Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Country Eating

I grew up in rural Eastern Kentucky back in the '50s and '60s.  My dad retired from the Navy after 30 years of service in 1952.  I was born in December of 1953.  I believe my dad said when he retired he was getting a pension of $44.00 a month.  From this he was raising three children and supporting my grandparents until they were old enough to get their 'Old Age' pension.  Sounds impossible doesn't it?  But at this time things were a lot less expensive than they are now.  Still, one only depended on the grocery store for staples and those were supplemented by the government surplus program which we knew as 'commodities'.  Made a trip to Inez to pick them up whenever they were giving them away.

Everyone raised a garden and preserved vegetables by canning.  In the late spring people would go out and pick blackberries and huckleberries to eat raw and to make jellies and jams.  Every year my mother and grandmother would work for days putting up tomatoes, pickles, sauer kraut, pickled corn and probably several things I do not remember.  We were pretty poor in many ways but there was always food on the table.

Another way of supplementing our food supply was by hunting.  We were not quite Andrew Zimmer bad but we did eat almost any wild game that could be had.  We ate squirrel regularly.  We had rabbit, ground hog, quail, pheasant and grouse when we could get it.  My grandparents raised chickens so we could have fried or cooked chicken (mmmm chicken and dumplings) on a fairly regular basis.  Every year my dad would order so many chicks (we called them biddies) to raise for fryers.  These chickens were fated to go early to the frying pan.

Once my brother (I believe) killed a woodpecker.  It was cleaned and put into a  pot and cooked all doggone day and still was too tough to eat.  So, the woodpecker population was safe from our appetites. 

My grandparents also raised hogs and there was no better morning to be had than the day after a hog killing.  Fresh  pork was wonderful.  Man, fresh tenderloin with eggs, gravy and biscuits was just the best.  And there was very little of the hog that went to waste.  Especially the fat.  My grandparents had a big, iron kettle.  It was coal black with soot from fires and all the hog fat was cut up and rendered down to lard.  Then it would be put in whatever containers they had and stored in the cellar. 

We had the normal chicken and dumplings and fried chicken but the kids (my brother, sister and I)  loved the 'egg bag' better than anything.  It was unusual to kill a "laying hen" for the pot but when it happened the egg bag (womb?) would be filled with eggs from the size of the head of a pin to in the shell ready to be laid.  We'd hover around the kitchen like vultures waiting on the egg bag to be cooked enough to eat.  I can't remember one ever making it all the way to the table.  Heaven help you if you left the kitchen and missed it.  Nobody was saving you a share. 

We always had bacon because that was cured and we cold keep it a long time.  We would buy those oval cans of ham.  We would have some home made sausage and eggs and home made biscuits at most breakfasts.  But the very best breakfast of all was squirrels, squirrel gravy and home made biscuits.  My favorite part of the squirrel was the head.  There was not a lot of meat on a squirrel head and a lot of people threw them away.  But, I loved them. (I imagine I still do.)  There was a little meat on the cheeks and the tongue was pretty good as well.  But, my favorite part was the brain.

If you take a squirrel head, put two fingers in the eye sockets and pull back the whole top of the skull will come off in one piece and you can take the brain out in one complete piece all the way down to where it connected to the spine.  It was wonderful.  I'd love to have a big plate full now.

In the summers when things were ripening we would always have potatoes, green beans, sweet corn, tomatoes, cucumbers and mother always raised a huge melon patch with cantaloupes (mush melons we called them) and watermelons.  I can remember mother going to the melon patch and bring back a watermelon which she'd cut in half and we'd each have half a melon.

Most every year there would be people travelling the country selling apples and we'd buy a couple of bushels.  Some to eat.  Some to make pies from.  Some to cook down for breakfast (fried apples) and some to make apple butter from.  I was never fond of apple butter.  And my cousin Jerry Lee had a small sugar cane patch and a mill that he would use to make sorghum molasses from.  Those were wonderful if you boiled them until really foamy and put fresh butter and molasses on fresh biscuits. 



Plain baked potatoes, peanut butter and jelly.  I can eat one egg and a small amount of bacon most days.  I guess that makes me even more nostalgic that I would have normally have been when I think about all the things I had growing up.    Where I live and where I work there are masses of grey squirrels just running all over the place.  They love digging holes in my mulch to berry their food then later to dig it up.  They are so used to people and feel so safe they will barely move out of the way on the sidewalk.  And, every time I see them, I can't help thinking how good they would be for breakfast with some gravy and biscuits.  Yummm.

1 comment:

  1. I'll skip the squirrel, thanks, but I'd love a good rabbit.

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