A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [250]
Mess o’ greens: A big pot of collards, turnip greens, poke sallet, or other popular southern green cooked (“overcooked,” my Yankee mother always said) in water with a piece of side meat or streaky. The greens are usually served in little bowls with plenty of pot likker (the leftover cooking water) and a corn bread of some kind to sop it up.
Mirliton: A type of squash popular in the Deep South.
Mississippi mud: There are Mississippi mud pies and Mississippi mud cakes, both of them chocolate, both of them as dark and gooey as a Mississippi River mud bank, and both of them of fairly recent origin. I’d never heard of them until the mid 1970s. Even Mississippi-born-and-bred New York Times food editor Craig Claiborne wasn’t aware of them until after he’d moved north. I once ate a frozen Mississippi mud pie in Charleston, South Carolina, that was a bit different: a crushed Oreo crust mounded with chocolate ice cream mounded with whipped cream drizzled with chocolate syrup and strewn with curls of semisweet chocolate. While traveling about Mississippi, I’ve come across Mississippi mud cakes steamed in preserving jars. They look messy, but to chocoholics like me they are glorious! I shudder to think of the calories.
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