“When growing up we, had to eat what was put on the table, or go without. So we ate what was put or what we put on our plates to eat. And they say don’t get more than your eyes will fill the stomach. Or your eyes were bigger than your stomach.
We would have fried rabbit for breakfast with eggs gravy and biscuits if we didn’t have bacon or sausage or jowl bacon or ham as meat. Sometimes bologna for breakfast as the meat who doesn’t love a fried bologna sandwiches with the toppings. Mustard or mayonnaise or miracle whip with onion and tomatoes or just with a fried egg and cheese.
I was raised on all game from the wildlife forest. If it be deer meat squirrel meat rabbit, cow turkey, chicken hogs, doves. Also fish from the lakes and the rivers. Bass was our family favorite and flathead catfish and bluegills and trout and frog legs.
I can remember my parents and grandparents doing the butter and jelly and or honey mixed together to put on a biscuit to eat just like how Tipper does.
We would make homemade popcorn balls out of sorghum molasses in the fall. We would have Matt’s favorite tomato sandwiches with mayonnaise to get as a dinner or supper. We would also put gravy over sliced tomatoes to for breakfast if we didn’t have meat as well to tomato substituted for the missing meat.
My parents ate buttermilk or milk with crumbled cornbread as I did to at times I can’t do milk at all makes me deathly ill.
We also ate soup beans with fried potatoes with onions and collards greens and macaroni and tomato juice and salmon patties at least once a week. My mom always made food that would last a couple days for leftovers like soup beans.
I would eat my dads hunting pack that would have sardines in it or Vienna sausages or beany weeny’s out of the can with saltines crackers and pickled bologna with crackers and the sardines with crackers and mustard. Yuck I wouldn’t eat sardines unless I had to now lol but I sure loved it when I was little.
We have a Pepsi in the glass bottles with peanuts as a treat. We helped our parents to can all our garden vegetables and fruits for the winter and put them away for winter months to come.
I always put myself as if I’m right there in the Pressley family because it is exactly like how my family came up with the fixings always nothing different even the recipes are the same.
From my Ky through the hills to NC Tipper your Appalachian ways are true to how our Ky Appalachian ways were with my grandparents ways of the Eastern Ky. You have brought back so many memories for me and my grandparents how how I miss them and your sweet momma aka granny it’s almost like a twin family blended in my eyes of the ways of the good ole Appalachian traits.
I have many many more I could add but as for me mine are not much different than Tipper’s. When I purchased the new cookbook I was in awe with my Melma’s recipes and yours they’re identical it must be the Appalachian way or recipes shared throughout the hills of the great Appalachia.
—Evelyn Wilder – August 2023
I really enjoyed Evelyn’s comment when she left it back at the beginning of August. For one thing it immediately made me feel starved to death when I read about all that good eating 🙂
Jim and I have been so pleased with the reception our cookbook has received from folks. People who aren’t even from the region have told us how much they’ve enjoyed the recipes, history, and photos. It is especially rewarding when someone like Evelyn tells us the cookbook hit the mark—meaning in their eyes it is a good representation of the foodways of Appalachia.
If you haven’t picked up a copy of our cookbook, you can find one here.
Last night’s video: The Last Beans of the Summer, Matt’s Passion, & Fighting Allergies.
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Those biscuits look delicious. There’s nothing like good ole right down country food. I know alot of it might not be good for ya but it brings a smile on your face. I was raised on food like Evelyn was talking about and still eat most of it.(so good)
I sure had all those good foods she mentioned. Still eaten alot of them now. I don’t care what anyone says, there’s no better food, than right down ole country food. I know alot of its not good for ya but it makes a body smile and happy.
The best meals are those in the summer. Up here in the north (Michigan) I only get fresh vegetables from the local farmers’ markets for a very few weeks in the summer. I can’t grow my own because we’re back in the woods where there isn’t enough sun. I sure do love those summer meals, though, with fresh corn, tomatoes, pole beans, squash, and cornbread. I don’t care if there’s meat or not. Funny thing, when I was little growing up in the south, I absolutely hated buttermilk. I loved to cook with it, but couldn’t get a glass-full near my nose. Nowadays, I just love it. It’s like a hug for my tummy. Nothing like a meal of fresh vegetables and a big glass of cold buttermilk.
I still eat molasses with butter (mashed with the back of the fork tines) on biscuits… mama says you can’t have “MO-lasses” until you have “lasses”. : )
i can remember my grandmother serving black eye peas with preserved stewed tomatoes and raw onion on top…
<3 appalachia. My mother's family hails from Waynesville/Crabtree area for over 200 yrs.
