Today’s guest post was written by Jim Casada.
Recently Jonathan Austin, the editor of a magazine for which I write a regular column that focuses on mountain foods and foodways, Smoky Mountain Living, sent me an e-mail inquiring whether I had ever done any thinking about interesting or unusual culinary customs associated with folks dwelling in the high country. He then listed a few examples with which he was familiar. It doesn’t take much , under any circumstances, to set my mind a-wandering, and this was precisely the sort of subject matter guaranteed to set me to travel down a mental rabbit trail.
Not only did I have fond and in some cases deep memories of the customs he mentioned, just a bit of a pause to ponder brought several others to mind. Here’s a “starter” list and my educated guess is that many of you will not only find material her that rings a nostalgic bell; you likely can add some delightful offbeat peculiarities of your own.
Crumbling cornbread in milk or buttermilk and eating it with a spoon. This practice has long been widespread, thanks no doubt in part to the fact that in yesteryear the combination often formed an entire meal.
Combining cornbread, possibly butter, and molasses (the common mountain term for sorghum syrup). My father often reminisced on cornbread and ‘lasses, carried from home in a small tin bucket, being his standard school lunch.
Using cornbread to dip in and sop up pot likker from dishes such as boiled cabbages or stewed mustard or turnip greens. Incidentally, the “s” on the end of cabbage is not a mistake. Old-timers during my youth (1950s) invariably used that form.
Mashing softened butter and some type of sweetening such as molasses, honey, Dixie Dew (a popular store-bought syrup with a wonderful bit of advertising on the label reading “Covers Dixie like the dew and gives a biscuit a college education”), or brown sugar and using it to adorn a piece of cornbread or a cathead biscuit.
“Sassering” coffee or tea. Mountain folks have traditionally enjoyed these beverages, piping, lip-scorching hot. Rather than wait for a cup to cool, it was commonplace to pour a small amount into a saucer (“sasser”), blow across it a bit, and then slurp the hot liquid.
Putting a packet of salted peanuts in a bottled Coca-Cola or Pepsi and combining a soft drink and snack.
Pouring cream-rich milk that had not been churned over hot “fruit” (stewed apples) to make a dessert.
Dropping blueberries or huckleberries into pancakes on a griddle just before they were turned.
Sprinkling salt on slices of watermelon or cantaloupe.
Children (and sometimes adults) debating or maybe even drawing straws to see who would get to enjoy the delicacy offered by tiny eggs in the making inside the carcass of a baked hen.
Crushing a dried pod of hot pepper atop a big bowl of soup beans to add flavor and a bit of “bite” to this popular dish.
Somehow lining up green peas atop a table knife and eating them that way.
Enjoying a late summer snack in the form of the juicy covering of seeds found inside what was known as a “maypop” (fruit of the wild passionflower).
Sucking the nectar from honeysuckle blooms.
Picking up locust pods after they had fallen following the first few cold snaps and eating the “meat” surrounding the seeds on the fleshy portion of them.
Delighting in the meaty tidbits offered by fish cheeks and the crunchy delights offer by the tails of fish such as trout, crappie, or bream fried to a crisp.
I hope you enjoyed the various food customs Jim shared. Thanks to Granny and Pap I’ve enjoyed many of them myself.
The snacks I eat today are some of the same ones Granny enjoyed when I was a girl: cabbage leaves, sliced turnips, sliced radishes, and even black walnuts sprinkled with salt.
The girls were notorious for smearing yogurt on every thing they ate as children. They still love it, but I seldom see them dunking every bite of food in it before they eat these days.
When I make homemade pizza The Deer Hunter likes to mix up ketchup and mayonnaise to dip his slices in.
Hope you’ll leave a comment and share some of your unique food customs.
Last night’s video: Catching Up: White Christmases, Putting Trees Through Windows, & Practicing Gratefulness.
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I don’t remember how I started it, but whenever Dad dragged out the old ice cream churn (it was so ancient that one of the clamps was broken and we kids had to take turns sitting on the top of it to keep it down), I would eat the vanilla ice cream as a dip for saltine crackers. Fast forward a couple decades: I was at a wedding reception for a friend of mine and they ran out of spoons for the homemade vanilla ice cream. I told my friend’s mom if she had any saltine crackers, they would work. She looked at me kinda weird but got me the crackers. I made a couple of converts that afternoon :).
So many of these food traditions were enjoyed by my mother and father. She always enjoyed a glass of buttermilk with cornbread crumbled up in it. She ate it like it was the most refreshing and delicious thing she had ever tasted. It seemed like it was pure joy to her. A dill pickle with (birthday) cake which was usually yellow cake with chocolate icing was also common place when I was growing up.
