In "Southern Cooking," Bill Neal offers a primer on the assemblage of what some tongue-in-cheek cultural commentators have called a country boy smoothie. Crumble leftover corn bread into a tall glass tumbler, soak with ice-cold buttermilk, dig the sodden corn bread out with a long-handled spoon and sip the grainy sweet-sour milk that remains.

You'll find similar instructions in Ernest Matthew Mickler's "White Trash Cooking," and numerous variations — adding chopped onions, toasting the corn bread, topping the affair with crumbled bacon — in a host of cookbooks that run the gamut from white-glove to working-class.

Neal describes corn bread and buttermilk as a "farm-style supper for the hottest summer nights," suggesting "the simplest accompaniment: sliced tomatoes, cucumbers and onions, maybe one-half a ripe cantaloupe sprinkled with salt and pepper."

Only recently have I come to understand the import of corn bread mix-ins for buttermilk neophytes. Only recently have I come to understand the genius of Neal's instruction.

For the longest time, I couldn't stomach the smell of buttermilk. It was too rich. It smelled like it had gone around the bend. Although I loved the idea of buttermilk and could appreciate its cultural significance, I tried and failed to knock back a glass and smile.

And then I drove out into the East Tennessee countryside, bound for Sherry and Earl Cruze's bucolic dairy farm, set on a bank of the French Broad River. I was with John Fleer, former chef of Blackberry Farm, the luxe resort in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. Fleer has long been an advocate of Cruze Farm's churned buttermilk, incorporating its product into dishes like buttermilk panna cotta and buttermilk soup.

Not long after we arrived, the Cruze family steered us to a picnic table set beneath the boughs of a towering tree. As his grandchildren gamboled about the farmyard, Earl Cruze, 64, held forth on the many-splendored benefits of buttermilk and let fly proclamations like "I'm prouder of my buttermilk than anything." A three-beat pause followed. And then the punch line: "Except my children."

He also talked technique, describing how he skims the cream from his nonpasteurized milk for ice cream before churning the remainder for buttermilk. "I don't believe in adding salt or anything else," he said, taking a long pull on a tall glass. "This is about the healthiest thing you can do for yourself."

Meanwhile, I crumbled a bit of Sherry Cruze's skillet corn bread into a mug and poured a slug of buttermilk on top. Along with the milk, real live pellets of butter came tumbling from the jug, and I grabbed a spoon.

Later, on the way home, Fleer translated what had transpired on my palate. "You get the natural sweetness of the corn playing off the sourness of the buttermilk," he said, reading my reaction reductively but correctly. "And then there's that texture. Kind of cereal-in-the-morning. Kind of chunky. Kind of smoothie." Kind of wow.