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Sunday, November 28, 2010 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM

Lyon's Turtlehead, Red Rock, East Chatham NY, August 31, 2010
Lyon's Turtlehead, Red Rock, East Chatham NY, August 31, 2010

Night camp

Site 7 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo 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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