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By Root 974 0

dried until shriveled and leathery. In the old days, fresh beans were threaded onto string and hung in the attic to dry, a method of preserving learned from the Cherokee, it’s said. Today the beans are more often “dried” in a dehydrator. Leather britches beans should be reconstituted in water before they’re cooked.

Lighten or light bread: Yeast bread, especially yeast-raised corn bread. Here’s a recipe for Old-Fashioned Corn Light Bread from Mrs. W. A. McGlamery of Clay County, North Carolina, just as it appears in From North Carolina Kitchens: Favorite Recipes Old and New (an uncopyrighted volume of recipes compiled fifty years ago by the state’s Home Demonstration Club women): “One quart water in a pot, let come to a boil; add one teaspoon salt, stir in cornmeal to make a thick mush. Add enough cold water to make it lukewarm, stir in meal to make a thick batter, cover and set by fire to keep warm; let rise twice and stir down; have oven hot; when it rises third time, put in oven and bake quickly.” The bread generates its own yeast.

Liver mush (also called liver pudding): A baked loaf made of ground boiled pork liver, cornmeal, sage, salt, and black pepper—a southern breakfast specialty. Before being served, it’s sliced and fried in bacon drippings or butter. (See Heirloom Recipe, Chapter 3.)

Loppered milk: Clabber.

Loquats: Also called Japanese plums, these sunny little fruits are ones that I will forever associate with Charleston, South Carolina; they seem to grow everywhere there. Depending upon variety, they can be as sweet as cane syrup or fairly sour. During their all-too-brief early spring season, loquats are made into pies, boiled into preserves, or eaten out of hand. Unfortunately, they are too fragile to ship.

Love Feast buns: Large round buns made from a rich yeast dough that in many versions contains mashed potatoes. According to Elizabeth Hedgecock Sparks, who was for many years the food editor of the Journal-Sentinel in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Moravian Love Feasts are held on Christmas, New Year’s, Easter, and other days of significance to the church. At the Home Moravian Church in Winston-Salem, Love Feast buns are accompanied by coffee (with cream and sugar). In North Carolina and Old Salem Cookery, Sparks, herself a Moravian, writes, “The idea behind the simple meal is that those who break bread together are united in the fellowship the way a family is.” (See recipe, Chapter 5.)

Marsh hen: The Lowcountry word for the clapper rail. A shy bird that hides among the reeds and salt grasses, it is difficult to spot. Still, persistent hunters bag it in season and claim to like its fishy taste.

Maypops (also called mountain apricots or field apricots): Passion fruits. One of the things we kids loved to do was stomp on the lime-green, lime-size passion fruits that grew in the red clay gullies of our edge-of-Raleigh neighborhood. They popped like firecrackers and, given their name, must have begun appearing sometime in May, although it seems to me that these tangled vines bore fruit all summer long. I remember the flesh inside being frosty-white; I guess you could say pithy. My father, a botanist, explained to my older brother and me that these were passion fruits—a delicacy in many parts of the world. I couldn’t imagine eating a maypop; of course the ones we squashed with such glee were immature. I didn’t taste mature passion fruits until many years later. When I was on assignment on the island of Madeira, I was served a passion-fruit dessert. Jacques Pépin, who happened to be on the island at the same time with his wife, Gloria, called it “Portuguese Jell-O.”

We all liked the local passion-fruit firewater much better. To me, passion-fruit flowers are incredibly delicate and beautiful. Measuring about two inches across, they are fringed in a starburst of purples, mauves, and whites. And their centers—fleshy and pale green or gold, if I’m remembering correctly after all these years—are said to resemble Christ’s crown of thorns. Hence the name “passion fruit.” According to Joseph E.