Strictly Southern: Food

Cheryl Mients is the winner of last week’s drawing!

I can’t believe another month has come and gone! I had so many plans for August. *Sigh* Oh well, let’s move on. Today I want to discuss a few Strictly Southern foods. One is the Muscadine–or muskydine as us kids used to say. It looks like a grape, and when I was a kid, you could only find them in the woods. And they grew high in the trees.  Now you can find them in my backyard. A bunch of us kids would traipse out to the nearby woods and the bravest one would climb the tree to the top (cause that’s where the vines were) and then he would shake the vines until muscadines rained down. While we were sent to gather the muscadines for jelly and preserves, quite a few of them never made it home. They were so good, well worth the 4 seeds that are usually in each grape. It’s sort of hard to describe how muscadines taste. They’re sweet with a unique musky taste,  and the hulls are tough, with a tangy flavor that contrasts with the sweetness of the pulp. Some people squeeze the pulp from the hulls to make a clear jelly, but I like the dark jams made with the hulls. And muscadine cobbler is awesome!     Here is the bowl I picked from the vines in my back yard. If I wasn’t on a diet, I would have baked a cobbler so you could see how delicious it looks. Muscadine cobbler is usually eaten after a meal of cornbread, and I don’t mean that sweet, cake-like version I found in Washington D. C., but the real kind made with buttermilk, fried pork chops or chicken, (take your pick), peas, fried corn (or on the cob), greens, (again take your pick over turnip or mustard. I won’t mention collard greens because that’s something even I don’t eat. 🙂 And Sweet Tea. Hope you enjoyed my ramblings on Muscadines. Next month I’ll write about Slugburgers. I would have written about them this month, but I didn’t have a photo of one. And it would be too hard to describe, so I’ll just let you wonder for the next 30 days what in the world a Slugburger is. Leave me a comment if there is a Southern food you’ve heard of and wondered what it is, or there is a food you’d like me to discuss.