Enjoyed reading Evelyn’s list of “good eatin”! As a native Kentuckian, we as a family are pretty much everything on here list. We rarely had salmon Pattie’s; but, the rest of the fare was pretty much right on. In particular, our spring was located in a little holler below the house; my grandfather always took a gun with him when he went down to the spring to get the milk and water. Many times he killed a squirrel or two • if it was a young squirrel, we had him for breakfast; an older squirrel was stewed for dinner. Not mentioned was something we had sometimes with biscuits, gravey, and fried taters was chicken; and occasionally we would have fried fish. Both were a treat; also missing was head cheese or souse. I still enjoy fried bologna on occasion- we called it, “Wayne Co roundsteak”. Thanks for the trip down memory lane; stirred a passel of good memories of “eatin’ in the holler”!
I just very recently realized we two do not have “home friends” who visit us here. Nor are we home friends to any real people ourselves. And that relates to good eating in that we don’t have shared meals except in the church fellowship hall. Good company makes good food even better. I’m sure your and Jim’s cookbook has, is now and will in future make a fine contribution to that very experience around many table for years and years to come. And if I’m any judge, that delights you.
I didn’t grow up in Appalachia, but today’s post reminded me of my own upbringing. My dad used to comment on our eyes being bigger than our stomachs. He always told us, “Take what you want, but eat what you take.” When we sat down to supper, and Dad said “Who set this table?” We’d laugh, because that meant someone forgot to put a plate of bread on the table. The table wasn’t set properly if there wasn’t bread and butter on the table. He’s been gone since 1991. I’d give anything to hear him say those things again.
I always enjoy all of your videos on cooking and food ways of Appalachia. When I was a kid, we ate lots suppers of pinto beans with cornbread and onion slices or fried potatoes with biscuits and gravy. Some years we raised a calf or a hog or chickens and butchered them. Mom and dad also canned deer meat when dad got one. She made the best fried squirrel and squirrel gravy over mashed potatoes. I have to admit I cannot do squirrel anymore. It makes me feel bad, because as a young kid I loved it. I think it may be because I have to cook it now. My mom admitted that she never ate it either, but she sure made delicious meals for us and we all enjoyed it. She canned green beans and tomatoes and peppers and pickles. She froze lots of corn. We gathered apples and walnuts for winter. We always had plenty of good food to eat. We also had a milk cow for many years and that gave us plenty of milk and butter and ice cream. Now I am hungry! Those were the days!
Evelyn wrote a very delicious post! Growing up in a different time and place than she did, my childhood food memories consists of different foods, but the same ideas. There were seven of us scrunched together around our kitchen table for all meals, except Sundays when we ate in the dining room at the bigger table. On Sundays, we passed the serving bowls around the table, and we were told not to take more than we could eat (if you couldn’t eat all you took, we were told our eyes were bigger than our stomachs, too!). During the rest of the week, my Mom plated our food from the pans on the stove, and then handed them to my Dad who passed them to each of us. We always had to ask for seconds with “please” and “thank you”, and we always had to ask to be excused from the table. These manners were practiced at whichever table we were eating at – the kitchen, the dining room, a friend’s house, a church dinner, etc.. If the adults were talking, us kids had to sit quietly and wait to ask our table manner questions. We couldn’t interrupt. We weren’t allowed to get snacks out of the fridge or pantry as we wanted to. We had to ask politely for something to eat between meals. And we always had to wash our hands before and after meals. I loved eating at my grandma’s because she always bought us kids the “trashy” snack foods! My grandma only bought Oscar Meyer hot dogs, and she would let me eat them raw! I still only prefer those kind of hot dogs, and I love eating them raw – slowly savoring every bite! My grandma’s house always smelled like the last meal she had just made, and that is the aroma I like permeating my house, too. Real, home cooked food is the best room scent there is!! Thank you for sharing Evelyn’s memories. I really enjoyed reading them! And Lesley Boyer said it perfectly – I ate all my calories for the week savoring Evelyn’s food memories in my own mind!!
Donna. : )
I would love to be able to purchase a cook book but right now our budget is living off Social Security. I would love just to read the stories more than anything. I am a celiac so many recipes would not be for me I think. Gluten free flour, the 1-1 kind is very pricey. I was gifted a bag though and today I am making a loaf of bread. so far, it is rising nicely as it bakes. The store bought gluten free bread is so pricey, like $6. a loaf. Anyway I love your blog and your videos.
