is often served for breakfast and cured with salt or sugar and hickory-smoked. Accompanying many meals is the southern style fluffy biscuit, where the leavening agent is baking soda and often includes buttermilk, and for breakfast they often accompany country ham, grits, and scrambled eggs. Desserts Desserts in the South tend to be quite rich and very much a legacy of entertaining to impress guests, since a Southern housewife was (and to a degree still is) expected to show her hospitality by laying out as impressive a banquet as she is able to manage. Desserts are vast and encompass Lane cake, sweet potato pie, peach cobbler, pecan pie, hummingbird cake, Jefferson Davis pie, peanut brittle, coconut cake, apple fritters, peanut cookies, Moravian spice cookies, chess pie, doberge cake, Lady Baltimore cake, bourbon balls, and caramel cake. American-style sponge cakes tend to be the rule rather than the exception as is American buttercream, a place where Southern baking intersects with the rest of the United States. Nuts like pecan and hickory tend to be revered as garnishes for these desserts, and they make their way into local bakeries as fillings for chocolates. Cajun and Creole Cuisine of Louisiana In Louisiana, cooking methods have more in common with rustic French cuisines of the 17th and 18th century than anything ever found at the French court in Versailles or the bistros of 19th- and 20th-century Paris; this is especially true of Cajun cuisine. Cajun French is more closely related to dialects spoken in Northern Maine, New Brunswick, and to a lesser degree Haiti than anything spoken in modern France, and likewise their terminology, methodology, and culture concerning food is much more closely related to the styles of these former French colonies even today. Unlike other areas of the South, Cajuns were and still are largely Catholics and thus much of what they eat is seasonal; for example pork is an important component of the Cajun boucherie (a large community event where the hog is butchered, prepared with a fiery spice mix, and eaten snout to tail) but it is never consumed in the five weeks of Lent, when such would be forbidden. Cajun cuisine tends to focus on what is locally available, historically because Cajuns were often poor, illiterate, independent farmers and not plantation owners but today it is because such is deeply imbedded in local culture. Boudin is a type of sausage