| There were numerous apple and pear trees in the mountains and valleys in Dizney. Papow Cloud's father and his brothers planted the fruit trees. Some of the brothers were pretty good nurserymen and had taken several different kind of apple trees and grafted two of each into one tree to produce a new variety of apple. Apples were a great staple eaten raw or cooked into apple butter, apple sauce, filling for cakes and pies. Pears were picked green and wrapped in newspaper and allowed to rippen in daddy's dairy and whenever we wanted a pair we just got one from the dairy and ate it or they were canned. There were also wild blackberries, raspberries, and strawberries for picking. Those that weren't cooked and made into cobblers or pies were made into jelly or canned whole for later use. There were numerous nut trees too. There were beachnut, black walnut, chestnuts are all I can remember. Beachnuts were not used for any particular recipe we just ate them from the trees. Black walnuts were delicious eaten plain or added to cakes and muffins. Chestnuts were good roasted in the fire place or in the coal stove. Black walnuts required a tremendous amount of work to even get to the point of eating them. They had to be picked, brought down out of the mountains in burlap sacks. There was a thick green hull that had to be removed before the nuts could be placed into the sun to dry out. The green hull would stain anything it got into contact with; your hands, and clothes. After they dried out the shell was so har5d it had to be broken open with a hammer. Sometime they still did not just drop their juicy meat into the hand, you had to dig out the nut with a pointed object. My mom favored a hairpin. There were also greens that grew wild that kept people from starving and people of the 50's would still take a walk into the mountains and pick ramps, poke salad, mustard and turnip greens. All these were boiled or eaten raw with hot bacon or sasuage fat poured over the leaves. Mamow Cloud was partial to the latter way of eating her greens. Poke salad and ramps were boiled and eaten. Ramps had a really strong pungent smell. It smelled up the house when cooked. It made your breath stink after being eaten. Most school teachers would tell the students if they ate ramps to not come to school until the odor wore off. No one really knows where the ramps came from. The smell had a garlic/chive/onion smell. They grew out of the ground the same as an onion, but the green stem was flat instead of round like an onion. I would think that it evolved over the many years that it has been propegating itself. Could have been from the american indians who lived in the region. |