Homestead food memories

Last week I mentioned the vintage soap dish reminded me of the kitchen in our Atlanta house on Macon Drive. A lot of food came out of that kitchen, with both Mama and Daddy cooking. Seven people lived there, two adults and five children. In addition, my uncle Clark Lankford lived with us for a while, although I don’t remember for how long. I’m sure money was tight and Mama had to work hard to stretch the food budget. But we made do and never went without.

Our kitchen was small and narrow and only had a little counter space. It had built-in shelves on one end to hold pots and pan. Underneath the shelves was a chute that went to the laundry room in the basement, directly below the kitchen. You could easily get your dirty clothes to the laundry room but you had to carry them up the stairs to put them away. For a while, we had a Hoosier cabinet that contained a flour-bin with a sifter. Mama said she did in fact store flour in the bin and just had to walk over and sift flour into a bowl when baking. Today the cabinet would be considered vintage. The photo above is Daddy cooking in the Macon Drive kitchen. It doesn’t show much of the kitchen but you can see how narrow it was, as well as the shelves I mentioned.

Of course, growing up in the south, biscuits was our bread of choice for many meals, definitely for breakfast and often for dinner. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Mama make canned biscuits. I remember sitting on the countertop watching the master perform her magic with self-rising flour, Crisco, and buttermilk. As many times as I did that though, I still can’t make biscuits. You would think I could whip up a pan myself, but that was not meant to be, and that’s probably a good thing. To go along with all those biscuits, we usually had a hearty breakfast that included some form of meat—bacon, sausage, streak-o-lean, ham, or pork chops. Mama needed to cook a meat so she had grease to make gravy for the biscuits. For a sweet treat, we mixed sorghum syrup with softened margarine (I don’t remember ever having actual butter), and spreading that on a biscuit. We ate lots of eggs—fried, scrambled, or poached. Sometimes Mama even made scrambled eggs and brains (yuk!). Grits was a staple but occasionally we had rice, probably leftover from dinner the night before. And of course, we sometimes had French toast or pancakes. I remember spreading jelly on my pancakes instead of syrup, something I’m not the least bit interested in doing today.

Davis Grocery from our front yard

When I think of lunch from that time in my life, I think about egg salad or pineapple sandwiches. I’ve previously written about Mama buying bologna from Davis Grocery next door but I don’t remember that at all. I also don’t remember buying lunch at school. I only remember carrying my egg salad sandwich or a crushed pineapple and cream cheese sandwich, always on Colonial bread, in a brown paper lunch bag along with a Moon pie for dessert. Sometimes at home we had a sliced pineapple and mayonnaise sandwich, or even just a mayonnaise sandwich. On Sunday, we ate our big meal mid-day, after church.

Dinners included your typical southern fare—chicken, pork chops, roast beef, spaghetti, cubed steak, porcupines (meatballs with rice in a tomato sauce), pork and sauerkraut, liver and onions (yuk!), and ham. Mama bought whole chickens and cut them up herself. You wouldn’t know which piece you were eating if I attempted that! When Mama worked the late shift, she’d often start dinner before leaving and left it up to us girls to finish. Mama said she used to buy one box of frozen shrimp and everyone got one to two pieces each. I don’t eat seafood so she cooked a pork chop for me. On weekends, Daddy sometimes cooked. I remember him cooking things like spaghetti, baked beans, curried chicken, BBQ ribs, and deer meat. I especially remember him cooking a cow tongue on several occasions. He put the tongue in a Dutch oven and filled it with water. It didn’t take much water because the tongue was huge. At least it was to my younger self. I probably ate a pork chop those nights as well. If we didn’t have biscuits with dinner, we had cornbread.

I remember the vegetables more than I remember the meats. Daddy always had a large garden in the backyard and what he didn’t grow, he or Mama went to the Atlanta State Farmers Market in Forest Park and brought home bushel bags full of vegetables. We’d sit on the back porch and shell peas, snap beans, and shuck corn till the cows came home. We had pole beans, butter beans, crowder peas, and purple hull peas. Uncle Clark helped us on Sundays. One time my brother stuck one of the peas up his nose. That was probably after he tried to slide through the laundry chute and got stuck. The corn was usually homemade creamed corn, something I still make. One of my favorite vegetables was fried okra. If I had to pick a last meal, it would probably consist of fried okra, creamed corn, and crowder peas, along with one of Mama’s biscuits. Mama made a lot of macaroni and cheese, but never out of a box. She once told me she made it because it was cheap and went a long way for our large family but everybody loved it and it became a staple. Cooked cabbage, coleslaw, squash, rice, white potatoes, and sweet potatoes were often on the menu. To this day, if I eat white rice as a side dish, it’s got to have butter and sugar on it. Mama made sure we ate good in the winter months as well. The chest freezer was filled with beans, peas, corn, okra, squash, and fruits. Mason jars filled with tomatoes, soup mix, pickled peaches, and jellies lined the shelves in the dirt side of our basement. My great-grandfather (James Stewart Shields or Pappy to the great-grandchildren) gave Mama several red plum trees that Daddy planted along the backyard fence. We always had good homemade plum jelly for our biscuits. An apple tree gave us apple jelly too. We had two cherry trees but they never produced enough to do anything with. Mama said we had a grapevine in the backyard when they moved to the house but Daddy took it down because of bees. And we had a pear tree, but it didn’t produce much fruit either. Luckily, Mama bought pears from the farmers market and then made pear preserves. Have you ever had pear preserves? They’re delicious! Another good thing to put on biscuits. 

And let’s not forget about sweets. Ours was not a cookie baking household. Instead, Mama made cakes, cobblers, and pies. Not one of my favorites, but everyone else loved her coconut cake with seven-minute frosting, cooked over a double boiler. She always used frozen coconut vs. the bagged variety. I remember having pound cake too. For a treat, Mama added cornstarch and red food coloring to a can of fruit cocktail which she heated until the sauce thickened. Once it cooled, we’d spoon the mixture over pound cake. We loved that. My favorite was, and still is, a pineapple upside down cake. Back then, it was always round, cooked in a cast iron skillet. And of course, carrot cake at Christmastime. Cobblers were a favorite—peach, strawberry, blackberry—whatever fruit was in season or she had stored in the freezer. I still love her apple pie. One of our favorites was fried peach pies Mama made using dried peaches. She added a little water to the peaches, cooked them down, and added a little sugar. While that cooked, she made a pie crust that she rolled out and then cut out circles of dough using a cereal bowl turned upside down. Fry that baby up, then while it’s still hot, rub it with a stick of butter and sprinkle cinnamon sugar over the top. Delicious! This was one treat that Mama and I made together when she’d visit me in Virginia years later. I was in charge of the butter and cinnamon sugar and she did the rest. I always remember divinity at Christmas. We made homemade ice cream in the summer and all had to take a turn at cranking the freezer filled with ice and rock salt. For a quick snack, Mama spread peanut butter over soda crackers, topped them with a marshmallow, and then toasted them in the oven until the marshmallow was golden brown. A great, cheap, sweet treat that I still make today.

Marshmallow, peanut butter on soda cracker treats

Such good memories!

References

• Hoosier cabinet; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoosier_cabinet.  
• Cake photo by Kathy Osborne.