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Thursday, December 10, 2009 - Brantley Lake State Park, Carlsbad NM

Sunset at the dam, Brantley Lake State Park, Carlsbad NM, December 10, 2009
Sunset at the dam, Brantley Lake State Park, Carlsbad NM, December 10, 2009

This was a nice quiet day, much of it spent working at straightening out the mess over at Clippings and Collectanea. I made some headway but there sure is a lot to do to get those pages in order. What a mess!

Night camp

Site 42 - Brantley Lake State Park, Carlsbad NM

Sweet, Rich Hickory Milk

Hickory was another favorite. Rambling through the Southeast in the 1770s, the naturalist William Bartram observed Creek families storing a hundred bushels of hickory nuts at a time. "They pound them to pieces, and then cast them into boiling water, which, after passing through fine strainers, preserves the most oily part of the liquid" to make a thick milk, "as sweet as fresh cream, an ingredient in most of their cookery, especially hominy and corncakes." Years ago a friend and I were served hickory milk in rural Georgia by an eccentric backwoods artist named St. EOM who claimed Creek descent. Despite the unsanitary presentation, the milk was ambrosial - fragrantly nutty, delightfully heavy on the tongue, unlike anything I had encountered before.

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