—Fuanita Kilby
RUTABAGAS
Peel them and slice them, and cook them in salt water to cover with approximately ¼ cup of brown sugar and drippings of streak o’ lean. They should be cooked until they are tender and almost dry.
—Fuanita Kilby
SAUERKRAUT
Another vegetable that was transformed by good cooks into many different, tasty dishes is cabbage. Aside from the obvious slaw and fried or boiled cabbage, sauerkraut is an ingenious way of both preserving an easily grown vegetable and providing more variety at the dinner table.
Lizzie Moore gave Russell Bauman instructions on how she makes sauerkraut—a favorite use of cabbage in northeastern Georgia. “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. I always make my kraut on the full of the moon ’cause it’s always harder and firmer then than it is at any other time. I like my kraut hard and firm. I don’t like soft kraut. Other people may have different times of the moon when they make theirs—I don’t know about that. As far as my pickled beans and kraut go, I have always made mine on the full of the moon.
“Don’t put the kraut in a tin barrel. Put it in a wooden barrel. A tin barrel’ll rust, and you can’t eat your kraut. To make kraut in the barrel—now, this is an all-day job—you take your cabbage, trim the outside leaves off, and save them for later. Wash and chop up your cabbage in a washtub. I got a number two washtub, and I just wash mine in that. If you want to make chopped kraut, you chop ’em up as fine as you want it. If you want to make shredded kraut, you can just take your cabbage, cut it into quarters, and slice it just as thin as you can make in those little strips—either way. I don’t make the shredded ’cause I like chopped the best. Just take it, chop it up, and put it in your barrel.
“When you get your cabbage chopped up, put it all into that fifty-gallon barrel. Take those green leaves that you trimmed off the outside of your cabbage, wash ’em, and put ’em over the top of your barrel. Just take those leaves and lay ’em agin’ your barrel so that none of your chopped kraut is showing. Get a big ol’ flat rock and lay it down on top of your cabbage. That weights it down. It keeps the cabbage down in the bottom of the barrel instead of coming up when it starts working. With a fifty-gallon barrel, I’d say you’d have to get two pretty good-sized rocks to go across it and weigh it down. You don’t pack it in the barrel. These rocks pack it for you. Pack your cabbage in there ’til it comes up six or eight inches from the top. I forgot how much salt you put into a fifty-gallon barrel, but the way I do when I make it is I’ll take my water and taste of it and get it as salty as I want it. Pour your salt water in that barrel and put it away to set for a while.
“It’ll take anywhere from two to three weeks for a fifty-gallon barrel of kraut to work off and get sour. After it gets sour, you have to take it out of the barrel. Take your hands and squeeze all of the water out of it and put it in a cooker or a dishpan. Run cold water over it, wash it, and take your hands and squeeze all of the water you can get out of it again. Put it in another pan, put water over the top of it, and put it on the stove. Don’t let it come to a boil. Just let it get ready to come to a boil. Stir it so the heat can get all the way through. Pack it in your cans and don’t put no more salt or nothin’ in it. Pack it in your cans, seal it up, and set it away.
“You can eat kraut with just about anything. You can make kraut with weenies. You can make fried kraut. If you want to, you can always put pepper in your kraut. Now, a lot of people don’t like pepper in their kraut. I do, but now, a lot of people don’t. I like hot pepper in my cabbage. You can eat it out of the can. I usually just get me some out in a bowl and eat it raw. To me, beef’s not good in kraut like pork is. You can also eat kraut with cracklin’ bread.
“Another thing you can do with your cabbage is to take your stalks that are left over and pickle them. Take the stalk, peel it off, and drop it down in your kraut. It’ll sour and be good too. When you get ready to eat it, put ’em in a pan of grease from bacon or fried meats. If you ain’t got that, just put your Crisco or lard in a pan, let it get hot, and eat it. That’s all there is to makin’ kraut. Of course, when you’re makin’ it, it takes longer than it does to tell about it. When you make it in a fifty-gallon barrel, oh, my goodness, that takes fifty pounds of cabbage!”
