Roger's Reflections
Down Home Cookin’
We ate heartily on the farm--a big breakfast, a big dinner at noon and a big supper in the evening. We worked hard, so we worked off those high calorie meals with a lot more physical exertion than most people get today.
Breakfast came about an hour after we got up (in the summer we got up at about four, but a little later during the rest of the year)--and during that hour we had dressed, gone out to do such everyday morning chores as feed and milk five cows, feed and water several pens of pigs, feed the horses, etc. By the time we came in for breakfast we were hungry. And, boy, did we eat! A typical breakfast might consist of a dish of hot oatmeal (we called it “rolled oats”) with thick cream, made-from-scratch buttermilk biscuits loaded with butter and honey, a fried pork chop and your fill from a platter of fried eggs (fried in bacon grease). We really dug in and enjoyed it--in a way that unfortunately is no longer possible in today’s calorie-counting world.
Other breakfast favorites on the farm in those days included “fried bread,” (now more delicately referred to as French toast), plenty of home-cured bacon and ham, homemade sausage, fried mush and a hot cereal Dad made from cleaning and grinding wheat we had grown. Another favorite was oven toast. Since we didn’t have electricity there was no such thing as an electric toaster for us--so we made toast in the oven--and it was delicious. You butter several slices of bread and put them on the oven racks until they are golden brown. M-m-m-m! The only problem was that some of the butter tended to drip down and start smoking on the bottom of the oven. We all loved the oven toast and never really worried too much about the smoky oven--that’s just the price you had to pay for such wonderful toast!
At noontime we ate a big dinner, too. Fried chicken was a favorite--and we cooked it in lard or bacon grease. The skillet was at least a quarter full of grease, so it was almost like deep-frying the chicken. M-m-m good. The first fried chicken of the year--usually in late July--was a very special occasion for us, and we always enjoyed fried chicken every three or four days after that for several weeks. Since we never bought any “store-bought,” meat, other than occasionally hot dogs, and since we had no refrigeration, the first fried chicken would be the first fresh meat we had had for several months. In addition to the fried chicken we might have mashed potatoes and gravy (we all loved gravy), green beans and a really big platter of sliced tomatoes. Everyone had a glass of fresh milk and there was a three-quart pitcher on the table for refills--which sometimes had to be refilled itself. And there might well be a freshly baked apple pie for dessert. Other popular pies included peach, raspberry, blackberry, rhubarb, rhubarb-mulberry, mincemeat, lemon, chocolate and custard. My, how I loved those pies!
One of my favorite dishes--to this day--is ham and thin gravy. This is a pretty simple dish. You simply fry a slice of ham in a skillet and then pour in quite a bit of milk to make a very thin gravy from the ham fat. You put a couple of slices of bread on your plate along with a couple of pieces of ham and then saturate the plate with loads of thin gravy. Wow! This is really good eating. My wife, Audrey, who was raised in the city and thus deprived of country eating pleasures, says the bread gets “slippery’ and she doesn’t care for it, but I still think this is a great meal.
When we had finished the evening chores--milking, feeding livestock, gathering eggs and things like that--we would have a big supper, too. In the fall and winter we ate lots of soup. Vegetable soup, tomato soup, potato soup--they were all delicious. When I was not quite two years old and couldn’t yet talk plain, they tell me I would exclaim, “Hoop a hupper!,” showing how pleased I was that we were going to have “soup for supper.” After soup might come fried pork liver, smothered onions, fried apples and stewed tomatoes. And this might be followed by a Devil’s Food cake--again with a couple of glasses of fresh milk.