“I make my yokes, wagon shafts, and everything else. I just make my own. I want everything to be old-time. You can make them out of a lot of different kinds of wood. Hickory and locust is the best thing to make a yoke out of. The only thing that I can get to work to make bows out of is white oak.
PLATE 129 June Jones placing a white oak bow into the yoke
“When I put the yokes on steers, I just throw it across their necks and run the bow up by their necks. The last pair of steer that I had, I hauled just like dogs. I could just back up there and lower the tailgate, and they’d crawl in. I don’t know if I will ever get the ones I’m working with now broke like that or not. Those others I took to work with me every day I went. Those guernseys, I took them with me to work and turned them loose like dogs and put them out. They’d loafer around, and when I got ready to come to the house, all I had to do was holler for them, and they would just load themselves.
PLATE 130 “When I put the yokes on steers, I just throw it across their necks and run the bow up by their necks.”—June Jones
“I like to work with steers because I can just do more with them. An old horse, he’ll just prance around and jump around. An old mule, he’ll work for two or three years just to get to kick you once.
“I could put them to the plow, to the planter. I planted it, plowed it, done it all with those holsteins, just like they do now with tractors. They’d do it slower, but I’m slower too.”
BEEF PREPARATION
Slaughterhouses, meat-processing plants, and packing houses were not in existence in the early 1900s; therefore, beef preparation, in its entirety, was done at home.
Terry Dickerson remembered preparing the beef after the animal was killed. “We butchered our beef in the wintertime,” he said. “We generally dried our beef. We’d hang up the meat and let it drain, and we’d put it in something like a cheesecloth to protect it from the flies and gnats. We’d hang it over the big wood range in the kitchen to dry. That stove would heat the whole room, and we hung the beef in there. It wasn’t too bad to keep. It was all the way we had. There wasn’t many people who dried beef. It took quite a bit of work to take care of it, and it was pretty small stuff in those days. They didn’t butcher an animal after it got over five hundred pounds. It was too big. Now they butcher some of them weighing nine hundred and even eleven hundred pounds. Animals [like that] were too big for us to butcher. It had to be really small stuff; something we could handle. Something that big, you couldn’t dry it all out. There’d be moisture around the bones for months.”
Garnet Lovell also told us about preparing meat. The first thing Garnet does is cut up a hindquarter of beef. Garnet said, “You can’t dry it with the bone in it. The bone will give it a taste or something. It’s not any good. We never did dry the bone, and I have dried lots of beef in my life. And we never would dry any of the forequarter. There is too much bone in the forequarter. We would always can that, or salt it and hang it out and eat off it while it was fresh. In cold weather, it will last for a month or six weeks all right.
“[You dry the meat in big chunks, but] the chunks won’t weigh but about three or four pounds when they get dried. [My wife’s father] used to cut it up in much bigger pieces. [I want it] to dry fast, so I [don’t] cut it as heavy as he did.
“And you’d never cut it into strips. The old people said it didn’t have the flavor. If the meat was smoked, hickory was the wood used. I don’t recall ever seeing a big beef smoked. I think the only time they smoked it was if it got warm weather. They’d smoke it to keep the flies out of their smokehouse. I don’t think they intended to smoke it [to make it have any special sort of flavor or anything].”
After the meat has been cut up, it must be salted down. Garnet sprinkles it with regular meat salt and doesn’t use any spices or other seasonings. He does this while the animal heat is still in the meat. Garnet said, “In the past, within four or five hours after the beef was shot, it was salted.”
PLATE 131 Garnet Lovell cuts up the beef in chunks
You can tell by looking at it when the meat is ready. There will be no water or blood coming out, and the meat will be dark. The process usually takes about two days, but if the weather is wet, it will take about a week.
After the meat has taken salt, Garnet cuts a hole in the meat and slides it on sweet birch sticks and hangs it about six feet above a fireplace. It usually takes about four weeks to dry. When the meat has dried, he puts it in bags and hangs it up in any dry place. “Now, this, when it’s dry, will keep ’til next fall. I’ve been in homes when they’d have that attic up here hanging full [of] turkey breast and everything,” Garnet told us. He said you could also dry deer meat this way.
