DATE: Saturday, March 29, 1997              TAG: 9703290600

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Column 

SOURCE: Guy Friddell 

                                            LENGTH:   52 lines

BUTTERMILK'S THE BEVERAGE OF SOUL FOOD, AND IT'S FINE

In a recent survey of American cities with overweight populations, a report from Chicago cited the widespread preference in the Windy City for high caloric soul food as one reason for its fatty citizenry.

Among dishes supposedly loaded with calories, brought along with immigrants from the South, it listed pork, collards, turnip greens and other greens cooked with greasy fat back - and buttermilk.

What in the world is wrong with those people? Haven't they lived?

Their attack on buttermilk as inducing weight demonstrates how little they know of rural cooking. Don't they know that dietitians prescribe consumption of low-calorie, nonfat buttermilk as a way to reduce weight?

You might as well be drinking spring water as far as any fear of buttermilk's adding avoirdupois.

Even as you swig buttermilk you can tell it doesn't convey a sense of filling you up as much as does the imbibing of plain sweet milk.

Buttermilk is a light liquid.

The ratio of that filled-up feeling is two quarts of buttermilk to one of plain milk. In a milk-drinking contest at a county fair, your average buttermilk addict drinks the plain milk champ under the table.

The buttermilk boy also beats out the milk man in speed of consumption, keeping pace with him on the clock even though he's consuming buttermilk at a rate of 2-to-1.

It is something to watch!

If the Norse god Thor, drinking from a vast horn attached surreptitiously to the sea, made his hosts stir uneasily when the ocean level dropped an inch or two, think what would have happened had it been connected with buttermilk. Thor would have had every farmer's wife in Scandinavia churning milk to keep up.

Homemade sugar cookies dusted with powdered sugar demand sweet milk. Who cares what pounds you may take on by washing down sugar cookies with a fruit-jar glass of cold sweet milk?

But plain milk is not as compatible with corn bread, especially that which has sugar in the batter, making it more cake than corn bread.

Sugar in corn bread is abominable.

Nor does plain milk have the sour stamina to stand up to boiled field greens of any variety.

For that you need coarse corn bread, especially thick-crusted corn pone, to crumble into the greens' pot likker laced with a trace of vinegar.

Why, even to think of pot likker and corn pone makes my mouth water. It breeds fortitude in a body.

And no beverage is more thirst-quenching on a sweltering hot day than a glass of cold, tingling buttermilk.

I will grant you this: Buttermilk is not tasty on cereal.

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu