A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [252]
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-ingredient 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