The only hindquarter meat not dried is that with too much bone, with gristle, or with fat, which keeps the dried meat from being lean enough. Garnet didn’t dry the T-bone section, for example, since it has too many bones.
We asked Garnet what he did with the meat that was left on the bone. He replied, “What she’ll [his wife, Blanche] do is put it in that big pressure cooker she has got, and cook it off, and then put it in containers and put it in the freezer. We don’t need it right now. They ain’t no use in throwing it away. No, we don’t want to throw anything away. We’ll just cook the meat off it.”
The fat from the meat may be used in several different ways. Some of it used to be rendered into tallow. Garnet said, “We don’t do anything with it [ourselves, but] it makes good shoe grease, [and] old people used to grease the bottoms of kids’ feet and chests with it for croup.”
BEEF RECIPES
OLD-FASHIONED MEAT LOAF
1 ½ pounds ground beef
¼ teaspoon black pepper
1 cup tomato juice
2 teaspoons salt
3 cups oatmeal or crushed saltine crackers
2 eggs, well beaten
¼ cup applesauce
¼ cup chopped onion
Combine all ingredients and mix thoroughly. Pack firmly in a loaf pan and bake at 350°F for 1 hour.
—Margaret Norton
BEEF SOUP
2 pounds beef, cubed
6 tomatoes
10 carrots
8 Irish potatoes
1 teaspoon salt
Pepper to taste
Cook beef until tender. Add tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, salt, and pepper. Cover with water and cook until vegetables are tender.
—Bertha Waldroop
BRUNSWICK STEW
1 pound chopped or ground beef
1 large onion, chopped
2 cups canned tomatoes
1 cup tomato catsup
½ cup green pepper, chopped
2 cups fresh, canned, or frozen corn
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon vinegar
Salt and pepper to taste
Brown beef and onion together. Add tomatoes, catsup, and green pepper. Cover and cook slowly for 30 minutes. Add corn and seasonings and stir well. Cook slowly for another 30 minutes. Stir often, and add water if stew becomes too thick.
—Clyde Burrell
PLATE 132 Clyde Burrell
To expand the above recipe to serve a large crowd or to can a large quantity:
25 pounds beef
20 pounds pork
8 pounds ham
12 quarts corn
12 quarts tomatoes
6 or more onions
Some people put sage in their Brunswick stew.
—Lettie Chastain
Blanche Lovell said, “Slice off a little piece of dried beef the thickness of a fifty-cent piece. Let it soak in water just a little, until it is soft. Then take it out and roll it in flour and fry it, and then you have a piece of regular steak. Or lay it out in the hot grease and cook it until it is tender, and then make milk gravy on top of that. That is the way they used to do it fifty years ago, and still do it that way today. If you are going to stew it, just throw it in water with vegetables in it. But who’d want to stew such good meat as this? It
’s better fried.”
MILKING COWS
Every farm had at least one cow just for the purpose of obtaining milk and milk products. Each morning and evening, farm families across the Southern Appalachians went to the barn to milk the cows. Because the milk cows were milked twice daily, they were never taken to the range with the rest of the herd. Apart from milk, these cows served another important purpose. Each year, they were bred and had one calf. These calves were then raised for milk cows, brood cows, bulls, trained as steers, slaughtered as beef, or sold.
Minyard Conner shared one of his stories with us. “When the children was growing up, we had three or four milking cows—seven head of cattle total, you know—and a mule, horses, and chickens—just name it. Lessie [his wife] always liked cats, and we had three or four cats here. Every time the boys would go to the barn to milk, the cats would follow ’em. The boys would go to milking, and the cats would get down and just open their mouths and let the milk spurt right in. I’ve also seen the boys just a-spurting milk at one another up there. You know how boys’ll do!”