I can relate to Evelyn with having to eat what was put on my plate or do without. As us kids got older and was allowed to fix our own plates, we was told we had to eat every bite we put on our plates or else. Then mom would reminds us kids that our eyes were bigger then our belly, so it would be best to take a serving spoon size of each dish on the table we wanted and after eating if we still was hungry we could get another spoon full. I guess mom got tired of punishing us kids because we put to much on our plate then didn’t eat it because we got full. Once she told us we could only get a spoonful of each thing on the table and then if we wanted more we could get another spoonful, that seemed to work. We never got second rounds because we were full from the first serving. My dad was a city boy, so he never hunted. Our meat was bought from the store or if mom found a good farm to buy from she preferred to buy from there. Mom being a county girl always grew a vegetable garden to feed our family. She only had $45 per week to buy groceries for our family of seven. She was very creative with meals and we ate a lot of eggs, brown beans, chicken, and bologna because they were the cheapest proteins at that time to buy. We ate a lot of pasta when it went on sale. Every meal was mainly vegetables from the garden or what she had canned or froze during the harvest. We had two sweet apple trees, one sour apple tree, and one huge black cherry tree in our back yard, which we called the field since it was the biggest in the neighborhood. Along our neighbors fence there were blackberry and raspberry bushes that grow the entire length of the property line. Our neighbor told mom to pick all she wanted since the bushes were on both sides of the fence and they didn’t eat that much of the berries. Another neighbor had a huge patch of rhubarb that she let us have as much as we wanted. We all felt blessed and each meal no matter what mom fixed for us we always had enough for any of us kids friends, neighbors or family to pull up a chair and eat with us. As Tipper says we had a feast!
Everything I’ve seen you and your mom cook always looks great especially the cornbread!
Goodness! Just reading this post gave me all the calories I need for a week! And it gave me something else as well: a reminder that communal dining satisfies both physical hunger and heart hunger. A meal shared with family and friends is a very good thing indeed. Thanks!
Evelyn’s comment reminded me how folks from eastern KY are so much alike when it comes to the food we used to eat. I remember eating soup beans, taters, macaroni and tomatoes, however, my family never had fish, venison, beef, turkey or doves to eat. We had chicken and pork that we raised and it tasted so much different than what we buy in the stores now. Mom used to buy a can of meat we called Banner Brand Sausage that was a very popular breakfast food folks mixed with gravy or scrambled eggs. About twenty years ago, I was able to find a few cans of that sausage at a store when I visited eastern, KY. I used to love the unique taste and could not wait to fix a can for breakfast. Some big wigs from my work came to deer hunt about the time I put my husband’s plate on the table as they looked at it suspiciously. A few weeks later, one of the guys finally got the nerve to ask what I was cooking that morning. He was relieved to find out it was not dog food! I would never eat another bite of that sausage even if someone gave me a thousand dollars to try it.
I enjoyed reading Evelyn’s comment start to finish. I could picture everything she described so well. Sounds blessed. I agree, it really was good eatin’ but I just did not realize how good it was until I have gotten older and my father and mother have gone on to Heaven. We have fed our family some of the same things but they just don’t taste like I remember- not as good-, and too, all of that family, even extended family, camaraderie is missing too. We just have to try to do the best we can, loving others and keep going. Hope everyone has a great week!
Enjoyed Evelyn’s story because it was the same for me growing up. We ate what was on the table and never complained. My oldest brother was always at football practice when we ate supper and my daddy would say “don’t edge the bread brother has to eat. My favorite part of cornbread is the edge.
Pepsi in a glass bottle was certainly a treat for us and ice cream also. I wouldn’t take anything in this world for the love of my parents and the way I was raised.
Blessings to everyone. Have a great Monday.
I was born and raised in Texas but my GGGrandparents were from Salisbury NC and all the food and fixins Evelyn mentioned and mirrored by what Tipper puts on her table were a part of our table growing up. Those GGG’s didn’t make it to Texas but their children and grandchildren did. And when they came to Texas they brought all those recipes with them. How I love that simple but delicious food. Brings back sweet memories.
I have 8 cats and they go in and out. One I like least (if you only had dealings with her, you’d know why) brought a fat, dead brown rabbit to me on Saturday. (After my heart broke and I felt like kicking her) I put the pitiful critter in a trash bag because I don’t know how to fix rabbit and can’t be sure he was took out by the cat so with uncertainty’s, I wasn’t gonna try to eat it, but WASTED is what comes to mind. I awoke yesterday to several of them cornering a poor toad. I picked him up and he made a toad croak and I set him on the hill hidden behind flower pots in deep grass. I wish I could prepare squirrel, rabbit, etc but I can’t. Reading about all the good eating this lady did growing up lets me know what’s wrong with us now. Most food you buy is filled with chemicals nobody can even pronounce. I called a candy company the other day asking why I need SHELLAC in my candy corn and the guy said it’s “harmless.” Am I a piece of wood? My question was brushed aside. Read labels and you may learn what a chemical dump the human body really is. My B12 injections have CYANIDE and aluminum too at no extra charge! Go figure, but it’s “harmless” the powers that be contend. I’m trying to cut down. Lol. I hope you got 3 items I sent for the baby. I’m excited for you all from afar! God bless Granny and Katie and her little one…
Sadie, concerning your cat bringing you a dead rabbit, do you know the wildlife departments in many states have did studies and determined that cats are one of the most destructive predators we have. They kill out of instinct, not because they are hungry. One state put cameras on tame cats that were being taken care of and brought in every night and only let out during the daytime. These states now ask hunters to kill any feral cat they come across while hunting.
