MY MEMORIES

Chapter 4

The Way Things Were

After the fun of the picnic there was plenty of hard work waiting at home. Women were busy canning fruits and vegetables to feed their families during the coming winter; the men with haying, threshing grain, picking corn, fall plowing and cutting firewood. Hay was stored in barn lofts or stacked in the field. Grain harvest was a two-fold process. The grain was cut and bound in bundles by a horse drawn machine aptly called a binder. Five or six bundles were set on end leaning against each other in shocks that I thought looked like little teepees. Another bundle was placed on top for a protecting cap. Later, after the grain had cured in the shock, the men followed the threshing machine from farm to farm. The machine was powered by a steam engine, separated the grain from the straw. The farmers hauled the bundles to the thresher, stacked the straw and hauled the grain to granaries. Threshing was a hot and dusty job.

Women saved choice food and started cooking for the threshing crew before daylight and threshers devoured an amazing amount of food. Neighbor women brought food or helped in the kitchen. The women not only served the noon meal but also took mid-morning and afternoon refreshments to the field.

Occasionally the crew would finish at one farm and move just before mealtime and the already prepared food had to be taken to the next farm. It is hard to imagine the panic as these ladies who prided themselves on their bountiful harvest table had this situation forced upon them.

Housewives were happy to have the new, clean straw to refill their straw ticks and to put under their woven rag rugs. The woven strips of the rugs were taken apart, washed, sown back together and stretched over the new straw. The strips were about three feet wide and I thought they were beautiful. There were stripes of so many colors they reminded me of stick candy. It was hard to believe they had been made from rags torn from old garments, sheets or most anything available. All the material did need to be about the same thickness.

Straw ticks were bed size bags made of blue and white striped material called ticking. It was a strong material somewhat like denim. The bags were filled with straw and put under the feather bed to make the bedsprings less noticeable.

Corn shucking time was a nice time of year. The weather was colder but I could still play outside. The men picked the corn by hand freeing the ear from the shuck and tossing it into a wagon. When the wagon was full it was taken to the barn or corncrib to be unloaded with a shovel. There was a competitive spirit about corn shucking that made hard work almost fun. The goal was to see who could shuck a wagon-load of corn the fastest. The men bragged about their horses. A good team would respond to their owner's voice and move the wagon along the row of corn as needed without interrupting the picking. Good dogs and good horses were very important to those men.

Trees for firewood were cut down a year ahead to dry. One could start a fire quickly with a little dry kindling or corncobs soaked in kerosene and later add green wood to hold a fire. A quick fire was indeed a blessing when folks had been away from home during cold weather and had to stay bundled up until the stove got hot.

Trees were cut with axes and two-man crosscut saws. The trunk and large limbs were trimmed and cut into logs of a manageable length. Any log too large for stove-wood was split with wedges and mauls. It could then be cut into stove-wood lengths by hand with a buck saw but, as a rule, neighbors helped each other as a gasoline powered buzz saw serviced the neighborhood. It looked so dangerous I was glad when it was over. Several men would hold the log up horizontally and the man at the head of the line would position it at the saw. One man on the other side of the saw blade would catch the stove length of wood and toss it to one side. This was known as off-bearing.

Women certainly did their share of hard work. They heated wash water in a large iron kettle over a fire in the yard or in a wash boiler on the wood burning cook stove and scrubbed the clothes on a washboard. They made laundry soap from lye, water and old meat fat and grease that had been saved for that purpose. White clothes were boiled to keep them white. Bluing in a small white bag was swished through the rinse water for the white clothes. I loved to smell the white clothes boiling because it made the house smell like it did when my mother made hominy. The clothes were washed, rinsed and wrung by hand and hung on the line to dry. If there were too many for the clothesline we hung them on the fence. I liked that because I could help. Doing the laundry was a full day's work and ironing was another long day.

Pillowcases and garments to be ironed were starched with starch made from flour and water cooked until it was thick and then mixed in the rinse water. Starched clothes were "sprinkled down" and would sour if left over night. Irons were heated on the cook stove and it was hard to keep the heat just right. Hot irons were run over waxed paper to slick them up a bit and to see if they were going to scorch the clothes.

Women also took care of the chickens, helped with the milking, did the gardening, made and mended clothing and made quilts and comforters. They saved the soft chicken and goose down to make feather beds and pillows and it took a lot of feathers and down. Feather beds and pillows were wonderful wedding gifts because young couples starting housekeeping had not had time to save the needed feathers and down.

