By JOHN T. EDGE

For the Journal-Constitution

Louie Favorite/Staff (ENLARGE)

Dairyman David Wright likes the pungent stuff straight up.

Louie Favorite/Staff (ENLARGE)

On a tour of Wright Dairy near Anniston, Ala., in business since the 1940s, visitors will take in the quaint sight of long-ago implements involved in making buttermilk, a pungent staple of the rural South.

LOUIE FAVORITE/AJC Staff (ENLARGE)

Russell Johnston's Newborn Dairy near Conyers is looking to add old-style buttermilk to its offerings by this autumn. He'll sell to area chefs, and plans to have a small store at the dairy selling Newborn products.

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David Wright, proprietor of Wright Dairy near Anniston, Ala., wears a wireless mic clipped to the placket of his blue-stripe work shirt. He stands on a sawdust stage, flanked by hay bales. Behind him is a Holstein, recently untethered from a milking machine. Before him, seated on bleachers, are field-tripping students from Oneonta Elementary School.

The students have completed a tour of the dairy, in business since the 1940s. They've learned about the 65 cows that range the 165 acres of pastureland. They've stood beneath the tin shed that shelters Wright's makeshift museum and stared down at a hand-cranked daisy churn, not to mention a ceramic churn with a wooden dasher that was already antiquated when their grandparents were in knee pants.

Wright has answered a range of questions from the students, including, "How much does a girl cow cost?" Now he has a question of his own: "Who wants a drink of milk?" Eager hands shoot up. Young smiles burn bright. "I've got whole milk and buttermilk," says Wright. "Who wants buttermilk?"

All hands drop, and a brief pall passes over Wright's face before he directs his young charges to a refreshment table. He knew this group would be no different from the last. But he had to ask.

Agrarian roots

Buttermilk is an old man's drink in a world that skews young. It's a rural remnant in a region gone urban and suburban. The presence of buttermilk on our grocery store shelves serves as a reminder of an agrarian past, when it seems like everyone kept a milk cow, churned their own butter and collected the liquid byproduct of the process. But as the years pass, those memories fade, and buttermilk occupies a smaller and smaller footprint in our region's dairy cases.

Southerners still hold buttermilk in esteem. We talk about the smooth crumb of cakes baked with buttermilk. We swear by a buttermilk dip for fried chicken. But few of us actually buy the stuff anymore. (When we do, we tend to leave it in the fridge forever, tucked behind a jug of cran-apple juice.) Fewer still drink an ice-cold glass of buttermilk on a warm spring day or savor a light supper of corn bread crumbled into buttermilk — with a slice of cantaloupe on the side.

The statistics are stark: Over the past 25-odd years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that buttermilk consumption in the United States has dropped by 60 percent. But it's the anecdotal evidence that hits hard, and, counter-intuitively, holds promise: "I've lost most of my buttermilk customers," says Wright, 57. "The retirement homes and the funeral homes took near about all of them a while back."

Wright sells cultured and churned buttermilk. Thick and creamy and tangy, it's made from nonhomogenized milk, and it tastes positively antediluvian. That said, Wright's business is no throwback. He's cultivated a market among Birmingham chefs like Frank Stitt of Highlands Bar and Grill, and, in a nod to the pervasiveness of fast-food culture, installed a drive-in window on his dairy barn.

"My hope is for the yuppies," says Wright, on a break between deliveries. "When they hit on yogurt a while back, sales went way up. Maybe buttermilk can be the next yogurt."

Not the real McCoy

If Wright and his fellow old-guard dairymen win a new market, they will find it beyond the bounds of the big-box grocery. The typical grocery jug is part of the problem.

Read the label. It's made from homogenized skim milk. A culture is added to convert lactic sugars into lactic acid, resulting in a sour tang, the signature taste of buttermilk. To bolster the flavor further, there's added salt. Common thickeners include locust bean gum, which is ominous sounding but innocuous. And carrageen, extracted from marine algae or seaweed.

All those additives are natural. But in the minds (and on the palates) of today's emergent consumers — those people farmer and thinker Wendell Berry calls urban agrarians — they are not welcome.

When Wright's mythical yuppie peruses the dairy case in search of the next yogurt, chances are good that she will come looking for an unadulterated product. Chances are she will come looking for buttermilk that conjures the past, not the lab.

An acquired taste

Joe Dabney, 78, a South Carolinian by birth who lives in Atlanta, knows that past. He was raised on buttermilk unsullied by thickeners and flavorings. "I was in college before I ever took a drink of sweet milk on a regular basis," says the author, famous for research and writing on the culture of moonshine. "Country people have always loved the stuff."

As do many advocates, Dabney acknowledges that buttermilk is an acquired taste. "Like a stiff drink, like a gin martini, like green olives," he says. "You have to be ready for it. It's a taste you cultivate over time. When you take a sip of straight buttermilk, you experience a certain dissonance, like a dissonant note in jazz; it makes you sit up and take notice."

