At the 2007 Southern Foodways Symposium staged in October on the Oxford campus of the University of Mississippi, Eddie Hernandez and Mike Klank of Taqueria del Sol dished out fried chicken tacos and hoppin' Juan.

The most popular quaff to accompany their cross-cultural feed was a mix of horchata (a milky Mexican drink of rice water, flavored with, among other things, sugar and cinnamon) and Jack Daniel's Tennessee Whiskey.

JOHN T. EDGE/Special (ENLARGE)

Jess Edge, the writer's son, sips his favorite drink, a horchata.

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The resulting drink, said my friend Angie Mosier, an Atlanta writer and food stylist, was "something familiar, like a Southern milk punch, gone way south."

My son, who ate his fill of fried chicken and black-eyed peas that night, might not have put it the same way. But Jess, 7, a child of the new multi-culti South, is a devotee of horchata. (He doesn't know Jack.)

That's Jess in the picture at left. It was taken on Mother's Day at Taqueria Milagro, our favorite after-church destination, set on the strip mall fringe of Oxford.

As you can see, Jess is employing his trademark two-straw method.

What you can't see is that when Jess finished his tumbler of horchata, and polished off his plate of chicken mole, he asked, in a cane syrup drawl that would have made his Alabama-born grandfather smile, if we could swing by a cross-town bodega, where they stock the freezers with horchata popsicles.