Women also canned fruit and vegetables; made pickles and relishes, mince meat and sauerkraut.. They dried corn, peaches and apples on a white cloth spread on a tin roof in the sun. The drying fruit would be taken in at night so it wouldn't get damp and there was always a worry about rain when away from home. Daddy made us some screens to lay over the food we were drying. It kept the flies away.

My grandma Jones taught me to make corn pone from cornmeal, a little salt and boiling water stirred together. When cool enough to handle it was made into pones about the size of a hand. My grandma said to leave three fingerprints on them. The bread was then fried in bacon grease. A variation was adding cracklings to the mixture to make "cracklin' bread," {cornbread muffins with no other shortening.) Lard was rendered from pork fat cut into small pieces and cooked in a big, black iron kettle over a fire in the yard. After the cooking process the pieces of meat were tiny crisp bits called cracklings and were quite tasty.

We bought flour in fifty pound sacks and cornmeal in twenty-five pound bags. The white flour sacks were used for dish towels, pillowcases, to set quilt blocks together and many other things. Nothing was wasted.

Depending on the supply of meal or flour we regularly had three kinds of bread. Biscuits for breakfast, light bread for dinner at noon and cornbread for supper. Leftover biscuits were used in bread pudding. I used to tease my folks by telling them that I was eleven years old before I found out everyone didn't have cornbread and milk for supper. In the winter it might be potato soup and cornbread. I loved it! That is unless the milk got awfully strong tasting for a time before our cow freshened, (had her calf). We celebrated when we could use the milk again. Later, we got three cows so we didn't have that problem. Another time that it was hard to enjoy the milk was in the spring when the wild onions were about the first green things growing in the pasture. Mama solved that problem by serving onions at the table. We were unable to taste the onion in the milk.

I liked sandwiches made with biscuits better than those made with light bread. The light bread was very good the first day but soon got stale. Most of our sandwiches were made with home cured meat. I liked fried egg and mustard sandwiches and sandwiches made with salt-pork side meat, mustard and onion. I loved saltine crackers with butter, too. I snacked on Mama's cookies and extra pie crust baked like little crackers with cinnamon and sugar on them. I also liked to "piece" on raw oatmeal. Another treat mama would make me was a cold biscuit split open and sugared with cream (or sometimes water) dribbled over it but just barely dampened so I could hold it in my hand.

Light bread was made with a starter that was a precious commodity. Some women had kept their starter for twenty years. If a starter was lost, (the yeast had died,) some nice lady would share a starter or a new starter could be made by mixing flour, warm water and sugar and setting the mixture in a warm place covered with a cloth, preferably a double layer of cheesecloth. After several days, when it had picked up enough wild yeast to make a foaming mixture, it could be used for a starter. Sometimes it was a good starter and sometimes it wasn't.

White bread was started the night before it was to be baked. A mixture of flour, sugar, warm water and starter was left overnight in a warm place. The next morning a new starter was taken from the mixture and set aside for future use. The other ingredients, more flour, sugar, a little lard, salt and water were added to form dough. The dough was turned out on a breadboard and kneaded for several minutes before allowing it to raise. Once it had risen to double its size it was punched down and allowed to raise again. After the second raising the dough was again worked down and shaped into loaves to raise one more time before baking. One never knew for sure how fast a starter would work. To keep extra starter Mama mixed it with cornmeal and spread it on waxed paper in strips to dry. It was unpredictable when first used again but would eventually be a good starter.

Mama made biscuits in a big wooden bread bowl. She put more than enough flour in the bowl and pushed out a "well" in the middle of the flour but always leaving plenty of flour in the bottom. Milk, baking power, soda, salt and lard were put in the well in the flour and Mama worked flour into the other ingredients with her bare hands until there was thick dough. She lifted the dough from the bowl, rolled it out, cut it with a biscuit cutter and baked the biscuits. When starting to bake again the flour had to be sifted to remove any dried remains of the last batch of biscuits. A good thing about the old cook stoves was that the oven was always hot. I have never tasted biscuits and cornbread as good as that mama baked in the old cook stove.

Quick bread was made with clabbered milk and leavened with baking soda. It had a very pleasing flavor but too much soda turned it yellow and gave it a bite. Today I sour my milk for cornbread with a little vinegar or lemon juice but in those days having soured milk was no problem as there was no refrigeration except a cool cellar.

People with cellars, my cousins in Northern Missouri called them caves, were considered fortunate. These cellars were cement and rock structures partially underground. People with springs and especially spring houses were even more fortunate and somewhat envied. Others suspended a bucket of food in a dug well to keep it cool.

