* Submitted by Agele Foust

We had a large family and Mama tried to get by on $1 a day and so a garden was a must for us. She canned plenty of green beans and tomatoes and blackberries and apples and 3 or 4 bushels of peaches each year. of course we had to spend a few extra dollars at the commissary at least once a month to buy flour and cornmeal. Dad bought extra sugar at canning time at St. Charles.
Dad loved to go over on Stone Creek to the stir-offs and he kept us in brown sugar for we refused to eat molasses! They made the brown sugar by continuing to boil the molasses until it was just right to set for sugar! At Bonny Blue, hogs were not allowed and eventually neither were chickens as they attracted big rats. A few did keep cows, but mostly we depended on canned, condensed Pet milk for our milk supply.
On Sundays we dined sumptuously on stewing beef made into a good beef stew and usually had banana pudding for dessert or one of Mama's apple stack cakes. Cowboy Barker kept the women folk supplied with peaches, pears and apples for canning and I suppose Daddy purchased the berries he made us think he picked from the Stone creek peddlers. Green beans, Chow, Chow, tomatoes, roasting ears and wilted lettuce and green onions and cornbread fed us well during the season they were fresh from the garden, but in winter time we had pinto beans and fried potatoes daily for the most part and of course, cornbread and onions. Pinto beans were cooked with salt pork and sometimes we actually had white northern beans instead. Occasionally Mama would get a roll of chili and make chili beans but hey, that was nearly another dollar right there, so mostly we ate 'em plain! And you haven't lived until you've eaten fried apple pies and sweetened tomato dumplings and on one occasion we lived it up with some vinegar dumplings...well we did not have an egg for a one-egg cake and no canned apples or berries and shucks we wanted something sweet that nite!!
Dad's garden always began with a lettuce bed which got covered with netting and then several rows of green onions and a couple hilled up rows of radishes and red beets. Then came the setting out of cabbage plants and then later on green beans were put in after about 5 rows of potatoes had been planted and were up about 6 inches high. We never planted corn as Dad brought corn home by the burlap sackfuls from the farmers down around Rose Hill and Ewing who owed him favors for driving them to elections and such. He hunted rabbits on their land. We were never allowed to skin them and he wore rubber gloves to skin them and was very careful with the discards...these went down the toilet hole!! I have never tasted cabbage as good as the green cabbage Mama steam-fried!!


*Submitted by K. Carson Kirk
We had a cow and therefore milk and butter was there for the family when the cow was fresh as we called it. But there was a period out of the year when she was dry, 'another term that we used when she was not giving milk' no matter how hard you pulled or squeezed her tits nary a drop would hit the milk bucket. But in those days you always had a neighbor that had a cow or in some cases cow's. And you could always get milk and butter some where.
Did you ever eat cornbread and milk? Or better yet, cornbread and butter milk. How about hot cornbread right from the oven, and put a big hunk of butter on a piece of it? 'nothing better' Or cornbread with green onions from the garden?
I guess by now you must know that we had cornbread every day. pinto beans, chow chow, Cucumbers. canned tomatoes, all of that went good with pinto beans, and there was always cornbread left over to crumble up in a glass of milk, or in our case a baking powder can.
Then there was biscuits without fail every morning cut out with a Clabber Girl baking powder can. Gravy, ham gravy, bacon gravy, fat back gravy, as long as the meat lasted from when we had butchered hog's, or some years just one hog. After the meat was used up and the cow went dry, we had water gravy. Our sweets were apple butter, canned apples, black berries, black berry jelly, etc.
As to your question about knives, forks and spoons. As I recall we ate mostly with spoons. And anything breakable didn't last long among our large family.
Well I could go on and on, but I think you must have a pretty good idea of what we ate at my house when we were growing up. Oh yes I forgot to mention potatoes. We had them fried in lots of lard, baked, cooked, mashed, and believe it or not I can remember grabbing a potato, peeling it and eating it raw. With a little salt, it's not bad at all. And how about pouring hot bacon grease over fresh picked leaf lettuce from the garden. You notice everything had lots of grease added.
There is one other thing that I want to mention. Once in a while one or more of the children would go to the store about a half mile down the road to get a few things. If we got a loaf of bread, half of it was ate up before we got home with it. Heck for a long time there, I thought it was Cake.
Don't know if I will be able to end this, I'm beginning to wonder. Want to mention Possum, or Opossum as Cityfied folks call them. We ate them. Yeah, we ate them! They were greasy, but good. I may be the only one in my family to admit it. Of course some of the younger ones can't remember the possum feasts. In my days growing up in Lee County, I bet that two thirds of the people ate possum at one time. And on the other hand I bet that two thirds of that two thirds will not admit it. Shucks! I wouldn't mind having a possum dinner right now. I see one around the house here every day or so. I might just catch him and fatten him up for a few days. Anybody out there want to come and join me for a possum dinner?


*Submitted by Marie Miller
Thanks Carson for the story, it brought back so many memories of my childhood! No, I won't join you in a possum dinner because I came home from school one day, looked in the oven and there, I thought, was a new baby in a big pan with sweet potatoes all around it! I eat rabbit, my favorite, Daddy would come home with a bushel basket and all of us kids would grab a knife and go in the back yard and start skinning and gutting them! I can still remember that terrible smell. They were so good when Mama fried them! I also eat squirrel, didn't like it much. My daughter-in-law's dad who moved from KY to Morristown, TN, had a squirrel dinner every year, had a special recipe with gravy, he also brought the squirrel here one year and fixed his big squirrel dinner here on the beach! It was pretty good. We also killed hogs every year, since there was so many of us kids, Daddy always killed five or six. I always looked forward to the tenderloin supper, do you remember that? Then the lard making, sausage canning, the little things that they put in corn bread, I didn't like them. My sister Myrna, didn't like biscuits and had a hard time eating because she loved toast. She always said that as soon as she left home that would be the first thing that she would eat every day! Since I was the oldest, I always had to help with all that kitchen work, canning, peeling, drying beans, you remember all that.


Note from Norma:
Carson, I'm a few years younger than you so by the time I came along, I could eat my cornbread and milk out of a jelly jar.