A Love Affair with Southern Cooking (74 page)

Mountain apricots: See
Maypops.

Mountain dew: Better known as
moonshine
or
white lightning
, this is bootlegged corn liquor. During Prohibition, bootleggers worked overtime in the mountains of North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia, hence the name “mountain dew.” A “revenuer” (government
agent) once told me that a sure way to tell a bootlegger was to look at the back end of his car. If the body was “jacked”—riding several feet above the rear wheels—the owner was a bootlegger. Of course if the car
looked
jacked, the trunk was empty and no arrest could be made. On the other hand, if the trunk was full, the car looked normal. That was the point. I saw a lot of jacked cars when I worked as an assistant home demonstration agent in Iredell County, North Carolina. In fact, when I was to visit a poor family in the north end of the county, I was told to tell them exactly what time I’d arrive. “Don’t be early,” my boss warned me. “And don’t be late ’cause they’ll come out shooting.” I knew what that meant: I might be mistaken for a “revenuer.” That wasn’t my first encounter with a bootlegger, however. A friend of ours bought a farm near Raleigh and, to his astonishment, discovered a still operating in its nether reaches. The dead giveaway: a stream turned rusty yellow by the still’s runoff. My brother and I were shown the stream one day and, though I couldn’t have been more than ten, I’ll never forget the Day-Glo brilliance of that water.

Mudbug: Crayfish or
crawfish
.

Mudcat: Catfish.

Muffaletta: The New Orleans equivalent of the hero sandwich. Created in 1906 by owner Salvatore Lupo at the Central Grocery, it consists of a small but sturdy round loaf mounded with thinly sliced cheese, mortadella, and salami plus a ladling of pickled olives or olive salad. According to John Mariani in
The Dictionary of American Food and Drink, muffaletta,
translated from the Sicilian dialect, means “a round loaf of bread baked so that the center is hollow” and can be stuffed.

Mule ears: Fried turnovers filled with dried peaches, popular in the Smokies and Carolina hill country. They are also called
half moons
.

Owendaw: See
Awendaw.

Oyster plant: Salsify, a favorite southern vegetable, particularly among the antebellum planter aristocracy. In early southern cookbooks, the recipe that appears over and over again is Scalloped Oyster Plant, parboiled, creamed, strewn with buttered crumbs, and baked until bubbling and brown. (See recipe, Chapter 4).

Peach leather: Fresh peach purée boiled with sugar until the consistency of jam, spread thin on a marble slab or large flat plate, and dried in the sun for several days until leathery. Some Southerners roll the peach leather into a cone at this point and munch it like taffy. But there’s a more elegant finish: Dust the peach leather with confectioners’ sugar, roll it up jelly-roll style, and slice into rounds at ½-to 1-inch intervals. Then it’s back into the sun for two to three more days. Stored in an airtight container, peach leather keeps for weeks.

Philpy: A rice bread popular in the South Carolina Lowcountry from Colonial times up through the nineteenth century. It is rarely made today.

Pilau: Southern for rice pilaf; in the Lowcountry dialect, it’s
purloo.

Pinder, pindar: What some old-timers call peanuts, especially those who grow them. In his
Garden Book,
Thomas Jefferson called them “peendars” and wrote of planting them at Monticello.

Plantation soup: A more elegant term for
Pot likker
.

Poke: A sack, usually a brown paper grocery bag. Southerners like to say that they’d never “buy a pig in a poke,” meaning they want to have a good look at something before they lay down any hard cash.

Poke sallet: Pokeweed leaves. When young and tender, they are edible. Most Southerners boil them just as they would turnip greens or collards—with a piece of side meat.

Pole beans: Green beans “on steroids.” Actually they’re about 1½ times the size of regular green beans and must be staked on poles, hence their name. For growin’ and eatin’ most Southerners would agree that Kentucky Wonder Beans are the best.

Pompey’s head: A large, domed, highly seasoned meatloaf once popular down south. There’s a recipe for it in
Mrs. Hill’s Southern Practical Cookery and Receipt Book
(1872). As for the unusual name, southern culinary historian-cookbook author Damon Lee Fowler writes in the book’s glossary that it may have come from the “ancient Roman statesman Pompeius,” whose unusually broad head the meatloaf was said to resemble.

