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The great community of Bowmantown with its magnet restaurant, Willies is about 80 miles northeast of Gatlinburg. We do not fry lettuce. It is "kilt" by frying fatback and then pouring the grease over it. It is always leaf lettuce or branch lettuce and can have variations including onions, ramps or apple cider vinegar. It is often accompanied by potatoes fried in fat back grease with ramps or onions and sometimes scrambled eggs with ramps or onions in fatback grease. Branch lettuce grows wild in the creeks in the mountains and once you get past the fuzzy leaf it is quite good. Ramps are wild leeks that grow in the mountains and have a flavor that is a mixture of onion, garlic and rotten onion. Unfortunately this natural food is not sold in restaurants and you nave to go pick it yourself.
By the way, grits are flatlander food along with blackeyed peas but we have reluctantly added this foreign cuisine to our diets as well as collard greens and catfish.