My Grandma Tucker ate a weird thing every morning for breakfast. She would pour about a 1/2 cup of sugar, piled on her plate and pour extremely strong coffee on top then sop it up with a biscuit. Her coffee was so strong, no one took a sip from her cup. She would boil the coffee on her wood cook stove then pour a big cup for herself then added 2 heaping teaspoons of instant in it. She would chew tobacco and you could never tell she had it in her jaw. She carried a small pocket knife in her apron pocket with her “backer” and of course her handkerchief. She chewed “Bull of the woods plug” and “King Bee twist” mixed. She lived to be 94 and still had all her teeth! I was amazed at how tough she was. Oh and her hair had never been cut in her whole life. I would sit on the porch with her while she combed out her wet hair to let it dry. It was black as coal with grey around her temples. She’d braid her hair and wrap it around her head like a crown.
I remember Grandpa (half Cherokee) loved eating beef fat (tallow) or any kind of fat for that matter. I know that most of the great tastes of properly prepared meat come from the fat grease. I just never took a liking to eating fat. Grandpa used to say, “Eat that fat; it’s good for you!” – while he was slicing (actually, it cut like butter) and eating another 3 or 4-inch mouthful of pure roasted fat. All the while, us grandkids fussed about the tiniest piece of fat in our portion of meat. I didn’t even want that piece of fat touching the meat I put in my mouth to munch down. So I’d do the best I could to carve that fat off and pile it on the far opposite side of my dinner plate. After I had ate everything except the pile of fat, Grandpa would say, with a big grin, “Well, if you’re not gonna eat that good fat, pass your plate to me. Can’t let anything go to waste!” I truly loved my Grandpa, and even after all these years since his passing, I still miss him so.
I can remember my grandpa eating toasted white bread sprinkled with sugar and coffee poured over it. When us grandkids wanted to try it he would fix it for us except he poured milk over it. I still like to eat it as a late night snack. We always ate cornbread and milk for a snack at night or cornbread , butter and honey. Sometime we would have cornbread and apple butter. On Sunday my grandma would make brown beans(pinto beans) and ham(fatback, bacon or ham hocks). She would always have cornbread on the table . I am from lower Missouri (the Ozarks) and we seem to eat a lot of the same things.
This sure brings back a lot of flavorful memories! Growing up in the middle of West Virginia, we ate beans’n’cornbread, sometimes with raw onions cut up in them–usually Pinto or Cranberry beans. Those beans also went into “hillbilly chili” with burger meat, tomato sauce, and not very much spice. The popular soup was potato, white with chunks of tater and onions in it. So good!
Squirrel was pretty popular in season, made into stew or gravy. Our Auntie Naomi loved to roast the squirrel heads in the oven, then eat the cheek meat, crack the skulls with a nutcracker and spoon the brains out; nobody I knew did that with the brains from rabbit or deer or groundhog when we ate them, though (she also learned how to make kick-ass-good lasagna after she married a man from louisiana). Hog brains and eggs, or fried sousemeat and eggs, were what the oldfolks ate for breakfast, or the ubiquitous cornbread soaked in milk or buttermilk.
My mom and older ladies used to make apple butter over a fire outdoors and canned everything else–corn, fruits, green beans, cauliflower, cabbage, even taters–in the house, in a great big “speckle iron” pot. Occasionally, old-style sausage canned in a jar with a layer of lard would make an appearance. Folks always made souse or headcheese out of hog heads during pig-killing time–the only part of the pig they didn’t eat was the hide, bristles, and bones– and the eyeballs, which got tossed to the dogs.
One of my nicest memories of my Grandma is me and her going to the tomater patch on a summer day with her pocket knife and a saltshaker and snacking on sun-warmed ripe tomaters with a pinch of saLT on them. Some of the older folks also liked a little salt on apple slices and watermelon–salt on watermelon really is quite good!
We gathered black walnuts (what they called wild walnuts but I’m not sure that’s correct and paw paws in the fall, and loved fried ramps, poke greens and sassyfrass tea in the springtime.
I live in California now and these pages are making me hungry for some of that good ol’ hillbilly grub.
I grew up on most all of these, and thought of a couple more:
‘Tater water’- my uncle and I would scoop out chunks of cooked taters and some of the water they were cooking in, add some butter and salt and have our ‘tater water’ together if we couldn’t wait for whatever meal those taters were being cooked for.
