Folks who live above the Mason-Dixon Line sometimes like to make fun of Cracker Barrel, with its down-home sensibility and kitschy country store in every restaurant.

Sometimes they are being elitist, as if the baked beans and brown bread so tied to New England cuisine are something to be found in every fine dining restaurant. Worrywarts and fans of slow food will decry the Southern-fried offerings on the menu as contributors to the obesity epidemic, and will completely ignore the fact that Cracker Barrel was started in the 1960s as a rebellion against the fast-food joints that were cropping up along America’s highways.

Yeah, we get it. The food ain’t exactly macrobiotic. But you, my fanatical foodie friends, just don’t get the point.

When you need real grits or turnip greens that haven’t been turned by a chef into an $8 side dish, Cracker Barrel is the next-best thing to making them yourself. When you’re in a car with three or four hungry kids and the only other alternative is a greasy burgers-and-fries joint, why not stop for some reasonably priced meatloaf that comes with a vegetable or two instead?

The new Cracker Barrel in South Portland, just across from the Maine Mall, looks like all the other ones strung across the country. Rocking chairs and checkers games (all for sale) line the “front porch,” there are oil lamps and puzzles on every table, and old-fashioned clutter hangs on the walls. What’s different is that, in Maine, they actually light the fire in the big stone fireplace in the main dining room.

Breakfast is served all day, and like the lunch and dinner menus, the breakfast menu is filled with Southern comfort food. Maybe it’s not exactly like what your grandmother made, but it’s close enough to evoke memories of country farms and family meals.

An order of the “Old Timer’s Breakfast” for $6.69 included two eggs cooked to order with grits, sawmill gravy and homemade buttermilk biscuits, along with a choice of fried apples or hashbrown casserole and a choice of smoked sausage patties, turkey sausage patties, link sausage or thick-sliced bacon.

The grits were real grits, even though they were served a little thick and gummy — grits should be the consistency of oatmeal, and these appeared to have been in the pot a little too long. The smoked sausage, though, tasted like real Tennessee country sausage bought from the farm down the road.

The scrambled eggs were fine; the cheesy hashbrown casserole unremarkable.

Sawmill gravy is made, basically, from sausage drippings, milk and flour, and is usually served over biscuits. It is, by its nature, a little bland, and this batch certainly could have used some more seasoning, sausage fat, or more noticeable bits of sausage mixed in for added flavor.

People who have never tried sawmill gravy before may wonder what the fuss is all about if they go solely by Cracker Barrel, but once you’ve had really good sawmill gravy, you’ll “get it” — and you’ll order it when you find it, even if it’s not perfect.

Cracker Barrel also serves redeye gravy, which a generation or two ago was a staple of the Southern breakfast table. (See, when you diss Cracker Barrel, you are dissing an entire region’s foodways. How many places serve redeye gravy anymore?)

Redeye gravy is made with the drippings from the country ham that’s just been cooked in a cast-iron skillet. My grandmother used some of the breakfast coffee to deglaze the goodies stuck to the pan (although she had no idea what “deglaze” meant); some people use the coffee just to add color to the gravy.

No, none of this is health food, but if we’re honest in our food snobbery, we’ll all agree that Cracker Barrel was never meant to be anything other than what it is, and we’re not going to be eating there every day anyway.

The breakfast menu is huge, with lots of other combinations similar to the Old Timer’s Breakfast. Most include eggs, grits, biscuits, sawmill gravy and your choice of breakfast meats, from hickory-smoked country ham to grilled pork chops. Combinations range from $4.99 to $8.99.

Cracker Barrel also has a large selection of buttermilk pancakes (including wild Maine blueberry pancakes) and French toast, and a good selection of cereal, yogurts and fruit for those who need to watch their calories and cholesterol. There’s a low-carb menu that consists basically of eggs and breakfast meats. The kids’ menu has pancakes, cereal and eggs, with all selections under $5.

In the attached “country store,” as you’re browsing the kitsch (you know you will), take a gander at the old-fashioned candies, the boxes of Goo Goo Clusters and the Moon Pies.

There’s been a lot of talk about whoopie pies lately in Augusta. While you’re at Cracker Barrel, sample the Southern version: a Moon Pie made with two graham cracker-like cookies that are held together with a marshmallow creme filling and dipped in chocolate.

Now if I could just find an RC Cola. 

The Features staff of The Portland Press Herald anonymously samples meals for about $7.