Lola Cannon told us how she judges the correct amount of salt to put into the barrel of cabbage and how she knows when the kraut is through “making.” “I’ve always judged how much salt to put in by the size of the container I’m using. If it’s a gallon container, I put two tablespoons of salt, fill the container with water, and weight the top down carefully. Then I watch till it ferments. You can tell by the bubbles coming up in the jar. The time it takes to ferment depends on the heat. In cool weather, it will take quite a bit of time. I just have to watch it.”
SQUASH CASSEROLE
I make a casserole out of squash, and the Florida people say I’m the only person they know that knows how to cook squash to eat. I take real small squash, and I always scrape them and cut them up in thin pieces. I put them in a pan and put onions and crumbled-up Ritz crackers on top. Then sprinkle a tiny bit of water and some grated cheese and dots of butter over the crackers. Then I put aluminum foil over it and put it in the oven to cook.
—Mrs. Effie Lord, Proprietor of Lord’s Cafe, Clayton
PLATE 60 Effie Lord
SWEET POTATOES
For candied sweet potatoes, I peel and quarter about 4 large sweet potatoes, put them in a pot with enough water to cover them, a cup of sugar, a dash of cinnamon and butter, and I let them boil until they’re tender and the juice is syrupy.
—Bessie Ramey
TOMATO SOUP
For tomato soup, take the juice from 1 quart of home-canned tomatoes. Stir 2 tablespoons flour into a small teacup of milk. Pour tomato juice into the flour-milk mixture and heat. Add ½ teaspoon sugar to taste.
BREADS
Few Southern Appalachian families consider a meal complete unless it contains at least one type of bread. Cornbread is always a favorite in mountain homes, as are freshly baked “from scratch” biscuits.
BISCUITS
2 cups plain flour
1 level teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
or 3 tablespoons shortening or lard
1 cup water or buttermilk
Sift flour with soda and salt into large bowl. Mix in shortening or lard until flour is crumbly or in little balls. Add enough water [or buttermilk] to dampen dough. Mix well. Pour out onto floured board. Roll out with rolling pin or press out thin with hands. Cut into circles with biscuit cutter or top edge of water glass. Put biscuits onto greased pan and bake in hot oven (425°F) 10 to 20 minutes, depending on thickness of biscuits.
—Margaret Morton
CORNBREAD
There’s one thing we did that was really good. Make up cornbread and make it to where the dough was hard-like, you know, so it’d hold together. And rake them coals out on that hearth, and my mother’d just throw one of them patties in there on that hearth and rake some ashes back over it and let that cook. And it’d brown and that’s the best bread I’ve ever eat! Ash cake I believe they called it.
But anyway, when they got that to where it was done, they just washed it off with water, washed all that ashes and coals and stuff off. Well, now, that’s really good. You just don’t know without you’ve lived back then!
I went to spend some days with my grandmother on my mother’s side, and she’d have me to cook, and I was just a small girl. I must have been about eleven or twelve years old. And Grandpa, he wouldn’t eat anything in his bread, only just water. He wouldn’t have a thing in his cornbread. No salt nor soda, nor nothing but just water. Well, she’d tell me to cook him a little cake like that and put me and her one with buttermilk and salt and soda in it.
—Eva Vinson
2 cups ground cornmeal
2 tables
poons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
½ cup flour
1 cup buttermilk
Use water to thin to consistency of pancake mix. Cook at 400°F for about 30 minutes.
—To Ann Chastain
HAPPY ROLLS
1 cup warm mashed Irish potato
⅔ cup shortening
2 teaspoons salt
½ cup sugar
1 cup hot scalded milk
1 yeast cake
2 eggs, well beaten
Flour to make a medium dough—not stiff
Melted butter
Put mashed potato in bowl. Add shortening, salt, sugar, and milk. Let stand until cool. Add yeast, which has been dissolved in ½ cup warm water. Add eggs and flour. Knead slightly until smooth. Set aside in warm kitchen and let rise 1 hour or so before putting in refrigerator. About 3 hours before serving, take dough from refrigerator and, using as little flour as possible, make into rolls. Dip each one in melted butter and let rise. Bake in hot oven (425°F) and serve at once.
