the meat of the American alligator, something settlers learned from the Choctaws and Houma. The maypop plant has been a favorite of Southerners for 350 years; it gives its name to the Ocoee River in Tennessee, a legacy of the Cherokees, and in Southern Louisiana it is known as liane de grenade, indicating its consumption by Cajuns. It is a close relative of the commercial passionfruit, similar in size, and is a common plant growing in gardens all over the South as a source of fresh summertime fruit. African American influences West African influences came with enslaved peoples from Ghana, Benin, Mali, Congo, Angola, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and other portions of the Gold Coast, and the mark Africans and their descendants, the African Americans, have made on Southern food is strong today and an essential addition to the Southern table. Crops like okra, sorghum, sesame seeds, eggplant, and many different kinds of melons were brought with them from West Africa along with the incredibly important introduction of rice to the Carolinas and later to Texas and Louisiana, whence it became a staple grain of that region and still remains a staple in those areas today, found in dishes like Hoppin John, purloo, and Charleston red rice. Like the poorer indentured servants that came to the South, slaves often got the leftovers of what was slaughtered for the consumption of the master of the plantation and so many recipes had to be adapted for offal, like pig's ears and fatback though other methods encouraged low and slow methods of cooking to tenderize the tougher cuts of meat, like braising, smoking, and pit roasting, the last of which was a method known to West Africans in the preparation of roasting goat. Peanut soup is one of the oldest known recipes brought to Virginia by Africans and over time, through their descendants, it has become creamier and milder tasting than the original. Florida cuisine Certain portions of the South often have their own distinct subtypes of cuisine owing to local history and landscape. Floridian cuisine, for example, has a distinct way of cooking that includes different ingredients, especially south of Tampa and Orlando. Spain had control of the state until the early 19th century and used the southern tip as an outpost to guard the Spanish Main beginning in the 1500s, but Florida kept and still maintains ties with the Caribbean Sea, including