My Appalachia

by Sidney Saylor Farr

  First, you must have a homemade gritter with which to grate the raw corn kernels from the cob. To make a corn gritter, Dad would open a tin lard bucket at the seams, and flatten it out until he had a piece of tin about six or eight inches wide and sixteen to twenty inches long. He used a number 10 (medium-size) nail to punch holes at close intervals over the surface of the tin. Then he would cut a flat one-by-six-inch board twenty-four inches long, and nail two one-by-two-inch strips lengthwise along the edges. Then he stretched the piece of tin, smooth side down, across the board and nailed it to each strip. This left a space between the tin and the board for the gritted meal to slide down into a pan as the cob was raked across the gritter. Mama would bake the bread as she did any cornbread. Yet it tasted wonderfully different. We loved to eat gritted cornbread at the end of the growing season.

  Spoonbread

  In 1996 I was invited to compile a cookbook of spoonbread recipes for the first Spoonbread Festival in Berea, planned for the last week of September. I was pleased to hear of the plans to make this event an annual affair. I agreed to do the cookbook.

  People around the world bake and eat some kind of bread every day. Bread, they say, is the staff of life. In Appalachia we ate hot bread three times a day—biscuits in the morning, cornbread for dinner in the middle of the day, and a pan of cornbread or a skillet of cornpone for supper. This routine might be varied for special times, such as when we had company.

  At times our flour supply ran low and there was no money to buy more. Mama would use the flour very sparingly, keeping it for breakfast biscuits and cream gravy. She did not mix flour in with cornmeal when we were short, but made cornbread with boiling water. This gave the bread a completely different texture and taste, soft and savory. Only later did I learn that bread made in this manner was called spoonbread. After I moved to Berea and experienced Boone Tavern’s version of spoonbread, I had to admit that their spoonbread was richer than the kind Mama made back in the mountains.

  At an early age, I became fascinated with collecting as many different recipes as I could. It was a special delight to find copies of very old cookbooks, and cookbooks put out by small organizations and churches. I discovered that some of these newer cookbooks contained recipes gleaned from much older cookbooks (the newer book always credited the name of the original group and the title of the old cookbook). In one old cookbook, the Cook-Book of Southern Recipes, published by the Woman’s Club of Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1908, I found a recipe for “mush bread,” which has to be an early version of spoonbread:

  Sprinkle slowly half a pint of white cornmeal into a pint of hot milk.

  Cook until it is a smooth mush. Take from the fire, add the yolks of

  four eggs, and then fold in the well-beaten whites. Turn into baking dish

  and bake in a quick oven for 30 minutes.

  Spoonbread resembles what you might call a cornbread souffle. It is the richest, lightest, and most delicious of all the cornmeal recipes I have ever tried. It makes a good accompaniment to country ham and red-eye gravy, or any meat and gravy dish. It is a good match for seafood, too, and is wonderful with fresh garden vegetables, salads, and fruit dishes.

  As far as it can be determined spoonbread probably originated in Virginia, perhaps with Mary Randolph in 1824. Some authorities maintain that spoonbread originated with the Indian porridge called suppone or suppawn, and consider that the true ancestral source of spoonbread. Others say that the butter, milk, and eggs, which made spoonbread such a special dish, probably were added after the Civil War. Spoonbread was most likely first made in Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, Kentucky, or Tennessee; some say Virginia is most likely.

  The basic ingredients of spoonbread are very much the same from one recipe to another, the major difference being between those who use baking powder and/or sugar, and those who use neither.

  Blackberry Dumplings

  In the summertime we looked forward to fresh fruits and berries. Mama canned dozens of jars of blackberries every summer. She would use the canned berries to make a blackberry cobbler, or sometimes she just put them in a bowl for us to eat. Best of all was when she made blackberry dumplings.

  BLACKBERRY DUMPLINGS

  1 quart blackberries, hulled and washed

  cup hot water

  1 cup sugar

  Dash of salt

  2 cups sifted flour

  4 teaspoons baking powder

  1 tablespoon sugar

  teaspoon salt

  1 cup milk

  Combine the berries, hot water, sugar, and salt and cook in large kettle with tight-fitting lid over medium heat until boiling point is reached. Reduce heat and cook until the berries are tender. Sift together flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt. Put in enough milk to make a light dough. Drop dough by heaping teaspoons into simmering berries. Cover tightly and reduce heat to low. Cook for 13 to 15 minutes or until dumplings are done. Serve with cream. These dumplings will keep in the refrigerator for four or five days, and will still taste fresh and look good when served warm.

  Spring Greens

  “Wild sallet is good for you,” Granny Brock was fond of saying. “It is rich in vitamins and it tones up the system.” Granny always said you can find wild lettuce, pepper grass, sheep’s tongue, poke, creasies, and crow’s foot in almost any field. She would add a basket of curly dock, dandelion leaves, watercress, wood sorrel, and a few wild onions, chopped. The greens would then be doused with oil and vinegar dressing or smothered with red-eye gravy. Either way is delicious.

  In researching the subject, I found that most of the lore of wild sallet came from the Indians. It is said that in addition to greens, they knew and ate over two hundred different kinds of berries and fruit. One of their sweets was called “serviceberry” cake. They gathered the delicious, edible red berries and pounded them into a paste; after pressing the paste into cakes, they dried them in the sun. They also made blackberry cakes in this manner. Early white settlers learned from the Indians how to do this and many other things.

  Many wild greens, however, like wild berries, are not safe to eat. Plants such as poison ivy, nightshade, and many more are poisonous. If you do not know wild greens, do not take a chance picking them yourself.

  Granny Brock and I would go into the hills and hunt lamb’s quarters, woolen britches, and what she called “shouny” (it takes land facing north to grow shouny). Dock is good, too, but you must pick it very young. There is yellow dock, narrow dock, and burdock.

  A favorite green was poke. It comes up early in April and must be eaten while the plants are young and tender. Poke was cooked and fried different ways by different cooks. I always thought the way my mama fixed poke was the best way of all:

  Gather poke shoots, cut them off above the ground because the roots are poison, and cook the leaves and stems together, parboiling two times and pouring off the water each time. Fill the kettle with fresh water the third time, add salt to taste, and cook until tender. Mix lard and butter half to half in an iron skillet, then add the cooked green poke and heat it again. Break three or four eggs over the top (adjust to amount cooked) and scramble with the greens. To serve, pass white vinegar as dressing, if desired.

  Poke cooked this way tastes a bit like very good, very tender broccoli.

  Mountain Morels

  One of the treats of springtime in the mountains was when Dad found hickory chickens and brought them home. I asked him once why he called them “hickory chickens.”

  “I usually find them growing under hickory trees,” he said, “and the way your mama fixes them they taste like chicken, only better. They have a proper name, I guess, but I don’t know what it is.”

  Later, when I went to college and researched the topic, the first thing I found out was that they were called morels. Finding out what I could about them was a pleasing job.

  Morels are conical, honeycomb-like mushrooms that sit on fat stems, with the cap and the stem a continuous piece. In Appalachia, besides being called “h
ickory chickens” as my dad did, they are known as “dry land fish,” “markels” (Morchella esculent), and “big-foot.” Morels are the easiest and safest mushroom to hunt, but mycologists say they have a dangerous look-alike: the helvella, or beefsteak mushroom, easy to identify because it is squatty and thick, with a brainlike head on a short, stick stem.

  Morels grow in rich soil mixed with ashes in burned-over ground and in old fencerows and orchards. They grow from an inch to a foot in height and are spread by spores. Cutting the stalk with a sharp knife is the best way to gather morels, as this does not damage the underground growth and enhances the likelihood that the morels will come back in the same area year after year.

  Dedicated morel hunters know when the time is right to gather morels in Appalachia—in April, after a warm rain, when blue violets are in bloom. As one moves north, or at higher elevations, the morel season gets later, even into early June. Morel hunters recommend that a person look for mushrooms while walking uphill, because they will be at eye level and easier to see.