Edith Cannon told us about her early married life. “Robert and I owned a cow. We put it up there in Bill O’Neal’s pasture. Robert built a barn to put the cow in. So we had plenty of milk and butter. We milked it every day. We had to milk the cow twice a day. We carried the milk and put it in a box down in the spring to keep it cold. Of course, the spring was nothing compared to the refrigerator that we have these days. We thought the milk was cold. The spring kept it good until supper. What we didn’t use for supper would go into our churn to make buttermilk and butter. Robert and I also sold milk to our neighbors who lived down in a little old house right below us. You know, people couldn’t go to the store and buy milk like everyone does today. We sold sweet milk for ten cents every half of a gallon. I believe it was a nickel per gallon of buttermilk.”
CHURNING BUTTER
Estelle Chastain has been churning butter for many years. “You have to have a churn jar and pour your [sweet] milk [whole milk—not sweetened condensed milk] in the churn jar, and if you want it to clabber [become thick by souring] pretty quick, you put a quart of buttermilk in—that’s in with your sweet milk. Whenever it clabbers, it will all be thick, and so you just turn the jar over enough to see if it turns loose of the jar. Then churn it.
“Whenever you take your butter out of it [the churn], whatever is left in the jar is your buttermilk. Then for the taking up of the butter, you have to wash your hands. You have to wash your hands in like laundry soap or that butter will stick all over your hands—we had some laundry soap like we have now when I was growing up. It wasn’t quite as strong as what we’ve got now. You have to wash your hands in that and rinse them in cold water.
“If you had something with holes in it that could dip a pretty good handful of the butter, you could use that and not have to put your hands in it. But I always fixed it like I’m a-telling you.
“You have to have a bowl to put your butter in. Then whenever you get all of the butter off of the milk, you have to put some cold water in with your butter and work it. And your butter will be kinda stiff where it will all be together.
“You’d have to churn it whenever it was cool if you could, because if it gets hot, the butter will get kinda thin. It won’t mold as good as it will if it’s cold. Some cows, their butter will really be firm, while others feels nearly like a grease is in it.
“[How much milk you use is] according to the churn jar that you got—what size it is. But I don’t like to churn any more than two gallons. That pretty well fills up a three-or four-gallon jar; it would be half full or more than that.
“[How much butter you get] is just according to what kind of a butter cow you’ve got. Sometimes off of two gallon of milk, you’ll get maybe four pints of butter. Because that is just half a pound—a pint is.
“[Churning] was always something you had to do at my home. Where I was raised, you had to put up with churning.
“The reason I’m not churning anymore is because people have given ’em [the cows] stuff [medicine] to purify the milk, and whenever they do that, why, then, whenever you churn it, you don’t make no butter. You can’t get it to churn; it won’t even clabber.”
CHICKENS
PLATE 133 Mary Cabe feeding her chickens
Claude Darnell said, “We had our own chickens to lay eggs. I tell you, I’ve carried eggs from right over here in the field there to Dillard for eight cents a dozen. I took ever’one I could carry and brought back as much stuff as you can buy for five dollars now.”
Claude’s wife, Edith, affirmed, “We bought a lot of stuff with eggs. We used eggs as money sometimes. Lots of time when we went to buy groceries, we would have nine and ten dozen.”
PLATE 134 “We were so busy trying to work and make enough food for our family to eat that we didn’t have much pleasure time.”—Diane Taylor
Edith Cannon disclosed, “We hardly ever ate the eggs [that the chickens laid]. We [used them] to buy our flour with.”
Diane Taylor discussed her childhood memories on her family farm. “I remember my father doing chores on the farm. We had a corncrib, and I would help him shell the corn for the chickens and feed the chickens. We were just a farm family. We had all kinds of animals that farms usually have. As a child, I worked on the farm. We were so busy trying to work and make enough food for our family to eat that we didn’t have much pleasure time.”
