PLATE 46 Bob Massee’s apple orchard
“They had the trees a lot farther apart than they have them today. They had ’em about thirty foot apart; you wouldn’t get but about half the trees you get today on a acre of land. So where they get three hundred today, you got a hundred trees on a acre of land back then. They let their trees grow up so big! They didn’t have none of these dwarf trees. There were only big trees, so you’d have to set ’em far apart to get through ’em. They didn’t keep ’em cut back. They thought the more limbs you left on ’em, the more apples you had.
“I’ve seen some that’d have fifty or sixty bushels to a tree and some ten or fifteen bushels, but the apples wasn’t no size; they was so little. You’d have a lot of small apples.
“When Mr. Roberts owned the orchard, and we went to gather the apples—there was about four or five or six of us boys—we would gather around the tree with a big sheet and hold it, and my father would climb the tree and shake the apples in that hole right in the middle of that sheet and the apples would roll down and roll out through that hole onto the ground. Then we’d pick ’em up and put ’em on the sled and take ’em down to an old house he had down there where he stored his apples.
“After Mr. Massee took over, we started picking about the middle of August—first picking Red Delicious and then finishing up with the winter apples, which sometimes lasted on up into October before you got all the Yates and Arkansas Blacks and Black Twigs and other winter apples picked. We used pick sacks, and we’d haul the apples to Tiger to the packing house in a truck. We’d fill up the pick sacks and haul ’em down on the sled and set ’em out to the place where the truck could get ’em, and then the truck would haul ’em to Tiger to the packing house.
“I’ve seen apples three and four inches in diameter that came from Glassy. We’d make a bushel pack with thirty-six apples of those Stark’s Delicious, the old-timey Stark’s. It usually takes anywhere from fifty to sixty-five apples to make a bushel. Biggest thing was Stark’s Delicious up there. There were a few trees of a big old yellow sweet apple and then an apple they called Early Harvest scattered around in orchards, but as pollinizers only.
“Those apples wouldn’t keep too good. They wouldn’t pack ’em. They just had to be sold locally or to peddlers that’d come in and buy ’em off the trucks or wagons and haul ’em off to market and sell ’em. That’s where all the culls went.
“Another good pollinizer was the Black Ben. But they never packed them either. It was just used solely for a canning apple and a cooking apple. It was one of the best apples you could find for drying and making dried fruit.
“We picked all the apples. Back then they cleaned ’em up. When we’d pick a tree, we’d go back and pick every one of them up. We’d take them to the packing house, and they would be sorted and graded and sold as culls. Some would be used for cider or vinegar, and the others they’d sell to truckers that’d come in and buy ’em by the bulk and take ’em off and peddle them.
“Utility-grade apples were packed in baskets or ring packs. The only thing Mr. Massee ever sold at a high price was little, round, half-bushel baskets. Those were called ring packs. He sold them for three dollars for a half a bushel there at the shed. The tourists would come in ançl buy them, and those ring packs would bring more money than any other apples he sold. The others didn’t bring very much. Two or three dollars a bushel was all you could get for them. [We] hauled ’em to the Atlanta Farmers’ Market.
“When trucker peddlers picked apples up at the packing house, he’d get anywhere from seventy-five cents to a dollar a bushel, sometimes fifty cents. It was according to the grade of the apple and how many they bought. We just sold apples at the packing house, no roadside stands. I stayed at the packing house six days a week during the packing season, and then if anybody come and wanted a load of apples on Sunday, I’d open up and sell ’em to ’em. There was no cooler back then. You just had to move ’em out. They had a contract with a man at the Atlanta Farmers’ Market, and he had storage where, if they couldn’t sell ’em, he’d take ’em down there and store ’em for ’em and sell ’em later at a discount price. He had to have his cut out of ’em for storing ’em and takin’ care of ’em.
“We used culls to make vinegar and cider. We’d make the barrels of cider, and we had to do that at night. We had no way to keep the bees off of us. They was so bad that we had to make our cider at night with just a old-type cider mill with a press. And we’d grind the apples at night and pour the cider in big fifty-gallon wooden barrels and let it set and make vinegar; and then they’d sell the vinegar to people for use in their cooking and pickling in their homes.”
Bob Massee summarized the feelings of many growers when he stated, “I’ve gone to apple meetings all my life. When I started, there were a lot of young people. Georgia used to have an apple meeting; we’d get two or three hundred people. South Carolina and North Carolina were [the] same way. Now they have five states that all have the same meeting, and there’s less people who go to that meeting than used to go to any one of those state meetings. There are no young people at the meeting. Sterling, my son, has about three or four people that he sees at these meetings that are about his age, and Sterling is thirty years old. There are very few young people that show up at this meeting, which makes me think the apple business is going to phase out if something doesn’t change.”
PLATE 47 Bob Massee
* Planting and harvesting by the signs of the zodiac. For more information on planting by the signs, see The Foxfire Book, pages 212–37.
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 gett
ing 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 did 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
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.”
PLATE 48 Lessie Conner
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.”
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 oak barrels, you know, back then.”
PLATE 49 Furman Arvey
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 woodstove 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
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.”
PLATE 50 Ruby Eller
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.”
PLATE 51 Lucy York
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.”
Fur man 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.”
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.”
Foxfire 11: Wild Plant Uses, Gardening, Wit, Wisdom, Recipes, Beekeeping, Toolmaking, Fishing, and More Affairs of Plain Living Page 12