South
A meat and three meal is one where the customer picks one meat and three side dishes as a fixed-price offering. Meats commonly include fried chicken, country ham, beef, country-fried steak, meatloaf, or pork chop; and sides span from vegetables such as potatoes, corn, and green beans, to macaroni and cheese, hush puppies, and spaghetti. A dessert, such as gelatin, is often offered. Typical accompaniments include cornbread and sweet tea.
“Meat-and-three” is a regional term popular in the cuisine of the Southern United States for both the meal and restaurants offering such a menu. Variants of meat and three can be found throughout the United States, but its roots can be traced to Tennessee and its capital of Nashville. It is also associated with soul food.
Similar concepts include the Hawaiian plate lunch, which features a variety of entrée choices with fixed side items of white rice and macaroni salad, and the southern Louisiana plate lunch, which features menu options that change daily. It is somewhat similar to a blue-plate special but with a more fixed menu. Boston Market and Cracker Barrel chains of restaurants offer a similar style of food selection.
“Meat and three” enters the record as meal in the South. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Meat, three and Meal can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Meat and three” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.