Mildred Story told us, “It is funny to me that chicken wings are a delicacy now. Back then, the guests [at my family’s hotel; Foxfire 10, pages 121–34] ate the thigh, the leg, and the white meat. [Our family] got what was left—now, it doesn’t mean we didn’t get some of the good pieces too—a lot of backs and wings! You couldn’t buy chickens already dressed. My daddy bought chickens by the coop. We killed the chickens, plucked them, and cut them up. Behind the hotel, there was a shack called the washplace where the washing was done with two great big iron pots. We had to kill the chickens by the washplace. I guess we did about twenty-five at a time.
“We couldn’t kill those chickens very long ahead, because they wouldn’t keep with no electric refrigerators or freezers. [Instead of] electrical refrigerators like we have now, we had a great big icebox.”
Minnie Dailey reminisced, “When I was a young’un at home, my mother had a bunch of chickens, and when they’d lay eggs, we’d take the eggs to the store and swap ’em for a nickel or dime’s worth of brown sugar, and we’d get a great big pile, more than you’d get now for a dollar, I guess.”
Rose Shirley Barnes stated, “When I lived with my mama and daddy, we never went to the store to get a chicken. We raised our own chickens. We went out, and we killed a chicken, and we brought it back in the house and fried it. If we needed money, we would catch some chickens and take them to the market and sell them and their eggs. For a dozen eggs, you could get enough groceries to last a while.”
Clive Smith revealed, “We had chickens [to have] our own eggs. We raised chickens for sale and for our own. The chickens ran free, and we’d sell eggs in the summer. When the chicks would set and raise young’uns, we sold fryers.”
PLATE 135 Mary Pitts
Mary Pitts, the former postmaster at the Rabun Gap post office, told us how people would order chickens through the mail. “People would order little baby chicks from different places, and they’d come through the mail by special delivery The rural carrier would have to take them directly to the owner. If the person who ordered them had a post office box, the postmaster would deliver them. There was a lot of that back then.”
Bernice Taylor recalled many stories about chickens on her family farm. “One time when we was real small, we had hens and one of them was a-settin’. Mama tried to break her and couldn’t get her broke [from settin’]. She called me and J. C. [her brother] in there and said, ‘Take them hens in yonder and go out there and dip them in water and see if you can get them to quit settin’.’
“Well, it was cold. We went out to t
he branch, and we had a big old tub that was sitting under a spout out there—that branch gets cold; in cold weather, it’s cold! We dipped them chickens in that water. We’d hold ’em down; we’d pull ’em up; we’d put ’em back down. We just kept doing that, and when we got done, that chicken couldn’t even stand up! We come back to the house, and we said, ‘Mama, this chicken is gonna die.’ She said, ‘What’d ya’ll do to that?’ We said, ‘We done what you told us to. We dipped her in the water.’ She said, ‘You dipped her more in the water than you were supposed to.’ She kept watching, and we just knew them chickens were going to die, but after they had time to thaw out, they kindly got over it, and they was all right.
“She deviled us as long as she lived about burying the chickens in water alive and just about letting them die! I imagine we was about maybe eight or ten years old. I can remember her telling everybody about that. She said, ‘Them old hens quit settin’ too. They didn’t set no more!’
“One time after we [she and her brothers and sisters] all got older, they [the family] had a hen that eat so much, and her craw was so full, she was gonna die if they didn’t do something. So Mama told them [her brothers and sisters] to catch that hen and bring her there, and one of them come and hold her, and she was gonna operate on her. She was gonna cut that craw open and get that out of there. When she cut it open and got it out down at the bottom—where it wasn’t supposed to have been—they was a cocklebur that had crawled in there. It had already sprouted, fixin’ to grow. She got that out, sewed the old hen back up with black thread, and turned her loose. She just went along like nothing had happened, said in a few days she was all right, just eating and doing fine.
“I guess we had twenty-five or thirty, maybe forty [chickens] running around on the place—not the same age, [and] different sizes. We used them for eggs, and if we took a notion to have chicken for dinner, we’d kill one and have it.
Foxfire 11: Wild Plant Uses, Gardening, Wit, Wisdom, Recipes, Beekeeping, Toolmaking, Fishing, and More Affairs of Plain Living Page 26