Rolls are lighter if made up and put in the refrigerator the day before you want them.
HUSH PUPPIES
A long time ago, when people used to go out on picnics or camping trips out on the creek banks, their dogs always went with them, of course. When they got their fish fried, they couldn’t keep their dogs out of their supper. They had the grease where they had fried their fish and they had cornmeal they had rolled the fish in. So they’d stir the hot grease and cornmeal up together with some water or milk and salt and put that back in the pan. They’d cook that and throw it to the dogs. The dogs would hush and get off to the side. That’s how hush puppies got their name.
—Margaret Norton
DESSERTS
Although today desserts are one of the staples of the mountain menu, years ago they were a rare treat. Sugar was expensive and occasionally unattainable, and as a result, dessert foods were saved for special occasions such as Christmas, all-day singings, and dinner-on-the-grounds at church.
APPLE PIE
Place several cups of bleached apple pieces in an uncooked piecrust and add butter, sugar, and cinnamon to taste. The pie can be covered with pastry strips or a second crust if preferred. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F for 30 to 35 minutes or until the crust is a golden brown. The Parker family enjoys the apple pies made from bleached apples because they taste so much like fresh apples.
—Edith Parker
APPLESAUCE CAKE
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 cups applesauce
2 cups sugar
½ sticks butter
2 eggs
3 cups plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon ground cloves
½ teaspoon salt
1½ teaspoons nutmeg
1 tablespoon cinnamon
1 cup chopped pecans
1 cup raisins
Preheat oven to 300°F. Add soda to applesauce and set aside. Combine sugar, butter, and eggs and mix well. Beat in dry ingredients. Add applesauce, nuts, and raisins and mix well. Pour into tube pan and bake at 300°F an hour and a half. Cool before removing from pan.
—Arizona Dickerson
BAKING HINTS FOR PIES
Mix all the ingredients for your pie together and put them in a pan on top of the stove. Bring them to a boil. Place dough on top of pie ingredients, then put the pan into the oven to finish cooking, and it won’t take so long because it’s already hot.
—Lola Cannon
You put your pies on the top rack in the oven to bake them. If you take your pie out and it isn’t done, set it on top of the woodstove and let it boil. When you’re baking pies, you can boil them on top of the stove and then put them in the oven on the top rack, and that bakes them.
—Ruth Holcomb
BLACKBERRY PUDDING
2 cups blackberries
1 cup water
1 cup sugar
1 cup cornmeal
Pinch of salt
Wash freshly picked blackberries. Put them in pan on top of the stove and add water and sugar. Heat to boiling. Stir in cornmeal and continue cooking until the pudding is as thick as you want it. Add salt and continue stirring. Put it over a low heat and continue cooking until the cornmeal is cooked through.
—Ruth Holcomb
COBBLERS
Put your fruit [about 2 cups] in a pan with a little juice or water. Get it to boiling on top of the stove. Add sugar and butter. I like to use a biscuit dough, but some people use pie pastry just as well. Just roll it out good and thin, and make enough for 2 layers. Dip half of your fruit and juice out and save. Put a layer of the dough on the fruit remaining in the pan and boil that a few minutes. Pour the reserved fruit and juice back in and place the second layer of dough in the pan. Let this boil up. Then put it in the oven (350°F) to brown.
—Bessie Underwood
FRIED APPLE PIES
Make a biscuit dough. Roll the dough out on your dough board and cut into saucer-size circles. Cook dried apples in small amount of water until soft. Mash and add sugar to taste. Place several spoonfuls on one half of each dough circle. Fold over the other half and seal the edges with a fork. Fry in a pan on top of the stove in a small amount of grease.
—Addie Norton
Use 1 quart dried apples cooked in a little water until tender. Add ½ cup sugar and a little allspice. The dough for 2 large pies requires 4 cups self-rising flour, lots of lard, and a little water. Knead the dough and roll it out thin. Put the cooked apples on the dough, fold over, and fry in an iron skillet in lard until brown.
—Bertha Waldroop
HONEY SWEET BREAD
2 eggs
½ cup butter
1 cup strained honey
2 cups self-rising flour
Follow the directions used for Syrup Sweet Bread.
