"April 16th, 2008: We were kept quite busy this afternoon since horticulturist, Leslie Reed, had organized a plant collecting project which had a Bartram inspiration. There is a plant which Bartram called Smilax, or pseudo china-berry, a type of cat-briar which can be used as food and had been by the native americans. It is a leaf of three heavy lobes and a woody vine. They dug some impressive tubers and I washed and cut them into small pieces while Leslie mashed and boiled them. A lovely amber colored starch was produced, but it tasted bitter. Bartram said it was dried to a powder and mixed with corn meal and fried in bear fat. It was quite a lot of wok to cut the fibrous and hard tubes."

"Saturday, April 19th: The catbriar, being reluctant to gel, we decided to leave as a thick amber colored sugar syrup. The plant is related to sarsaparilla, and the flavor reflects its family tie. Mixed with vodka and a little soda it makes a nice little cocktail, which we served with the delicious mussels our Belgian resident, Fillip, was good enough to cook for us."

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