• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1127 0

Burrus of Dare County—printed in From North Carolina Kitchens: Favorite Recipes Old and New, an uncopyrighted collection of recipes from the state’s Home Demonstration Club women—is sweetened with sugar and molasses, then set to rise overnight. Too soft to shape, the batter is baked in a Dutch oven, uncovered for the first two hours, then with the lid on for another hour. Mrs. Burrus accompanied her Pone Bread recipe with the following note: “As far back as the oldest Hatteras resident can remember, pone bread has been considered a treat. It was first cooked in fireplaces, in iron pots, with hot coals on the lids, and later, in modern ovens. No camp meeting was complete without several of these, and not many Sundays passed without each home having a pone bread, cooked the day before. This bread packs well and keeps for a week or more (if well hid)…In the days before freezer lockers and short hunting seasons, all the thrifty islanders had a barrel of salted wild fowl, which made an excellent stew, and its gravy was enjoyed over the pone bread. Any gravy is good with it, however.”

Country ham: Before refrigeration, farmers used salt to preserve their hams. Over time, they’d add assorted seasonings to the “cure” and soon each family was zealously guarding its own secret recipe. At hog killing time, they’d rub fresh hams with their secret blend, then let them stand until the salt and seasonings permeated the meat. Only then were hams hung in the smokehouse—usually over smoldering hickory coals. Known as a “dry cure,” this method produces mahogany-hued hams, firm of flesh and intensely salty-smoky of flavor. The most famous (and some say the most elegant) country ham is the Smithfield (see Baked Virginia Ham and Smithfield Ham, Chapter 3). But there are some other mighty fine southern hams, too, among them the Edwards Hams of Surry, Virginia; A. B. Vannoy Hams of North Carolina; Benton’s Smoky Mountain Country Hams of Tennessee; and Colonel Bill Newsom’s Aged Kentucky Country Hams (see Sources, backmatter). Note: The big packing-house hams—what Southerners call “city hams” or “pink hams”—are wet-cured. That is, they are either immersed in brine or, as is more likely these days, injected with a salt solution. Many of these mass-produced hams now carry “water added” phrases on their labels.

Coush-coush caillé (also spelled couche-couche and cush-cush): A crusty skillet-browned cornmeal mush and Cajun breakfast staple. In years past coush-coush was accompanied by clabbered milk, but these days it’s more often served with sweet milk and sugar or cane syrup and bacon.

Cowpea: The preferred name for this big family of beans is southernpea according to Elizabeth Schneider in Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini (2001). One of the food world’s most diligent researchers and careful writers, Schneider is the absolute authority on fruits and vegetables.

Crawdads: Crayfish or crawfish (see below).

Crawfish: Colloquial for crayfish throughout the South. Cajuns tell a charming story about the origin of crawfish: It seems that when the British began deporting the French from Acadia (Nova Scotia) some 250 years ago, lobsters swam alongside the ships. But by the time they’d reached New Orleans, they were so tired and hungry they’d turned into crawfish. Settling west of New Orleans among the bayous, the Cajuns raised crawfish cookery to high art. Today, crawfish farming is big business in Louisiana, with buckets of them being shipped far and wide. (See Sources, backmatter.)

Cream peas: See Lady peas.

Creecy greens: A bitter wild cress of the mustard family also called winter cress (because it’s a cold-weather green) and dry land cress (because it grows in meadows and along roadsides). Old-time southern cooks boil creecy greens with a piece of ham or side meat just as they would collards or turnip salad. But those less wedded to tradition pick it young and toss it into salads. Finding fresh creecy greens isn’t as easy as it once was, but you can grow your own. You can also buy canned creecy greens (see Sources, backmatter).