—Ruth Holcomb
ICE CREAM
We had a lot of milk and cream. Our daddy or one of the men in the community would go into Dillard and get some ice. We had a grinder that you turn. You put your ice and your salt around the churn on the inside of the grinder. Then in the churn you put your milk and sugar and whatever flavor you want to make your ice cream: peaches or vanilla or strawberry. You turn the crank on the grinder, and when it gets to where it won’t turn anymore, your ice cream’s made.
—Margaret Norton
PUMPKIN BREAD
4 cups sugar (all white or equal parts white and brown sugar)
4 cups cooked pumpkin
1 cup vegetable oil
1 cup chopped nuts
1 teaspoon ground cloves
4 teaspoons baking soda
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon salt
Chopped dates or raisins
5 cups flour
Mix all ingredients together. Bake in 4 tall 1-pound coffee cans, filling each about ⅔ full. Bake at 350°F for 1 hour or a little longer. Bread will shake out of cans freely when cool. Store in refrigerator or other cool place.
—Arizona Dickerson
PLATE 61 Arizona Dickerson
OLD-FASHIONED TEA CAKES
1 stick butter or margarine
1 egg
cup sugar
2 tablespoons milk
½ teaspoon vanilla
1¾ cup flour (omit salt and baking powder if self-rising flour is used)
½ teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
Cream butter, egg, sugar, milk, and vanilla. Sift flour, salt, and baking powder. Add to creamed mixture and blend well. Chill the dough for several hours. Remove from refrigerator and roll out into half-inch thickness. Cut out with a biscuit or cookie cutter. Bake in 375°F oven for 8 to 10 minutes. Note: More flour may be added to make the dough stiffer, and cookies may be cut out immediately instead of waiting for the dough to cool.
—Bertha Waldroop
QUICK MIX TWO-EGG CAKE
2¼ cups sifted ca
ke flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1½ cups sugar
1 cup milk
½ cup shortening
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 eggs
Sift together flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar. Add shortening and milk. Blend together. Beat by hand 300 strokes. Add vanilla and eggs. Blend together and beat an additional 2 minutes. Pour into 2 greased 9-inch-layer cake pans and bake in moderate oven (350°F) about 30 minutes.
—Bertha Waldroop
SYRUP SWEET BREAD
2 eggs
3 tablespoons butter
1 cup syrup or molasses
2 cups self-rising flour
Preheat oven to 350°F. Cream eggs and butter. Add syrup. Fold in flour and mix good. Bake in lightly greased pan until brown. This usually takes about 20 minutes.
—Ruth Holcomb
SWEET POTATO PIES
I used to make the best sweet potato pie you ever put your tooth on. Sweet potato pie is wonderful! You just peel your potatoes and cut them up raw. Cook them ’til tender. Add a teaspoonful of cinnamon. I don’t want but a dash of nutmeg, quarter of a teaspoonful, in mine. Put a tablespoon of butter and a cup of cream and a cup of sugar in your pan. The sweeter you make your sweet potato pie, the better it is.
—Addie Norton
2 sweet potatoes, about fist-size
2 teacups milk, about 12 ounces
½ stick butter
2 cups sugar
½ teaspoon cinnamon
Dash of salt
Peel sweet potatoes, slice, and put them in a pan of water. Boil until tender. Leave the water in them. Add milk, butter, and sugar to the potatoes. Heat to boiling. Add cinnamon and salt.
Roll out a thin biscuit dough and place on top of the sweet potato mixture. Allow juice to boil through dough until dough is thoroughly cooked. Sprinkle sugar on top of the pie and set the pan under the broiler to brown on top.
—Ruth Holcomb
BEVERAGES
Although in recent years the traditional drink of southerners has been sweetened, iced tea, years ago all teas came not from tea bags bought at the grocery store, but from herbs in the woods. Because teas were used primarily as tonics and remedies, they will be discussed in the next chapter, “Wild Plant Uses.”
Foxfire 11: Wild Plant Uses, Gardening, Wit, Wisdom, Recipes, Beekeeping, Toolmaking, Fishing, and More Affairs of Plain Living Page 14