the vertebrae.’’ Then one should ‘‘roll in salted and peppered flour and fry
quickly in butter.’’ Bears had grown scarce even around Cross Creek, but
when Marjorie was introduced to bear meat in the still-wild Big Scrub—as
pot roast or steak—she also found that delightful and offered instructions
on preparation. Her most outrageous animal-scavenging occurred seren-
dipitously, during her first duck hunt, on nearby Orange Lake. Her neigh-
bors—much better shots than she, she confessed—‘‘were bringing down
their ducks.’’ Marjorie ‘‘had not touched a feather.’’ Her eyes and mind wan-
dered, and nearby she saw ‘‘hundreds of red-winged blackbirds...stirring
in the tussocks.’’ In a flash she thought of ‘‘the four and twenty blackbirds
baked in a pie and wondered if these grain and seed eating birds might not
be the edible ones of the rhymed fable.’’ So she ‘‘slipped No. shells into
my shot-gun, and two shots brought down a dozen birds.’’ Marjorie made
the pie and found it ‘‘utterly delicious.’’ Thereafter for several years, when-
ever she lacked meat and ordinary game had disappeared, she repeated the
slaughter and baking. At last, however, she ‘‘began to be ashamed of shoot-
ing the cheerful chirruping things that were so ornamental in the marshes.
I decided I would do no more of it.’’ A little later, too, she discovered that on
her hunting license, red-winged blackbirds—albeit under another name—
were a protected species off-limits to hunters.^31
Marjorie foraged relentlessly for vegetables and fruits, too. Northern
Florida pokeweed flourished in late winter and early spring, and she went
gathering with a basket. She knew that native southerners washed and ate
leaves as ‘‘salat’’ or boiled them with bacon, but she preferred to remove the
leaves and cook the shoots as one would prepare asparagus. She served it
on toast covered with a creamy sauce, with fried bacon on the side. Marjorie
also harvested the ubiquitous scrubby palm called swamp cabbage. Her ob-
jective was the palm’s heart, but since extracting the heart killed the palm,
she took few and served the delicacy not often. Wild grapes and other fruits
were plentiful, though, if got one to them ahead of birds and raccoons.
Marjorie’s fenced garden was typically southern. She loved collard
greens and seemed to have grown them as well as turnip and mustard
greens. Cowpeas were a staple, and okra was a specialty in her kitchen. Next
to her celebrated lemony hollandaise, Marjorie’s culinary vanity was most
invested in her ingenious treatment of okra. In her garden poetics, okra was
‘‘a Cinderella among vegetables.’’ Living ‘‘a lowly life, stewed stickily with
tomatoes, or lost of identity in a Creole gumbo,’’ it still possessed potential
to become a princess. Marjorie happened to possess ‘‘the magic wand’’ and
knew ‘‘no other cook who serves it as I do.’’ Selecting only the small, tender