The Birmingham age-herald., 1907-10-30

From the Louisville Courier Journal.
 T is difficult to determine whether President Roosevelt's statement that 'possum meat is delicious is a mere distinterested but not dispassionate ob- servation based upon recent gastronomic revelry or guileful bid for the Foraker delegates to the next republican conven- tion, but in view of the fact that the statement is true it is hardly fair to charge the Executive with ulterior polit- cal motives. Very probably he was not contemplating the licking of the gentle man from the Buckeye state, but merely licking his chops when he paid his gen erous compliment to the little animal that is associated not only in the popular imagination, but also in the pot, with sweet "taters''
 At this time of the year it is custom ary for the poets to sing of the golden rod and the frost-painted leaves of the au- tumn woodlands. The 'possum and the yam have never received their merited attention from the bards. Perhaps Judd Mortimer Lewis and Frank Stanton oc- casionally let the autumn leaves and the golden rod take care of themselves and give the possum a pean or so, but generally speaking he is sadly sighted tby our makers of fleeting verse This is due largely to the, fact that much of our poetry that is "close to the soil is ground out in New York, where poets move and have their being in a forest of skyscrap- CTS ana subsist upon coffee and sinkers, ham and Boston," and Welsh rarebts,
 in the order mentioned. They know noth- ing of the joys of battening upon fat
 possum wreathed in yams and almost afoat in his gravy. It they did poetry would be born within them and not made of grinding toll. It is in the south that the sweet potato and possum reach their rarest perfection. Perhaps none but a southerner can fully appreciate the feel ings of the old negro whose response to his master who said he should say DO tato" and not "tater' was. "Dem ain't DO taters; deys fat "taters." Fat ta- Aters and fat 'possums commingling form a dish the like of which the noblest Ro- man of them all never served at a symposiac and washed down with old Falernian. Preferably 'possum should be cooked over a wood fire in a log cabin and seasoned with the odorous blue smoke of hickory and ash as the lid of the oven is lifted now and again to give glimpse of the promised viand to those who wait with whetted appetite for the coming feast With the 'possum and taters there should be served either the ordinary Kentucky corn pone-if such an adjective may be not improperly applied to anything so rare-or the Olympian ''cracklin' bread of the hog killing sea son. In justice to the 'possum it must be said that neither corn pone nor crack ling bread is necessary, but it. serves well prevent the possum and the yams from melting in the mouth too rapdily for the flavor to be enjoyed in the fullest.
 The finest possums on earth are found in the woodlands of the Pennyrile district of Kentucky. and they reach perfection about the time the perfumed nawpaw be- comes so ripe that il falls from the parent stem and reposes in all of it's golden beauty in the orange-tinted leaves that the earth has first claimed as tribute from the trees for her enrichment. Of late the woodman who does not spare the tree has encroached upon the great pos sum nurseries of Western Kentucky until there is danger that the most succulent race of possums upon the globe may become almost extinct, but there are still patches of primeval forest here and there in which the pawpaw f1ourishes and the possum feeds upon the food that Provi- dence' set aside for his especial bene- fit.
 If the President never ate Knetucky