It is January 1996. We are in the grips of what is being called the blizzard of 1996. In the supermarkets there is a shortage of bread and milk because of roads being blocked by blowing snow and large delivery trucks unable to deliver much of the food. if we did not have a 4 wheel drive vehicle we too would be snowed in. Urban residents today would be without food unless delivery vehicles could reach the markets every day or two. Today this could produce a serious crisis if it lasted a week or more and if shoppers had not purchased supplies before the storm arrived. Our national weather service has been able to predict the time these storms would hit. During the early years of my life such a crises was no worry for us. We did not depend on day by day food from markets. We had from the farm all the essentials we needed. We couldn't run to the story every day for bread or milk and other foods. We produced our own milk, bread, meat, fruit. We had only to keep on hand necessary sugar and salt. If we needed any of these we saddled a horse or hitched to the sleigh for a three or four miles to our small town market. We had a large supply of flour and cornmeal. We had large cans of lard, the meat from butchering, fruit canned and stored our own apples in the warm cellar beneath the house or the root cellar or spring house where it didn't freeze. We had hundreds of pounds of potatoes, our own butter, milk and cream, cabbage, turnips, salsify*1, carrots, and other root crops buried in the ground so it could not freeze, or stored in the cellar. Occasionally we ate rabbit, caught in box traps, quail and squirrel shot with shotguns or rifle. Today we have a buffalo roast, a gift from a grandson in Kansas City and deer roasts common in our mountains, but not in those early years. Deer were extinct in the eastern U.S. Wild turkeys were also extinct. I remember we did not ever have domesticated turkeys, at least on our farm, but we had hundred of chickens and eggs in surplus which we frequently took to the town market and traded for sugar and salt. We also traded butter and cream for other necessities. We also occasionally killed a lamb, and calf for veal. We had large supplies of scrapple*2, hams, sausage, pork pudding, spare ribs, backbone, tenderloin, souse, pig feet and large supplies of cornmeal and flour. My mother made cottage cheese, corn bread and meal, biscuits, cakes and pies, mincemeat pies, pumpkins pies, beach and apple pies. When we age fish it was salt herring but not trout which were also extinct in our area. I still go to a market which in winter months has salt herring that you take from a barrel and put in a plastic bag. Occasionally we had oysters and I learned early to eat them raw. In recent years when fishing at Chincoteague, VA, at low tide we beached our boat and stepped out on a small island and dug clams and oysters which were visible on the surface and would set in the boat and shell oysters and eat most of then on the spot.
My mother made every kind of jelly and jam you could think of and in the apple season making apple butter in a large iron pot, the same pot we used in butchering in the fall over a hot fire, stirring constantly with a long handed paddle. If you stopped stirring, it would burn on the bottom and ruin the whole pot. Apple pealing the night before was a festive occasion with neighbors assisting. My mother would have made a large pot of vegetable soup for the occasion. Apples had so many uses such as apple dumplings with pure cream, fried apples, sulfured apples, apple sauce, or apple strudel with raisons. I don't remember ever knowing about dry cereal in the early years. The most widely used hot cereal was oat meal. Green vegetables were unheard of. We had never heard of cauliflower, broccoli, Brussels sprouts. We lived near ponds and steams that had water cress around the spring. My mother would gather wild mustard cress from the fields. WE could gather also in the fall bushels of black walnuts and we also made huge crocks of kraut. You see that in those early years anything we needed could usually be found in a country store. I don't remember much about candy bars. I do remember the most common were Tootsie Rolls, Milky Way, and Necco Wafers. I don't remember any chewing gum. Of course in winter and summer we made our own ice cream with plenty of ice on the far in winter and blocks of ice from a local supplier in summer. I have learned along time ago not say to my wife any food we prepared was not like mom made it. But my wife, who was also a farm girl is an excellent cook and much of her cooking is like we remember from the farm years. Of course all the publicity about fat and sugar today make us hesitate about eating many of the foods we had on the farm. I notice the word "free" on much food in the supermarkets, that is free of fat, reduced sodium and sugar free. But the taste is not the same. In early years of 20th. century pizza, chow mien, potato chips, or fast foods of any kind were not known. My mother had a food she prepared that she called slum-gullion*3. She chipped up pieces of country ham and browned it in a skillet with onion, added a little flour, stirred if and then poured in milk with tomatoes and made a rich gravy to eat on hot cakes or biscuits. We have tried to repeat it but have never made it exactly like hers. Maybe because we have no country ham. Since we are gregarious animals we look for ways to associate with other of our kind. Butchering, threshing, apple pealing for apple butter are some of the events which, even though they were necessary and were work, we enjoyed more the company of neighbors and friends. We did not have radios or TV. and only very rarely were able to see a movie. We were taught early to read and we have all been very good readers, and also use very proper English because of our mother, and especially spelling which she was really a whiz*4. One interesting social event for both young and old was an old time taffy pulling. Neighbors and friends were invited in for an evening, usually during the winter months to pull taffy. This involved combining in a pan 2 cups of sorghum molasses and one tablespoon of vinegar, cooking it, stirring constantly until taken a drop of this mixture will become solid in cold water. Stir briskly into this mixture 1/4 teaspoon of soda. When the mixture turns light and looks foamy pour into a buttered pan. When it is cool enough to handle give everyone a ball of this mixture to pull. Be sure hands are greased with butter to prevent sticking. Pull and keep pulling until it is no longer sticky. Pull into long strips, lay on a table and cut into inch long pieces. The recipe can be doubled or tripled as many times as necessary to see that everyone has a portion to pull. Of course some of the older people would sit around and watch and did not attempt to pull a portion of the candy.
*1 Oyster Plant: the plant looks similar to parsnips
is cleaned, cut, cooked by boiling, drained, layered with crackers, butter, and
milk and baked makes an delicious dressing. The dish had the taste of oysters.
*2 Scrapple bought in the stores today, was known by it's German name, pon
haus, in parts of the Shenandoah Valley, especially in Jefferson and Berkeley
counties in West Virginia.
*3 The editor still makes this mixture, but eats it on white rice.
*4 His mother, Louise Morrow, graduated from Shepherd Normal School, and
was teacher prior to her marriage. When the editor was young, the neighboring
farm wives frequently used her for a dictionary.
RETURN to CONTENT