‘Sugar noodles’ elbow macaroni with chunks of tomato and a lot of sugar. I grew up in WV and a lot of us had this cheap meal.
My husbands family went hungry quite a bit and they would eat:
1. stale bread with mustard or ketchup ( I think I would have added mayo if they had it)
2. Lettuce and peanut butter
3. Peanut Butter n bananas
4. snow with vanilla and sugar.
He still likes to eat like this.
One day he stuck his mozzerella cheese stick in the peanut butter and said I should try it, but I turned my nose up to it. So one day I tried it n it was really good n now we purposely will buy organic mozzarella cheese sticks n dip into the peanut butter. We got everyone trying it, LOL
Our family had something that had a bad name when we were poor. We had (I’ll say) “Garbage” on a Shingle. It was a white sauce with chipped beef and peas over bread.
Or fried spam, yuck!
Home made Noodles n butter with salt n garlic powder. Which we still make every once in a while.
But my dad would go hunt a pheasant or something and some morel mushrooms.
We usually weren’t poor and was actually spoiled.
My grandpa who called himself a northern hillbilly would eat honey on a butter knife and scoop up his peas on it.
And he ate ice loudly with his mouth open.
Both these things drove my grandma nuts. But it made us laugh.
He loved to flirt with her in public and embarrass her. She would say, Oh Clay, cut that out now. She was shy. But we laughed.
My grandma always had an array of various so delicious homemade fresh fruit pies made and something ( fresh fruit or vegys) on the table sitting in a covered bowl with vinegar n spices or Else vinegar with sugar n spices for snacking on.
And she was big on having fruit trays on the table always with what she called mush melon and I found out when I got older that it was cantaloupe, LOL
These are a few things I still do.
They lived next door, and our other grandma lived with us. It was a blast growing up with all the grandparents.
Sadly I don’t live near my grand babies cuz of the cold, but it makes me sad inside. But we get to do this new finagled thing called FaceTime which is nice, it’s not a hug but it’s nice.
I LOVE reading people’s comments and stories!
It’s so much fun to read them.
My mom in law was poor as a kid n married very young, she had dirt floors and milk carts n boxes for cupboards. She hung towels over to make it look nice. She put boxes down for flooring and one day felt sorry for these new chicks they got cuz it got cold out so she brought them in and she said she had the hardest time trying to hurry and to be getting those chicks back in the box cuz they were poopin all over her floors and hubby to,d her not to bring them in the house and it was about time for him to be coming home, lol And she laughed and laughed telling that story. I never seen how it was funny but she was funny tellin it n it made me laugh!
She would tell me things like… I was upset with my husband for helping a neighbor who we knew had drugs n I was afraid police would come with him over there helpin n get arrested.
So she said to me, Well, some days are diamonds n some days are stones, this is what you do. Go put your hair up and put on some makeup n do your nails up, and put on your best perfume and when he comes in, you just look at him and tell him, you’re stooooooopid. And she laughed and laughed.
I didn’t know how that would help but it was funny tellin him what she said and he apologized and we both laughed.
But the police did come about a month later and arrested them neighbors but not sure why exactly. But I was a thanking our Heavenly Father that it didn’t happen when my husband was there.
My mom cooked different than the grandmas. She listened to TV and Betty Crocker. She bought margarine and MiracleWhip and Boxed mixes n fried the meats and made greasy gravies n made white sauce n put over almost all the vegys.
Grandmas used real butter n real mayo and real milk n baked meats n still had gravy but didn’t seem as greasy and the vegys didn’t have white sauces over them.
White sauce over Cabbages was my moms favorite.
And she liked putting salt on watermelon and yeast in milk.
I think her favorite meal was pepper steak that had tomatoes sauce with fried cubed steak. But it wasn’t mine, LOL
I suppose I had the best of both worlds with an array of ways to cook.
My absolute favorite was the easy bake oven cakes n frosting ….especially cherry. 🙂 No tradition there though. But so so yummy!
homemade jelly/jam went with EVERYTHING in my house growing up (or apple butter) …cornbread, biscuits, eggs, even mashed taters sometimes…it seemed to make the unpalatable foods edible…even on bologney sandwiches…
My ma would brown or toast corn bread in oven then fry eggs leavening yellow real runny and but on bread little butter
I grew up eating all that. Truth be told, still do.
Daddy was a big hunter and trapper. You ALWAYS ask what kind of meat are we eating. The usual for our table was of course chicken
pork, rabbit , squirrel sometimes frog legs or goat. I’ll never forget the day we sat down to BBQ beaver. I ate all the sides that night.
