A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [253]
Southern house wine: Sweet tea.
Southernpea (also called cowpea, field pea, and black-eyed pea). The nomenclature of the beans so dear to Southerners (for these are beans) boggles because they go by different names in different parts of the South. One cook’s cowpea, for example, is another cook’s crowder pea. To clarify things, cookbook author Elizabeth Schneider, in Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini, tracked down Blair Buckley, an authority at Louisiana State University’s Calhoun Research Center. Here’s how he groups the southernpeas—from delicate to assertive: (1) cream or lady pea, (2) pinkeye purple hull (variously mottled pods ranging in color from green to burgundy with rose-eyed green or dusty tan peas), (3) black-eyed pea (yellow-green pods packed with black-eyed tan or pale green peas), (4) crowder pea (greenish-grayish pods so crammed with peas they’re misshapen). Shelling southernpeas is labor-intensive, but most farmer’s markets, thank goodness, now sell them already shucked. Moreover, some of these peas—black-eyes, in particular—are available frozen and/or dried.
Sowbelly: The same as fatback.
Spat: A baby oyster.
Sponge crab: An egg-laden female blue crab. She carries her eggs—a spongy mass—on her belly. In the Chesapeake, females move to the intensely salty waters of the lower bay to spawn, even into the Atlantic.
Stack cake: A homespun hill-country dessert that consists of five, six, or even more wafer-thin, Frisbee-size shortbread or cookie rounds sandwiched together with a dried apple filling. Some cooks spike the filling with bourbon or Tennessee whiskey; some don’t. (See recipe, Chapter 6.)
Stone-ground meal: Cornmeal ground the old-fashioned way: between stones. Some southern mills still sluice water onto giant wooden water wheels that set the grindstones in motion, which explains why it is also sometimes known as water-ground meal. One of the best places to see an early water-powered mill is at Cades Cove, Tennessee, in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. (See Sources, backmatter.)
Streaky: Pork fat (or fatback) with a streak of lean. Often cooked along with collards, creecy greens, kale, turnip greens, poke sallet, or green beans, it adds delicate meat flavor and eliminates the need for butter.
Sunchoke: Jerusalem artichoke.
Sweet milk: Fresh milk as opposed to buttermilk (or sour milk).
Sweet sorghum: See sorghum molasses.
Sweet tea: The presweetened iced tea both southern home cooks and restaurants serve. Today some restaurants also offer the option of “unsweet tea.” In country or small-town restaurants, glasses are continually refilled at no extra charge.
Swimpy: Colloquial for “shrimp,” especially along the Gulf Coast and in the Georgia–South Carolina Lowcountry.
Syllabub: A frothy milk punch spiked with bourbon or rum introduced to the South by the English gentry who settled there. In the old days, cows were milked directly into the mix and that created the froth.
Tasso: Cold-smoked, cured, pickled pork or beef. Richly spiced, often peppery, and traditionally used to season gumbos, jambalayas, and other Cajun and Creole dishes, tasso has found new favor among innovative chefs elsewhere about the South who slip it into everything from “nouvelle Hoppin’ John” to Brunswick stews their grandmothers would never recognize.
Tassies: Bite-size tarts served mainly at teas, open houses, and receptions. Most popular flavors? Pecan (as in pecan pie) and lemon (as in lemon chess pie).
Tupelo honey: A rare honey made from the nectar of tupelo gum blossoms. These trees grow mainly in Florida and along the Gulf Coast. (See Sources, backmatter.)
Vegetable pear: Another name for mirliton.
Virginia ambrosia: Brunswick Stew. (See recipe, Chapter 3.)
Water-ground meal: See stone-ground meal.
White lightning: