ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2011
Copyright © 1972, 1975, 1999 by The Foxfire Fund, Inc.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
“Preserving Vegetables and Fruit” originally appeared in The Foxfire Book, © 1972 by Brooks Eliot Wigginton. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.
“Apple Butter” and “Sorghum” originally appeared in Foxfire 3, © 1975 by The Foxfire Fund, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.
“Preserving and Cooking Food” originally appeared in Foxfire 11, © 1999 by The Foxfire Fund, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-307-94822-9
v3.1
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preserving and Cooking Food: An Introduction
Preserving Fruit
Drying Apples
Burying Apples, Beets, Cabbage, Potatoes, and Turnips
Canning
Pickling
Jelly and Preserves
Blackberry Jelly
Pear Preserves
Mint Jelly from Apple Juice
Quince Honey
Sorghum
Apples
Applesauce
Cooked Apples
Scalloped Apples
Soft-baked Apples
Vegetables (Cooking)
Baked Beans
Beets
Cabbage
Corn
Green Beans
Hominy
Mustard Greens
Parching Peanuts
Cooking Picked Beans
Potato Salad
Rutabagas
Sauerkraut
Squash Casserole
Sweet Potatoes
Tomato Soup
Preserving Vegetables
Drying Vegetables
Pumpkin
Sweet Potatoes
Corn
Okra
Leather Breeches Beans
Peas
Burying
Cabbage
Potatoes
Pickling
Sour Kraut
Picked Beans
Pickled Corn
Pickled Beets
Icicle Pickles
Chow Chow
Ripe Tomato Pickle
Green Tomato Pickle
Iceberg Green Tomato Pickle
Watermelon Pickles
Mustard Pickle
Pear Relish
Cucumber Relish
Tomato Catsup
Preserving Fruit
Bleaching
Drying
Using Syrup
Apple Butter
Sorghum
A NOTE ABOUT THE FOXFIRE AMERICANA LIBRARY SERIES
For almost half a century, high school students in the Foxfire program in Rabun County, Georgia, have collected oral histories of their elders from the southern Appalachian region in an attempt to preserve a part of the rapidly vanishing heritage and dialect. The Foxfire Fund, Inc., has brought that philosophy of simple living to millions of readers, starting with the bestselling success of The Foxfire Book in the early 1970s. Their series of fifteen books and counting has taught creative self-sufficiency and has preserved the stories, crafts, and customs of the unique Appalachian culture for future generations.
Traditionally, books in the Foxfire series have included a little something for everyone in each and every volume. For the first time ever, through the creation of The Foxfire Americana Library, this forty-five-year collection of knowledge has been organized by subject. Whether down-home recipes or simple tips for both your household and garden, each book holds a wealth of tried-and-true information, all passed down by unforgettable people with unforgettable voices.
PRESERVING AND COOKING FOOD
“Then y’ had some good eatin’.”
I make my sauerkraut by the full of the moon because my mother and grandmother made it that way and their mothers before them made it that way.” That’s what Lizzie Moore told Russell Bauman, a Foxfire student, when he interviewed her. She also told him, “When you learn something in the family, it goes right down the family with you.” Lizzie Moore’s words, however, don’t just apply to sauerkraut. They apply to a whole way of life, one that is disappearing in some places, changing in others, but still occasionally appearing when we least expect it. After having worked with Foxfire for several years, while in high school and now in college, I know that we are trying hard to preserve the old Appalachian customs and ways of life—our heritage. What I didn’t realize is that some parts of it are still very much present.
While working on this section, I called my grandmother daily for help in editing the recipes. Not only did she not mind, she was thrilled. She doesn’t care how I learn to cook or what my motivations are just as long as I eventually learn. I was proud to announce to my grandmother that I knew how to make sauerkraut and that the recipe I was using was similar to my great-grandmother’s.
I was at home one night with my mother, who was trying to teach me how to make slaw. I remembered Lizzie Moore’s comments about learning to make sauerkraut from her mother. That’s when I realized that this chapter is about family traditions, and one of those traditions is taking the time, each and every day, to sit together over a meal and discuss family life. The importance of dinner cannot be stressed enough. Mealtimes were among the few occasions when the whole family sat in the same room, did no work, and simply enjoyed each other’s company. Important decisions were made as steaming bowls of corn and potatoes were passed around the table. News about engagements and births, local gossip, and news from far away were shared as families gathered together for the evening meal. And when the community lost a member, people gathered at the home of the bereaved family, bringing every kind of good food imaginable so that the family wouldn’t have to worry about cooking.
Although our lifestyle is quite different today, the dinner meal is still one of the most important parts of the day. In spite of the fact that meals where the whole family eats at the same table and at the same time now seem to occur less frequently, the times when families do eat together still bear resemblance to those of years ago. Who’s getting married, who’s having kids, and who’s moving in or out of the community are still favorite subjects. Other matters often discussed are who makes better biscuits or when the next fishing trip will be. And neighbors still take food to those who’ve lost a loved one, knowing that the food is not as important as the concern behind it.
I will be the first to admit that my motivation for putting together this section on recipes was that, first and foremost, I love to eat, and much of what I love to eat is discussed in the following pages.
The words on these pages represent a collection of recipes, hints, and cooking stories, knowledge that has been passed down for generations, mother to daughter (or perhaps father to son), about how to care for a family in the form of fixing them what they like to eat. Here you have time-tested and well-loved recipes from families throughout the region. Many directions are not precise, as the women learned to add “a little bit” of this and “a dab” of that from their mothers, who did it that way because that’s the way their mothers did it.
—Lacy Hunter
PRESERVING, CANNING,
AND PICKLING
Before the era of deep freezes, store-bought fruits and vegetables, and restaurants, not only di
d people depend on their ability to grow food on the farm, they also depended on saving what they had grown. To provide fruits and vegetables year-round, methods of preservation such as canning and pickling were devised. Even today many families prefer the vegetables they can “put up” themselves to those bought from the store. Thus, canning and making jams and jellies are still late-summer rituals in many families, including my own. Though the actual work is occasionally tedious, the results are always worth the effort.
PRESERVING FRUIT
I LLUSTRATION 1 Lessie Conner
Lessie Conner remembered her family’s methods for preserving fruits and vegetables. “Before we bought our deep freeze—people ain’t had deep freezes so long, you know—in the fall of the year, we’d put up a big barrel of bleached fruit, apples. (Just peel ’em and bleach ’em in sulfur.) We’d have a barrel of bleached fruit, and we’d have a barrel of kraut, and that’s the way we spent the winter—with stuff like that to eat.”
As Mrs. Conner mentioned, one of the methods of preserving fruit was bleaching it. Several people told us that unless the fruit was prepared with too much water when it was later cooked, they could not taste the sulfur used in the process, and the bleached fruit was actually quite good. As Susie Smith said, “That fruit was just as pretty and white [as it could be].” Her brother Clive Smith also remembers bleached fruits. “My mother, aunts, and sisters would cut up apples to smoke them in the fall. They’d cut ’em up and put ’em in a basket with an iron pan. Then sprinkle a little sulfur in it to preserve the apples. They’d store ’em in a churn. We had fresh fruit all winter. You don’t hear of smoked fruit anymore.”
ILLUSTRATION 2 Furman Arvey
Furman Arvey spoke of what his family did with the fruit after it was bleached. “Applesauce and stuff like that, they usually made it out of bleached fruit. They take it and get a big barrel and put a run of that in there, and they’d get sulfur or brimstone—that brimstone was hard, and it’d burn—and they’d cover that [barrel] up and let it smoke. That’s what cured it. Turned it real white. And give it a good taste. Then they put it in jars. It stayed soft. It wouldn’t dry out. It’d keep. If they wanted to, they could just leave it in the barrel and use it out of the barrel. It’d keep right in that barrel. Be big oal barrels, you know, back then.”
Susie Smith graciously gave us specific directions for bleaching apples. She said that the first step is to find an airtight container or box approximately thirty-six inches deep. She remembers her family using an old cement box with a quilt draped over the top of it. They placed a hot stove eye from the top of their wood-stove in the bottom of the box on which they placed one teaspoon of sulfur and one teaspoon of cream of tartar. The sliced apples should be placed in a basket—she used an old market basket—and suspended from the top of the box and covered with a quilt. The sulfur and cream of tartar will burn on the hot plate, producing smoke, which will, in turn, bleach the fruit. (If the stove plate wasn’t hot enough to burn the sulfur and cream of tartar, they were lit with a match to make them burn.) The bleaching process takes about forty-five minutes to one hour.
DRYING APPLES
I LLUSTRATION 3 Ruby Eller
Another commonly used method of fruit preservation was drying. Ruby Eller recalled how people found a way to make the chore of peeling the apples to be dried a social event. “There were candy drawings, corn shuckings, apple peelings [for social get-togethers]. In the summer when the apples would get ripe, people dried a lot of them. They’d meet at somebody’s home one night to peel a bunch of apples and have them ready to set out in the sun to dry the next day. They’d go to a different house each night and help each other.”
I LLUSTRATION 4 Lucy York
Lucy York found a slightly more convenient way to dry apples, especially in times of rainy or bad weather. “I would peel my apples and slice them and put them in the oven when I finished cooking a meal. I’d slip the trays in there and leave the oven door open. It would take several days for them to dry because I would leave them in there only until the oven cooled down.
“Now I dry them over my hot water heater because it’s a low heat yet it dries the apples out. I can stack three trays of apples up on the heater by putting pieces of wood across and separating the trays.”
Lettie Chastain told us how she stores her apples once they are dried. “I’ve always dried apples out in the sunshine. Then I put them in the stove and heat them, get them hot all the way through. I pack them in gallon jugs while they’re real hot, and they just keep real good. We didn’t have gallon jugs years back, and we used large crocks.”
Furman Arvey summarized the whole process. “We didn’t have refrigerators or freezers. Had to dry most of our food to keep it. We had one kiln. That old kiln—I can’t recollect when it was built. The sides were four feet wide by eight feet long by two feet high built of rock. Then there was rock over the top of it. They tried to make it about four inches thick. That’s what you laid your fruit on. They didn’t burn their fruit that a-way. See, they just got that rock over the top of the fire hot, and it stayed a certain temperature. Then they took flour back then and made a paste out of it and stuck old newspapers—all kinds of papers—to the rock cover. It was clean, you know, about layin’ your apple on. I recollect that. Then they’d peel ’em and just cut ’em wide open and quarter ’em, you know, and took the cores out. They’d dry better and dry even that way. It’d take about twenty-four hours to dry a run, and then they’d put a new run in. It wouldn’t be over a couple of layers thick on the [furnace]. Stir it up ever’ three or four hours. Just go in and stir it, you know.
“Then they’d take it off and put it in sacks, and on them good sunny days, they’d take that sack and lay it out on the porch where the sun could hit it, and they’d go and turn it over ever’ once in a while so it’d dry out good, keep good. I seen a room one time—a little old pantry they called it—and I seen it stacked full of sacks of dried fruit.”
BURYING APPLES, BEETS, CABBAGE,
POTATOES, AND TURNIPS
Although drying was a common method of preservation, it was by no means the only one used. Burying fruits and vegetables was both an excellent means of preserving food and a testament to the ingenuity of the mountaineers. In order for the food to keep, the hole had to be well drained and insulated to prevent water accumulation and freezing. Sallie Beaty remembered well her family’s potato hole. “Another way we kept our food was by putting it in a hole in the ground. We did our potatoes like this. [After] we dug up our potatoes in the fall, we would dig a hole [in the ground and put them in it]. We put straw or whatever we could find around them. Then we’d hill them up. [Next we] put dirt on top of them to keep ’em from freezing. Then we took an old piece of board or tin and put over the—we called it a hill—so it wouldn’t get so wet. You could do turnips and cabbage the same way. Then, as you wanted a mess, you would go out there and get whatever you wanted at a time.”
Ada Kelly also recalled her family’s hole. “They’d dig a hole to put the apples in, put some hay, straw, or something in there, and just pour them in that hole. They they covered it over with leaves or straw and then heavy soil. Turnips, apples, and potatoes are all buried that way.”
The logical question of how the fruits and vegetables were removed from the hole during the winter was answered by Roberta Hicks. “You would hoe up the potatoes in the garden, then put them in a hole, then put hay in the hole, and place your potatoes in the hole. Then you leave a place to where you can reach in and get them out.”
ILLUSTRATION 5 Gertrude Mull
Gertrude Mull also told us about storing fruits and vegetables in this manner. She felt, however, that perhaps due to changing weather patterns, burying fruits and vegetables would not be as effective today as it was years ago. “Back in them days, they just dried fruit and holed up their taters—get ’em off the trees and carry them to the cellar. We packed leaves in there and put the apples down in them. Then we’d cover the apples over with
more leaves. They kept all winter. Nowadays they wouldn’t keep over a week. They’d be rotten. [Apples] don’t keep like they used to. I don’t know why. It’s just the weather changing.”
Mrs. Mull recalled that beets were also stored in a hole before canning became common. “We buried our beets [to keep them through the winter]. We never canned beets. We didn’t know nothing about canning beets then. [When we cooked them,] we fixed them up with a lot of syrup.”
In spite of the skepticism about their effectiveness today, holes for fruits and vegetables were an excellent method of preservation, especially in this climate where the winters are cool, but not too cold. As Roberta Hicks noted, the fruits and vegetables “would stay good all winter if it did not get too cold.”
CANNING
“Back then there wasn’t no money, much, and we had to grow what we had to eat. We grew beans, cabbage, tomatoes, everything like that [in our garden]. We canned everything we grew. We dried fruit too. My mother dried blackberries. She just put ’em on a cloth and let ’em dry. After she dried ’em, she cooked ’em with a little water. Then she’d sweeten ’em. You could make pies out of ’em or anything you wanted to. Why, they was good! They aren’t as good dried as they was canned, but back then they didn’t have too many cans to can in.”
ILLUSTRATION 6 “Back then, there wasn’t no money, much, and we had to grow what we had to eat.”—Minnie Dailey
This quote from Minnie Dailey summarizes one of the changes in food preservation that have taken place in the past century in the mountains—the advent of canning. Although definitely one of the better means of keeping food, canning could not be used until glass jars became common and cheap enough for the average family to afford.
By the 1930s, when glass jars became readily available, canning quickly became widespread and is still very common today. Roberta Hicks said, “I grew corn, green beans, taters, okra, and tomatoes in my garden. In those days, you had to can everything. I canned beans in half-gallon jars and jelly in quart jars. I canned a lot of tomatoes. One year I canned a thousand jars. I had eighteen different kinds of jams and jellies. I had seven or eight dozen jars of applesauce, and a hundred and fifty cans of green beans, and about a hundred and something quarts of peaches. We also had cows and pigs. We raised most of our own meat, but I say most of our food was from things that I had canned.”
Pickling and Preserving: The Foxfire Americana Library (3) Page 1