Portulaca (also called Purslane): A fleshy salad green popular long ago among southern cooks that’s being rediscovered by trendy chefs. I’ve seen lush beds of it in eastern North Carolina, also farther south in the Lowcountry. But I’ve had no luck growing it in my Chapel Hill garden; perhaps winters here are too harsh. Still, I keep an eye peeled for portulaca at my farmer’s market. It reminds me of the Italian
puntarella
.

Pot likker: Vegetable cooking water, particularly that left over from cooking collards, turnip greens, or green beans. It’s sopped up with corn bread.

Pulled pork: North Carolina barbecue, especially eastern style, for which the whole hog is pit-roasted over hickory coals until so tender the meat can be pulled from the bone. The classic sauce consists mainly of oil, vinegar, and cayenne pepper.

Pully bone: The chicken wishbone; children pull it to see who gets the longer piece—and a secret wish.

Purloo: A colloquial word, especially in the Lowcountry, for
pilau
or
pilaf
. (See Turkey Purloo, Chapter 3.)

Purslane: See
portulaca
.

Ramps: Wild leeks. Ramp festivals erupt in spring and summer across the Smokies and Blue Ridge.

Ratafia: A cordial made by steeping berries or other fruits in brandy. Old Charleston ratafias call for soaking peach kernels in brandy and adding orange flower water for flavor.

Receipt: The preferred southern word for
recipe
, especially in Tidewater Virginia and the South Carolina Lowcountry. It may derive from
recette,
the French word for
recipe
. Many French Huguenots settled in the Lowcountry.

Red and white: Popular New Orleans phrase for red beans and rice. (See recipe, Chapter 3.)

Rock (also called rockfish): What Outer Bankers and others living on the South’s other barrier islands call striped bass. (See Rock Muddle recipe, Chapter 2.)

Roux: The fat-and-flour paste used to thicken gumbos and scores of other Cajun and Creole dishes. There is blonde roux for delicate gravies and sauces and a rusty brown roux for more robust recipes. Miss Tootie Guirard, a lively Cajun cook I profiled for
Family Circle
some years ago, told me, “You must work the roux very slowly in a very heavy pot for at least half an hour until it turns a rich rusty brown. Any time I see a recipe that says to cook the roux five minutes, I know it’s no good.”

Sallet: Salad greens (usually a mixture) or the salad made from them. Some Southerners also call turnip greens “turnip sallet.”

Sally (or she-crab): A sexually immature female blue crab, easily ID’d by its scarlet claw tips and triangular apron (belly).

Salt pork: Freshly butchered cuts of pork, laid down in crocks with saltpeter or salt. Before refrigeration, this was one way meat could be preserved. Today, salt pork is not readily available—and the salt pork I’ve found is fat, not lean.

Salt-rising bread: Ruth Current, for years the state leader of the North Carolina Extension Service’s home demonstration clubs, introduced me to salt-rising bread. Born and brought up on a farm in Rowan County, Miss Current made this special bread every Christmas to give to friends and colleagues and I was lucky enough to be a beneficiary. The taste and texture of salt-rising bread are unlike any other. It’s not as sour as sourdough, not as sweet as yeast bread. And its chewiness? Slightly less than that of an English muffin. (See Heirloom Recipe, Chapter 5.)

Samp: An old-fashioned word for cornmeal mush, derived, it’s said, from the Algonquin word
nasaump
. In Colonial days and even later, Southerners breakfasted on samp with milk or butter, dined on samp and gravy, and even made a dessert of it by adding molasses or sweet sorghum.

Shine: Moonshine.

Short’nin’ bread: A song I heard a lot when I was growing up down south—long before such things were “politically incorrect”—was “Mammy’s little baby loves short’nin,’ short’nin,’ Mammy’s little baby loves short’nin’ bread.” Some believe it’s the southern equivalent of Scottish shortbread, an easy three-ingredi
ent recipe: butter, sugar (often light brown instead of granulated), and flour, although sometimes cornstarch replaces part of the flour to make the shortbread more tender.

Shuck beans: Another name for
leather britches beans
.

Side meat: The same as
fatback
.