Dabney is talking about what some call the whang of buttermilk. The stuff is distinctly sour. If you've tasted durian, the fruit from Southeast Asia with the fetid nose and the sweet and creamy flesh, you'll have an idea of the yin-yang of appeal-repulsion conjured by a whiff.

For connoisseurs, that whang is the payoff. For detractors, it's an olfactory assault to be suffered, secure in the knowledge that a) buttermilk, consumed by the drink, is chock-full of beneficial bacteria; and b) buttermilk, employed by the cook, is an ideal meat tenderizer and a key catalyst in the coagulation of eggs.

In years past, milk went sour naturally, without the introduction of a culture. Souring was the first step in butter making. Come winter, a farmer might place a churn full of milk alongside the hearth so that the heat could catalyze fermentation. But for much of the year, owing to the region's hot and humid climate, the ambient temperature and the leavings from the last batch would provide impetus enough for the milk to clabber.

Thirty-plus minutes of churning followed, as the clabber thickened into a buttery mass. After the butter was wrung free of excess fluids, the liquid that remained in the crock was thin and flecked with butter. This was what the boys of Joe Dabney's youth knew as buttermilk. Chances are, you'll never get to taste it.

Preferring it sour

From the 16th century, when the Spanish introduced cattle to the Americas, until the middle of the 20th century, when electrical refrigeration became truly affordable for the working class, the milky residue known as buttermilk was what Southerners drank when they reached for dairy.

Part of the rationale was frugality. Owing to the natural preservatives developed during fermentation, buttermilk kept longer than so-called sweet milk. But Southerners also loved the taste. Settlers of Irish ancestry were especially infatuated. Cultural observer John Stevens called them "the greatest lovers of milk I have ever met. They drink it about 20 different ways and what is strangest, they love it best when it's sourest."

Health imperatives factored in, too. Among Southerners of African descent, the National Institutes of Health estimates that as many as 80 percent are likely to be lactose intolerant. For that reason, "blacks have long preferred buttermilk," says Anne Mendelson, who is writing "Milky Ways," a cultural history of dairy production and consumption.

"You have to remember, it's the people who can process lactose who are the odd men out," says Mendelson. "They are the freaks. In no part of the world except modern America, and those Westernized places affected by the modern American diet, are people able to easily process lactose. In the South, for the longest time, you skirted that."

Courting a new clientele

Today, a number of Southern dairies stand ready to churn buttermilk for discerning drinkers. Like Wright, they are farmstead operations, which means they raise and milk their own cows. They also trumpet the superiority of nonhomogenized milk, the sort of milk that has not been pressure-treated to break down fat globules and yield a standardized fluid, the sort of milk that still naturally separates, with the thick cream rising to the top and the thin skim settling to the bottom.

None rely solely upon ambient cultures to clabber their cream. (Various governmental dictates outlawed that a while back.) And they differ in technique, falling into two basic camps, of which Wright Dairy as well as Cruze Farm, near Knoxville, are illustrative.

Wright cultures whole, nonpasteurized milk and churns its buttermilk to a smooth consistency. (When Russell Johnston of Newborn Dairy, near Conyers, begins producing buttermilk this fall, selling to area chefs, he likely will follow suit.) Cruze Farm takes a different tack with its nonpasteurized milk, letting the skim settle naturally and skimming the cream off before culturing and churning that skim aggressively until beads of butter form.

Compared to most of the big-box grocery store stuff, the buttermilk sold by Wright and Cruze is vestigial. It's a taste of the past in the present. And it may, upon first gulp, prove too outré for modern palates to process.

That's where the new guard of Southern chefs comes in. For, David Wright's yogurt dreams to the contrary, if unadulterated buttermilk is to reclaim a place of prominence on Southern tables, if the dissonance Joe Dabney speaks of is to be modulated, the cadre of cooks who sold us on the white-tablecloth appeal of pork belly and wild-foraged ramps are surely up to the task.

John Fleer, who recently departed his post at Blackberry Farm near Knoxville, is the elder. He has been working with Cruze Farm buttermilk for a decade, turning out dishes like muscadine-glazed guinea hen swaddled in corn bread and buttermilk gravy.

And he has won his share of disciples, people like Linton Hopkins of Restaurant Eugene in Atlanta, who, upon tasting a jug of Cruze's high-test, devised a hominy and buttermilk flan, topped with a hunk of bacon and napped with a vinegary barbecue sauce.

And then there's John Currence of City Grocery, on the square in Oxford, Miss., who snagged a gallon of David Wright's liquid gold and turned out a cornmeal and buttermilk bread pudding, laced with dried cherries and swirled with blackstrap molasses caramel. He couldn't leave well enough alone. And so, in a feat of one-upmanship, Currence served his dessert with a fat tumbler of bourbon-buttermilk punch.

If that doesn't win over the yuppies, nothing will.

John T. Edge is director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. The SFA documents and celebrates the diverse food cultures of the American South. Go to www.southern

foodways.com.