Kingsolver's older daughter, Camille, who goes off to college midway through the experiment, is a bred-in-the-bone cook too.

Not an imitated, but a bred-in-the-bone instinct, a driving, unquenchable fire that's genuine.

Evarin will either be ecstatic to find another bred-in-the-bone physician, or else insanely jealous."

Her bred-in-the-bone hatred for the genetic slave trade was as implacable as a Sphinx winter, probably because of her mother.

Indeed, Thomas B. Fenlon, a lawyer and author, said in his 1996 book that Pelham has always been known for its bred-in-the-bone neighborliness.

For this bred-in-the-bone Manhattanite, "progress" consists largely of a bumpy and somewhat bemused adjustment to life in the Magnolia State.

Robert D. Krebs of the Fort Worth-based Burlington Northern is a bred-in-the-bone railroad man, with 34 years' experience running American trains.

The theme of resiliency runs through his entire book, cementing the connections between his years as a bred-in-the-bone country boy and his quest, as an adult, for rootedness.

Fit and trim at 61, with the ruddy skin and overarching brow of the bred-in-the-bone Yankee, Bob McCray wouldn't seem to need any extra help in the confidence department.

And where she held one of the Star Kingdom's thirty oldest peerages, he was a Gryphon highlander, with all of the bred-in-the-bone hostility towards all things aristocratic which that implied.

So when John Kerry dared to suggest just before the New Hampshire primary that he could win the presidency without the South, he may simply have been speaking like the bred-in-the-bone Yankee he is.

He was also a bred-in-the-bone Tory, and as the youthful leader of the Oxford Movement that sought a bulwark against Parliamentary manipulation of Anglicanism in its ancient Catholic roots, he could be savagely polemical.

The other part of him, the pragmatic, bred-in-the-bone part, was aware that where there were duchesses, there were bound to be dukes and various other lofty titles, some of whom might be in need of a wife named Lorelei.

However, Israel is a bred-in-the-bone pioneer who believes that once he has Lucy and her children out of sight of civilization, she'll learn to live without the niceties of her former life - the afternoon teas, genteel manners, fine clothes.

Echoing the anguished cry of countless bred-in-the-bone American Catholics, "The Church That Forgot Christ" devotes four pages to excoriating "the church that I mistrust" for every one that celebrates "the religion I love."

"Dawn's Early Light: Ralph McGill and the Segregated South," an affectionate yet unfawning documentary at 10 tonight on Channel 13, presents a picture of a bred-in-the-bone Southerner who in the 1940's sought only to ameliorate segregation, to make it "more balanced," rather than abolish it.

Hesser, a reporter for the Dining In/Dining Out section of The New York Times, understands and values the bred-in-the-bone wisdom of people who have grown up on the land, as I first noted a few months ago on TheAtlantic.com, the Web site of The Atlantic Monthly.