The temperature in a cellar was more or less constant year around, cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Milk and cream stayed sweet longer if kept in a cellar and vegetables and fruit would keep well into the winter. Potatoes stored in a cellar were usable all winter and were used for seed potatoes in the spring. We occasionally had to break off the sprouts. Toward spring we would let potatoes sprout so we would have good "eyes" to plant. Apples and turnips were buried on beds of straw in holes dug in the ground. By the middle of winter the apples might be somewhat shriveled and taste a little musty. It was important to keep these things edible because they would the only fresh food we would have until another crop. We had dried corn and fruit. Canned foods were mostly fruit, fruit products, pickles and kraut. Our cellar was very important as a place to keep food both summer and winter and as a place of refuge for mama when a storm threatened.

With an abundance of fresh produce available the year around in today's stores one cannot appreciate how truly wonderful the first lettuce, radishes and green onions from the spring garden tasted. Wild onions were one of the first greens available in the spring. Mama wilted them like lettuce or if there wasn't enough she would scramble eggs and wild onions together. Next were wild mushrooms. Mama fried the mushrooms or, when there were just a few, made mushroom soup. Wild greens came on next. Grandmother Jones knew all that were safe to use. I was very young when she taught me how to recognize some of them; three or four kinds of dock, dandelion, thistle, cow glory, lamb's quarter and polk. Lamb's quarter is very good wilted.

Soured milk was used in many ways. The solid clabber was cut into small squares and heated on the cooler part of the stove top to make clabber cheese, (cottage cheese.) After it was heated and the whey separated from the curd it was poured into a clean, cloth sugar sack and hung on the clothesline to drain. After draining the cheese was put in a serving dish and sweet cream, salt and pepper added. We ate lots of dried beans, cottage cheese and fried potatoes. Another staple was cornmeal mush that is somewhat like hominy grits. It was eaten with butter and milk or with milk and sugar. I much preferred butter, pepper and milk. Left over mush was sliced and fried. Once in awhile Mama would fry a batch of mush with a can of salmon added. It was very good. Pancakes or flapjacks were another quick meal. Pancakes were sometimes made with bread starter to keep the starter fresh. If we didn't have molasses Mama made sugar syrup for the pancakes.

Churning butter was sometimes an easy chore and sometimes it took a long time for the butter to form. The thick sour cream was "skimmed" after it had risen to the top of the stone crocks of milk. We had a glass Daisy Churn with a paddle turned by a crank. This was pretty modern for that time. I always wanted Mama to put some cream in a quart jar and let me shake it to churn butter. After a great deal of churning the butter began to separate from the whey and gather together. When it could be handled it was put in a large bowl and covered several times with cold water. The remaining whey was worked out of the butter with a small wooden paddle. The butter was salted and shaped in a mold with a pineapple design in the bottom of the mold. In hot weather butter turned rancid in a few days and churning had to be done often. Cakes and cookies baked with butter that was beginning to get "old" had a very special flavor. Honestly, they were very good.

Not many country people would eat creamery butter because of the tales that were told about how the cream was taken care of after it was sold. I've smelled some pretty rank cream that was brought in to be sold.

While I am on this subject I need to add this story. There was a small country store near us that bought eggs and cream. The folks at the store had a little girl. She was very bright and talkative. She told my mama that she was going to get a d-o-l-l and i-r-o-n for Christmas. She said she didn't know what that was but she heard her mother tell someone. She told Mama there was a woman in the store that week that said she wasn't very p-r-e-t-t-y but she sure was s-m-a-r-t. Then she whispered, "I'll get in trouble if my daddy knows I told this but I have to tell someone. I was scared to death this week. My little kitty nearly died. Daddy was testing cream and it fell into the open cream bucket. He pulled it out and took his finger and wiped the cream off into the bucket and told me if I told I would get a whipping." Mama was a little upset but she didn't tell.

Later we got a cream separator. It had a tall base and a large metal bowl at the top to pour the milk in and was driven by a large crank. Cream and skim milk called blue john poured from spouts into containers. Talk about low fat--we never drank much of the blue john but some people did. My Grandmother Jones thought children should drink the separated milk until one of her grandsons started to cry and when she ask him what was wrong he said, "My water has a little milk spilled in it." We never had to drink blue john again. Our skim milk went in the slop bucket along with dishwater and scraps and was used in hog mash. Hogs were great garbage disposals. The separator no doubt recovered much more cream than hand skimming but hand skimmed milk tasted good and was much to be preferred. When it was my lot to wash the separator I hated that machine. Homemade soap made the water slick and slimy. Washing the separator was a job to be avoided if possible.