  Morels are cooked in a variety of ways by professional chefs; Appalachian people think the best way to prepare them is simply to drain them well and saute them in butter or bacon grease.

  I have been told one can freeze morels, but doing so often makes them lose flavor. Drying morels, and reconstituting them in warm milk or water, is a better option. Probably the best way to deal with a surplus is to invite your friends and neighbors in for a mushroom feast.

  Shuck Beans

  In some states in the Appalachian region dried green beans were called “leather britches”; in other areas they were called “shuck beans” and “shucky beans.” Most people knew them as “shuck beans”—and dried green beans have been a traditional food from pioneer days.

  The Cherokee Indians cultivated beans long before the European setders arrived in the early 1700s. Like maize, beans were nutritious and fairly easy to grow, particularly in the rich valley bottomlands in the mountains. For most Appalachian families, green beans, served from the garden, canned, pickled, or dried, became a staple food.

  In pioneer days drying beans was a necessity, but people liked dried shuck beans so much that even today some mountain families who raise bean crops dry them for winter eating. They crave the intense flavor of the dried shuck beans. Appalachian natives who migrate “up north” carry fond memories of dried beans and dried apples, and it is not unusual for boxes of dried beans or apples to be shipped to Phoenix, Detroit, Indianapolis, or Cleveland, where they are eagerly received by those who are homesick for the old-time cooking and traditions.

  In the Big Sandy region of southeastern Kentucky, some families would wait for the first deep snow to cook the first mess of shuck beans. This was an annual ritual for many generations. Favorite beans for drying were the mountain white half-runner, the striped cornfield bean, and the Kentucky Wonder.

  A bean stringing was a popular social event in the first part of the twentieth century, as were apple peelings, corn shucking, and quilting bees. This was a way for neighbors to socialize even as they got needed work done.

  Word would go out to neighbors that a bean stringing would take place at a certain home on a certain date; everyone was welcome to come. Family, friends, and acquaintances came from near and far. Someone might bring a guitar, fiddle, or banjo and provide music. The music provided entertainment for youngsters not old enough to string the beans. They would frolic and play games while the music rang out. Many hands made short work of readying two or three bushels of green beans for canning or drying.

  There were two methods for drying beans. (Neither method was used for “shelly beans,” which mature and start to dry on the vine before they are shelled.) When the beans matured but the green pod was still edible, they were picked from the vines. Each end was broken off and the strings removed. A big darning needle was threaded with heavy thread; the needle was then carefully inserted between the two middle beans in the pod. It was like stringing popcorn for Christmas trees. When the string of beans was three or four feet long, the thread was knotted at the ends and the string hung on porch rafters or on walls behind the wood-burning stove in the kitchen. The beans would slowly turn straw-colored as they dried and shriveled up. After the beans were dry, they would be put into cloth sacks or glass jars for storage. (A later method was to put the dry beans in the freezer to keep out bugs and insects.)

  The second way to prepare beans for drying was to break off the ends and strings from both sides, then break each pod into bite-size pieces, usually between each bean in the pod. The bean pieces were then spread out on white cloths and put in a sunny place to dry. Many women preferred to break their beans before drying because, they said, it was easier to prepare the dried beans for cooking. It was, for one thing, almost impossible to pull out the threads after the strings of whole beans had dried.

  The best method for cooking dried beans is to soak them overnight in a kettle of water (or put them into boiling water and soak them for an hour), then rinse and cook them with a piece of smoked slab bacon for two hours or more until the beans are fork-tender.

  When I was growing up on Stoney Fork, families ate what they grew on the place or found in the hills. In the years before and during World War II, before the timber and coal companies came and stripped the land, the hills brought forth all kinds of berries. In addition, we had both orchard-grown and wild fruits such as apples, plums, grapes, persimmons, and pawpaws. There were fish in the creeks and wild game in the hills.