’Simmon: Country colloquial for wild persimmon.

Skip-in Jenny: What Charlestonians call leftover Hoppin’ John.

Snow biscuits: Yeast-raised biscuits. They’re rolled, cut into rounds, pricked with a fork, and baked in a hot oven straightaway—no rising period. Served hot with homemade jam or jelly, they sometimes substitute for dessert.

Sook: A sexually mature female blue crab, easily distinguished from the male because the tips of its claws are red, not blue. A sook can also be recognized by its bell-shaped apron (belly); the male’s is phallic.

Sorghum molasses (also called sweet sorghum): Southern farmers, particularly those of Appalachia, grow a grain called sorghum to feed their livestock. They also press juice from the ripe seed clusters and boil it down until thick, syrupy, and the color of amber. This is sorghum molasses, mellower than sugarcane molasses and a popular sweetener. In the Blue Ridge and Smokies, sweet sorghum is ladled over breakfast biscuits. (See Sources, backmatter.)

Sour mash: To many Southerners, sour mash means the ultra-smooth, charcoal-filtered corn whiskeys of Tennessee, with Jack Daniel’s being the epitome of them all. But in truth, most bourbons are “sour mash” whiskeys, meaning that one day’s spent mash (a mix of grain, yeast, water, and sugar or molasses) is used to jump-start the next day’s fermentation. (See Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey, Chapter 1, also Bourbon, Chapter 6.)

Sourwood honey: A beloved Appalachian honey—delicate, pale as straw, and not overly sweet—produced from the nectar of sourwood blossoms. (See Sources, backmatter.)

Souse meat: A congealed loaf of ground pickled pork (usually the head and trotters) well seasoned with vinegar, salt, sage, and black pepper. It was always made with great care (each family using its own recipe), ladled into crocks, heavily weighted, and stored in the coldest part of the house. Considered a delicacy, it’s great in a sandwich, delicious sliced and eaten cold or breaded and fried. In the old days, souse meat was one of the by-products of the annual fall or winter hog killing. (See Heirloom Recipe, Chapter 3.)

Southern house wine: Sweet tea.

Southernpea (also called cowpea, field pea, and black-eyed pea). The nomenclature of the beans so dear to Southerners (for these are beans) boggles because they go by different names in different parts of the South. One cook’s cowpea, for example, is another cook’s crowder pea. To clarify things, cookbook author Elizabeth Schneider, in
Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini,
tracked down Blair Buckley, an authority at Louisiana State University’s Calhoun Research Center. Here’s how he groups the southernpeas—from delicate to assertive: (1) cream or lady pea, (2) pinkeye purple hull (variously mottled pods ranging in color from green to burgundy with rose-eyed green or dusty tan peas), (3) black-eyed pea (yellow-green pods packed with black-eyed tan or pale green peas), (4) crowder pea (greenish-grayish pods so crammed with peas they’re misshapen). Shelling southernpeas is labor-intensive, but most farmer’s markets, thank goodness, now sell them already shucked. Moreover, some of these peas—black-eyes, in particular—are available frozen and/or dried.

Sowbelly: The same as
fatback
.

Spat: A baby oyster.

Sponge crab: An egg-laden female blue crab. She carries her eggs—a spongy mass—on her belly. In the Chesapeake, females move to the intensely salty waters of the lower bay to spawn, even into the Atlantic.

Stack cake: A homespun hill-country dessert that consists of five, six, or even more wafer-thin, Frisbee-size shortbread or cookie rounds sandwiched together with a dried apple filling. Some cooks spike the filling with bourbon or Tennessee whiskey; some don’t. (See recipe, Chapter 6.)

Stone-ground meal: Cornmeal ground the old-fashioned way: between stones. Some southern mills still sluice water onto giant wooden water wheels that set the grindstones in motion, which explains why it is also sometimes known as water-ground meal. One of the best places to see an early water-powered mill is at Cades Cove, Tennessee, in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. (See Sources, backmatter.)

Streaky: Pork fat (or fatback) with a streak of lean. Often cooked along with collards, creecy greens, kale, turnip greens, poke sallet, or green beans, it adds delicate meat flavor and eliminates the need for butter.

Sunchoke: Jerusalem artichoke.