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Those hifalutin' folks up north are forever discovering what we redneck Southerners have known all along: that mama'n'em and Pappy knew how to fix food and drinks right.

Some time ago I wrote about a seminar they held in Brooklyn on how to kill rabbits for food.

Question: What kind of wine do you serve with rabbit stew, fried rabbit or grilled rabbit?

Answer: You don't serve wine. You serve that clear stuff my Grandpa Rains used to make back during the lean '20s and '30s.

The Brooklynites who learned to fix rabbit meat have apparently caught on to Pappy Rains' secret. According to my friends at The New York Times, a place called Char No. 4, a bar on Cobble Hill in Brooklyn, was the site of a seminar on bourbon, conducted by a fellow named Kris Comstock from a distillery in (where else?) Kentucky.

But the folks in Brooklyn weren't all that interested in the colored stuff. They wanted to taste the "white dog."

Now for all you sober folks out there, "white dog" is the same thing we always called "white lightning," "mountain dew" or plain old "moonshine." It was Pappy's main product back when he was wrestling the Carolina Piedmont for a living for him and Grandma and a dozen kids. The U.S. Constitution gave him a strong boost when it took on the 18th Amendment.

The Times described white dog as "newborn whiskey, crystal-clear grain distillate, as yet unkissed by the barrel, the vessel that lends whiskey some or all of its color and much of its flavor."

Aye doggies, them Yankee writers sure have a way with words.

I remember Mama telling how Pappy turned white lightning into something resembling the unconstitutional bourbon. He would douse the inside of a wooden keg with kerosene and set it on fire. After the flames had burned out, he'd pour in the raw whiskey and let the charred barrel work its magic until the 'shine was the color of weak tea. I guess the alcohol overpowered the residual aroma of kerosene. Anyhow, Pappy found a few customers for his tea-colored booze.

By the time I came along, Pappy had junked his still and gone to work as a loom fixer in the cotton mills. He no longer made or drank the stuff. But the moonshine industry was well established down South.

When I covered City Recorder's Court for the Athens Banner-Herald down in Georgia, I remember a hapless fellow who was hauled before Judge Olin Price on a charge of public drunkenness. When Judge Price asked him why he got drunk, he replied, "Lawd, Judge, that was good gov'ment whiskey, and I just couldn't stop."

I suppose those Brooklyn folks have drunk "government whiskey" until their tastebuds have been deadened, so they're looking for new sensations.

Tad Carducci, a cocktail consultant whose job I covet, explained it to the Times this way: "Aging in wood has many beautiful effects on a spirit. But it does tend to disguise whatever the base spirit is. When you strip that away, you're getting a real sense of what wheat offers, or rye or corn." Or chicken mash, the duke's mixture of cheap grains that could be used for chicken feed or as the raw materials for white lightning.

"Unlike vodka," opined the Times, "in which the source grain is often purified to a vanishing point, white dogs are pungently fragrant, with a chewy sweetness to them."

And I thought the pungent fragrance and chewy sweetness those good ol' boys relished back in the woods came from Bull of the Woods tobacco.

I've always treated white lightning with the kind of respect you treat a pit bull on a chain. You get just close enough to hear its growl, but you stay out of range of its teeth. I had taken an occasional sip of the stuff when it was offered by someone I trusted, but never enough to get a good appreciation for it.

And then an elderly friend invited me to an all-male gathering in the piney woods near Old Texas, somewhere between Monroeville and Scratch Ankle, Ala. There I was to be initiated into the pleasures of chitlins, mountain oysters and other Southern goodies. My host pointed to a Jack Daniel's bottle arrayed among other bottles on a table under a pavilion and said, "You drink from that one."

It wasn't Jack Daniel's. It was a potion that someone who knew what he was doing had crafted from white lightning, giving it a subtle kiss from the barrel.

When I left Alabama in retirement, my elderly friend called and asked that I detour through Monroeville to receive a parting gift. It wasn't in a Jack Daniel's bottle this time, and it wasn't accompanied (thank goodness) by chitlins or mountain oysters. But it was the product of the same craftsman, who seems to have perfected the process Pappy Rains had developed in the Piedmont.

I'm glad the folks Up North are catching on to the magic that flowed from the hollows down South, though I must warn that the stuff can have the bite of a pit bull. My best advice to those who overindulge is to treat the after-effects with the hair of the white dog that bit them.

Write to Gene Owens at 315 Lakeforest Circle, Anderson SC 29625. E-mail: Swampscum2@aol.com