Sadie, your post reminded me that not only do we get chemicals in our food, we also get weird enzymes if we eat cheezes. There is an animal extract called rennet that, if you care to search it, might just turn you against eating many cheeses. For certain you will keep checking labels for the ingredients. I learned a new chemistry lesson when I searched…but I still like cheeze.
Interesting read, so I have to ask what is a cow turkey and chicken hogs? I looked online, but there is no info out there in the world of Google.
She just forgot to put , in between her words. No biggie, it happens to all of us once in awhile.
That is cow, turkey, chicken, hogs! I find myself leaving out punctuation sometimes when I write. My problem is the lack of visual acuity. If I am lucky enough to see them at all, I can’t distinguish between commas and periods, colons and semi-colons, quotation marks and apostrophes. I too noticed those omissions but I fully understood the author’s thoughts.
My reply to your comment might seem grammatically correct but throw in the fact that it took me about 20 minutes to write it, I think she did pretty good! Or, would that be “pretty well”?
Yepper, and if you didn’t, well….might be a long time til next meal. I don’t do bambi, thumper, bear or most any of those wild things, but other than that, I am in there. Have a Blessed day and week, you guys.
God Bless.
Good morning, my goodness all the food sounds so good, I’m originally from Arkansas and we ate all the foods mentioned in the article, how good it is.
We still grow a garden and can what we grow and or freeze it. I really love looking at my shelves of canned food and wonder about people that buy their daily supply of food each day, I like mine stacked up so to speak because in my early years it got to where you could almost see the bottom of the bean pot along about spring. We were happy to see the thistle, wild green onions, poke sallet etc coming up, all wonderful things to eat.
Blessings to all. One set of my grandparents came from Pike County Kentucky.
I also smile when reading the food you and your family eat. it is so much the same as I ate growing up in what is now called old FL, a time before the invasion of so many from other places. We didn’t eat wild game tho except for occasionally venison or boar my uncle hunted. Of course lots of fish as my dad was a commercial fisherman since age 9, he later opened a fish market in town.
It does seem like I returned home when I moved here.
The first sentence pretty well sums it up, everyone either ate what was on the table or went hungry. Unlike today, there was no separate meals for picky kids. It was pretty much true that if we couldn’t grow or raise it we didn’t eat it except for a few things. Mama would spend all summer preserving any food we grew or somethings that grew wild for us to have during the winter. We only ate squirrel dumplings, rabbit, or pork from a hog we had raised, very seldom any beef. We didn’t eat fish until I got old enough to fish and could come up with a dollar to pay to fish in a pay lake for catfish. Eating a hotdog was as meaningful back then as eating a steak is today. Every morning we would always eat a big breakfast of homemade biscuits, grits, eggs, and some type of pork meat, never any cereal or toast. Mother and daddy would get up early enough and work together to cook this before we went to school or daddy went to work. A big fulfilling breakfast was a main meal for people working manual labor jobs, they couldn’t have made it eating toast and cereal, even if we had had it. My favorite breakfast meal of all was fried fatback or streak of lean, gravy made from from this meat (hunky doo gravy to my family) and homemade biscuits. It was “icing on the cake” if it was during the summertime and you had fresh cantaloupe to eat with this. We often ate cornbread and milk, but no buttermilk for me, I have never been able to get a taste for buttermilk, buttermilk was the only milk my daddy would drink. Even today, I am in “hog heaven “ when eating cornbread and milk or gravy and biscuits. I don’t understand the reason for some of the mom and pop restaurants not offering gravy made with the grease from fried fatback-they have the fatback but not the gravy. Now when I look back, I think we sure were eating good during my childhood even though we were not eating the fast food of today bought at restaurants or warmed up in a microwave oven. I have mentioned this before, I was about 17 years old and in high school before I ever tasted or knew what pizza was, and would not eat pepperoni because I thought it might be vegetable pepper. Writing this has made me want some grits, eggs and fresh pork sausage (not grocery store sausage) and biscuits, I think I will get on up and cook me some and at least start Monday off with a good breakfast.