Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread & Scuppernong Wine: The Folklore and Art of Southern Appalachian Cooking by Joseph Dabney
Author:Joseph Dabney [Dabney, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2010-04-30T16:00:00+00:00
North Carolina Indian women had an extra-special incentive to eat bear meat, according to William Byrd. To do so, they were taught, would assure them an easy baby delivery and would add to their vitality.
Bear meat, easily cooked and cured like pork, met many pioneer needs, producing cooking oil, grease for arthritic bones, oil for lamps, and even hair grease for the young man out to impress a lass on the other side of the mountain. Drops of hot bear grease eased the pain of many a mountain earache, while bearskins warmed cold cabin floors, provided wonderful blankets, and were used to make shoes.
But by the late 1800s, under relentless pressure from the tide of settlers rolling down the Shenandoah Valley and spreading through the Piedmont foothills and valleys, the Appalachian bear population began to thin out dramatically. This forced mountain people to turn more and more to the white-tailed deer, which for centuries had been an Indian food staple.
Accounts tell of huge deer herds roaming the region. In the Little Tennessee River Valley near Rabun Gap, Georgia, Andrew Ritchie’s grandfather and friends killed seventy deer on one “long hunt.” Following the Indian pattern, Ritchie hauled his surplus hides to the Augusta market, along with cured venison hams. This became a common practice across the eastern Blue Ridge and other sections of the Appalachians.
How did an American bird [the turkey] get named for a Eurasian country? The answer is simple. Our country’s early settlers had never even seen this American bird and they thought it looked a lot like a Turkish guinea fowl. So they referred to it as turkey fowl, or just plain turkey.
There are other good questions to ask in this type of discussion: Why is a live animal called a cow or calf, while we eat beef or veal? Answering this involves giving a bit of a history lesson.
The English language is a combination of several older languages. By the sixth century AD, Anglos, Saxons, and Jutes had set up shop in England. These folks spoke Germanic dialects. They supplied us with the old high German words that became cow, calf, pig, sheep, and ox.
In 1066, William the Conqueror crossed the English Channel and put a whipping on the Saxons at the Battle of Hastings. William and his gang, who spoke Norman French, became the ruling class while the Saxons did the dirty work.
The Saxons continue to slop “pigs” and feed “cows.” But if you were a member of the upper crust, it was only proper to refer to those critters by their proper French names at the table. Thus, our terms beef, veal, pork, and mutton are derived from Norman French. To this day, we use the language of the peasant to name the live animal and the language of the king to name the meat.
This is the reason you hunt deer (German origin) and eat venison (French origin). If you hunt raccoon, opossum, or moose, you get to eat the same thing; these are American words, borrowed from Native Americans by the early settlers.
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