Daddy always had to have either cornbread or biscuits for dinner.
Good eating – everyone of those!!!! Crumbling hot pepper on beans made me think of my uncle stringing hot red peppers and hanging them to dry on the car house.
My Granny raised me on many of these things. I was just thinking the other day about how much I would love to have a glass of buttermilk with corn bread crumbled in it, and she always added onion to it. Yum! I had it for lunch many a time growing up, just because I loved it. Peanut butter and Karo syrup makes a kind of poor-man’s fudge and I still make it. She made biscuits with sorghum molasses or else sugar syrup (home made) on Sunday mornings, along with bacon gravy. Now I’m hungry!
When reading Jim’s story I kept thinking about my dad eating crackers and milk together, cornbread and milk, pickled pigs feet and pickled bologna. I remember my grandparents eating pig’s brain with scrambled eggs. My uncle would put sugar on his cottage cheese, I tried it once needless to say I didn’t try it a 2nd time.
When I was young, we ate many of the same things…hot cornbread and milk,
biscuits and chicken gravy, peanut butter and Karo syrup mixed together for sandwiches with a bowl of homemade chili, salt on cantalope slices, softened butter mixed with Karo syrup sandwiches, Libby’s corned beef, macaroni and cheese and pork and beans, turnip greens or collard greens with corn bread and fried chicken or baked ham slices, peanuts in RC Cola or Seven Up bottles, and many other foods. My mother cooked either salt pork or ham with our pinto beans. My mother made “cold” slaw with lettuce, quartered tomatoes and Miracle Whip. I was so disappointed when we moved to Texas and stopped at a restaurant that sold “cole” slaw and it turned out to be cabbage and carrots with a different dressing! I said, “where are the lettuce and tomatoes? and the Miracle Whip?”
We made tomato sandwiches with miracle whip spread on the bread.
My paternal grandfather enjoyed sardines. He mashed them with a fork, added chopped onion and sprinkled them with vinegar. We ate them on saltines. My mother’s mother drank Postum. We would pour some in the saucer and blow it cool. If she ran out of Postum we drank what she called “sugar tea”, hot water, sugar and milk in a coffee cup.
What is postum ?
Joyce- it’s a coffee substitute 🙂
I really like cornbread and milk, have eaten butter stirred around in molasses, and I like the taste of maypop seeds. We would put a biscuit in coffee and sprinkle sugar on it. We called it “soakie”. My wife’s grandmother ate cornbread and milk for supper almost every night. Thanks for making me thing about these things. Dennis Morgan
Well I’ve read all the comments and found that two unusual things that I have always eaten as normal, tomato slices on mayo and light bread AND butter and sugar on top of pancakes instead of syrup as I loved the sweet crunch. Now I also would eat a big spoonful of peanut butter sprinkled with sugar when I got hungry and supper was still a long way coming and give to my grands when they didn’t have enough supper but still wanted something before bed. My cousins in South Carolina always put salt on their melon and sugar on grapefruit which I thought was crazy as we grew up (Wisconsin) eating them naked. But they also taught me one thing that is absolutely divine but never heard of anyone else doing it – cut up a medium sized Vidalia onion, place a Tablespoon of butter over it in a small cup then douse it with brown sugar and finally cover the cup and microwave until onion is soft. It is the best dessert ever!!!!!
I though of another! Sour cream butter! Made from milk from your own cow. Milk the cow. Let the cream rise and skim it off. Save the cream until you have enough to churn then leave it out until it sours. Put it a churn jar or a half gallon jar . Churn until the butter separates. Dip out the butter, wash and salt it. Chill and drink the buttermilk that remains. That is real butter and real buttermilk! If you like butter on your cornbread or buttermilk with your cornbread its the best you can do!
You may substitute the words “culture” or “cultured” for the word sour if it makes it more palatable.
My mom ate apples and watermelon with salt sprinkled on them. She also used a spoon on apple halves to scraps apple sauce like spoonfuls from them to give me when I didn’t feel good. She would occasionally put some sliced cheddar cheese on top of day old Krispy Kreme donuts and heat till melted in a toaster oven.
My dad always made our dressing. I think he did it just so he could cut the edges off the still warm cornbread to add to a glass of buttermilk he’d eat once he got the dressing in the oven. Some years he made a separate special pan of oyster dressing. He was the one that made us oyster stew too.
Dad liked peanuts in a RC Cola.