  Each little homestead had its cornfield, its patch of cane, and its beehives. Somewhere along the creek there would be a water mill, where corn was ground into meal. And somewhere in the hillside thickets would be moonshine stills where corn liquor was bottled, sold, and drunk.

  In any culture people’s activities concerning food often reflect their social customs and beliefs. In our community it was considered bad manners to eat a meal without inviting anyone who happened to be on the premises to eat with us. The invitation would be extended several times, because it was not good manners for one to accept the first time offered; and the response, worded differently each time, made it perfectly clear to each party just what the result should be. They had to go through the ritual because it was the custom, the traditional thing to do.

  The ways of cooking and eating in Appalachia have changed. My son Bruce, who grew up in Berea, has never tasted birch sap, or corn parched in an iron skillet, or potatoes roasted in the hot ashes of a wood-burning fire. On the one hand, I am sad that Bruce is missing so many of the things I took for granted as a child. On the other hand, I like my electric kitchen. Both Bruce and Wayne now can cook a meal in their own kitchens as well, and certainly in less time than I could in the kitchen on Stoney Fork. Who can say the old-fashioned ways are the best? There is value in both old and new.

  14

  Moonshine and Celebrations

  When the screech of dry leaves on bone-hard

  ground told us winter was not far away, we

  knew it was time to dig the potatoes, gather the

  corn, and get ready to celebrate the harvest,

  Christmas, and the coming year.

  As part of my work for the Council of the Southern Mountains, I read articles and books about Appalachia and talked with people working in community action programs in communities across the area. In this way I learned that land grants brought the Scots-Irish mountain folk to the hills of southeastern Kentucky. Marooned in their mountains, they were generally isolated and were spread out as political minorities among the states that share Appalachia geographically. Grandpa told me that he and his people felt hardly any loyalty to North Carolina, Virginia, and the other states they lived in when they first settled there.

  When the Civil War came, a majority of mountain men supported the Union. During the Reconstruction period, ex-Confederates were considered to be traitors and were left mostly to themselves. The mountain people’s land was almost worthless for tax purposes, their roads
were little more than trails along rocky beds of streams, their families were outgrowing the capacity of rugged mountain farms to sustain them at subsistence levels, and the wild game was mostly gone from the coves and ridges.

  The mountain people thus became burdened with terrible poverty at a time when there was inadequate tax support of public education and the construction of roads. The culture turned inward upon itself in an overcrowded land; and the people, old-fashioned even when they arrived, now depended upon the ancient oral culture their ancestors knew to sustain rigorous life on a static frontier.

  By the early twentieth century the Appalachian Mountain range held nearly half of the coal the world would need. Coal and virgin timber were discovered in the late nineteenth century. Powerful timber and coal enterprises sent representatives to purchase rights to these resources.

  “Land given to us as land grants was sold for as little as fifty cents an acre,” Grandpa told me. “Fifty cents an acre seemed big money back then—especially when people were told they could still live on the land.” Grandpa’s face turned red with anger and his voice got loud. “They lied to us! They got the coal and timber out, no matter what destruction it caused.”

  Fortunately, the skills possessed by the pioneers were taught, father to son, mother to daughter, on down through the generations. People who live in the mountains still know how to raise gardens, tend small orchards, and plant and raise corn on steep hillsides. And some carried forward the knowledge of how to make moonshine. That was the only cash crop Grandpa, Dad, and his brothers and cousins ever knew.

  Moonshine Whiskey

  Moonshining in Appalachia has been romanticized in so many books, songs, and motion pictures that many find it difficult to differentiate between fiction and the true role the production of illegal alcohol played in the lives of mountain people.

  There were legal whiskey makers in Kentucky, but Appalachian men made illicit whiskey. It was part of my heritage. My ancestors made liquor in Scotland and Northern Ireland. In the 1600s they had been forced to hide their small stills in wild, inaccessible places to avoid the despised British tax collectors. Making whiskey was considered to be a man’s own business. Why should he have to pay tax on a product made on his own land?