Scents from Southern America

Maybe it's because I've never been to Southern America or America at all that I really like reading about how people experience that part of the world with their noses, so I was please to find this article today in Garden and Gun. It has some fun quotes from real people which in my view is better than reading research that says most people love this or all people hate that. Yes, interesting site name but authentic things are good because like or hate them at least you know how things actually are.

In Mark M Smith's excellent book 'Smell and History' there are quotes from the first arrivals in Southern Carolina who said the air was very fragrant and full of mastic, or lentisque. It was probably actually lentisque because mastic is the resin tears from the lentisque tree and are said to only be produced from trees grown in Chios - a very romantic story but I'm yet to find evidence that disproves it. Now I associate the smell of colonisation, or invasion, of America with lentisque, Colonisation is apparently better but it depends on who’s doing the invading. Interestingly the other name for Chios, the land of mastic and lentisque, is Columbus!!!

Mark's book also mentions that the scent of sassafras was also in the air but that was before the FDA banned it. Sassafras was used in Louisiana Creole dishes but not anymore because it contains Safras, which is the precursor to MDMA. So those creole dishes must have been really something in the early days!! I was wondering if you are a child/grandchild of someone who ate the original version with the drugs in it if you would inherit a ‘high’ when you smelled the modern form of the dish without it. That would be quite fun to research.

When Leah Chase had died I made it my mission to make vegan Goober Peas, which I found in a Southern recipe book somewhere. It requires good quality vegan fish sauce and that can be hard to find. But then I forgot to get the peanuts in their shell, so I used popcorn instead. You have no idea how good it is - better than truffle popcorn, better than cheesy popcorn, better than popcorn all the ways.

Niki Signet has a great Mint Julep in caramel recipe in her book Lateral Cooking , which I made into a vegan icecream. The problem with making it was that I can’t stand the smell of bourbon because I’ve really only been around people drinking cheap bourbon because bourbon doesn’t seem to be the drink of choice for people with finer tastes. So I decided to use brandy instead because I do like Brandy and it turns out, as argued by this article anyway, that the Julep was originally made with brandy. I used a Napoleon brand of brandy because I have a DNA genius match with Napoleon and also with Abraham Lincoln. It’s true, I can show you the National Geograhic DNA report. The Mint Julep piece starts with history from 1770, which is when Australia was “discovered”, or invaded, depending on whether you are talking to a black or a white person