A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [245]
Carolina Gold: The yellow-husked rice once grown in the South Carolina Lowcountry; it helped launch the planter aristocracy and made men rich. The Carolina brand rice sold in nearly every supermarket is not Carolina Gold; apart from name, it has little in common with the rice that had been the choice of Chinese emperors.
Cat: Catfish.
Chayote: Another name for mirliton.
Cheney briar: The Lowcountry word for a nasty, invasive, sharply thorned vine known elsewhere as smilax. The baby shoots, I’m told, taste like asparagus and occasionally show up in local farmer’s markets.
Chicory: The practice of roasting the fleshy root of endive and adding it to coffee dates back to eighteenth-century Europe and it may have been the French who introduced coffee with chicory to New Orleans. No one can say for sure. What is known, however, is that to stretch precious coffee during the lean Civil War years, cooks routinely added roasted chicory grounds because chicory was available and it was cheap. To this day, Louisianans prefer coffee with chicory to “everyday American,” although those unaccustomed to this dark brew find it excessively bitter.
Chincoteagues: The exquisitely briny Chesapeake oysters taken off the Virginia island of Chincoteague. Some connoisseurs consider Chincoteagues to be the East Coast’s finest oysters.
Chinquapins: I always thought that these tiny, buttery acorns came from an oak tree. Not so. They’re the “fruit” of a variety of chestnut that grows throughout the South. There was a large chinquapin tree in our front yard when I was a child, and I loved to gather the little brown acorns and string them into necklaces. My father told me that they were edible, also that people liked to roast them just like peanuts. I never tried this, although I did munch a few raw chinquapins; to me they tasted bitter. I’ve subsequently learned that chinquapins were an important food among Native Americans, who pounded them into meal, pressed them into oil, boiled them into “milk,” and no doubt ate them raw or roasted. Frugal mountain folk still use chinquapins much as they would wild hickory nuts or black walnuts.
Chit’lins: Chitterlings or the small intestine of a hog. Cleaned, boiled, and then fried, chit’lins are particularly popular among country folk.
Christophene: Another name for mirliton.
Clabber (also called bonney-clabber or loppered milk): Thick soured milk the consistency of yogurt. Spooned over cornmeal mush along with molasses, cane syrup, or sugar, it was (and still is) a breakfast favorite in many parts of the South but no more so than in the Louisiana bayous—Cajun Country. In North Carolina, clabber is used to make pancakes (clabber cakes); and when topped with heavy cream, sweetened with sugar, and strewn with freshly grated nutmeg, it is eaten for dessert. (See Heirloom Recipe for Bonney-Clabber, Chapter 6.)
Coal yard: A cup of black coffee; the term was popularized early in the twentieth century, or perhaps even earlier, by New Orleans African Americans.
Collation: In New Orleans, a tea party or a coffee.
Coon: A racoon; some southern country folk still trap them and eat them.
Cooter: Believed to be a corruption of kuta (West African for “turtle”), a cooter is a sea turtle. Before sea turtles became an endangered species, Lowcountry cooks made a specialty of cooter soups. Today they’re more apt to use terrapin (an amphibious turtle found in brackish water)—if they make turtle soup at all.
Corn pone: In its simplest form a corn pone is nothing more than a thick-enough-to-shape mixture of cornmeal, baking powder (or soda), salt, and water or buttermilk. Patted into burger-size rounds, pones are browned on a well-greased griddle, baked till done “clean through,” then served with greens—to sop up the pot likker. But there are more elaborate corn pones, too. One old Outer Banks recipe from Mrs. Rebecca