I enjoyed drop by drop of honeysuckles I’d find while outside playing. Oh and being from the South when I was a little kid I thought RC Colas were ROC Cola because of our Southern drawl.
I’m going to have to come back later and finish reading everybody else’s comments.
My dad also made the best giblet gravy.
I know most of the southern delights mentioned but one stranger to me was fish cheeks and tails. Cornbread and milk or buttermilk were very common at my house also loved honey and butter mixed together and spread on bread. Every meal was ended with honey or molasses spread on bread for a desert. There was no loaf bread, it was corn bread or molasses.
A different time and a different world!
“Hog hash” as we called it is one of my favorite dishes. We always put in the liver, heart, lungs or lites, taters, onions and plenty of sage.
My favorite snack is peanut butter and vanilla wafers.
The more onions the better. like it best over cornbread. We called hog haslet. We didn’t put in potatoes. As near as can tell basically came out desire for haggis which was hard to make because the ingredients wasn’t readily available. I’m the only one in the family who eats it now that I elders are gone. My generation are the old folks now.(Try Barbecue Cantaloupe).
Too many of these “food memories” to name were eaten of Jim’s “culinary delights in the holler” list. Of note, still eat my fish with the fins and tail crispy; and as you, Tipper, like salt on my shelled black walnuts – always, my favorite nut as the lane going to the barn was lined with black walnut and persimmon trees.
Thanks so much to Jim for his take on “Unusual eating customs.” Most of this I have tried or heard of except I never ate molasses as far as I can remember. Being born and raised way back in the mountains may have added a few unusual food items not covered by Jim’s list. We drank clabbered milk at my grandparent’s home, and I loved it. I was so blessed to have helped with churning a few times.
Some of the food we loved as children and even fought over were, chicken gizzards, chicken liver, pickled pig feet, pickled corn on the cob, fermented/pickled cabbage cores. and lastly I never knew a kid that would not eat green apples. Those green apples usually resulted in a stomach-ache, but that never slowed us down even a little. My maternal grandmother had lots of German in her line, so there were always many crocks of fermenting vegetables. I still recall my grandmother cooking a turtle and telling me about the seven meats it contained. Maybe we were introduced young to these foods, because nothing edible was ever wasted. I never heard anybody ask for steaks that are so popular nowadays, because most cooks back then believed they had to cook meat extremely well done. Well done as in shoe leather! 🙂
Cornbread with milk, and a biscuit with butter is wonderful for a snack. When I lived for a time in Louisiana, I did cook tripe, but steered far away from Crayfish. I learned so much about actual seasoning of food from the wonderful people from that part of our country. I still cook some of their popular dishes such as Gumbo and “Dirty Rice.” Time has made me a picky eater, and even though I love many of the foods I had growing up there are far more I avoid.
Your comment left me thinking about my paternal side of the family. My grandad used the phrase, “The green apple Two Step”. I’m sure you can ponder on that one & figure the meaning. LOL.
My dad says he was not fond of pork chops for the reason you mentioned. His grandmother would cook them until they were like shoe leather (his exact words), because she was afraid of parasites.
Another strange food thing….Its all Irish & Polish around us, not any Italians. My great grandmother’s idea of “spaghetti” was Ketchup as the sauce, served over the noodles. My dad never had real pasta till he was grown, it was meat & potatoes – ALWAYS.
While I’m thinking about it, Beanie’s mama made cornbread with canned blackberries stirred into the batter. I didn’t like it too good but it was a nice color change.
They also kept guineas. Guinea eggs are like chicken eggs only a noticeably different shape. Their meat was much darker than the chicken I was used to.
How could both of you have left out GRITS?? !!
Now, I have to admit that most Southerners wouldn’t find this unusual and it ain’t as much so now as it once was; but there seemed to have been a line – maybe the Mason-Dixon – which when crossed removed grits from the menu.
And, there’s a whole conversation about how to to cook grits – whether stiff or ‘loose’ – and another about how to eat grits – whether with salt or sugar/honey/syrup/molasses if’t you don’t have redeye gravy – and another about what to eat them with. My mother always cooked grits with fried fish.
Finally, I have to say that I’ve been a bit confused by talk of syrup made from sorghum as molasses. I always called it syrup even if it was as thick as molasses in February. Molasses for me has to made from sugar cane syrup boiled down to that iron-rich goodness. All cane syrup to me was Kero syrup when I was growing up regardless of the brand – much like tissues are all Kleenex; but I much preferred molasses in my butter, mashed up with a fork and put on biscuits one bite at a time. I sometimes see ‘molasses’ written with a plural verb. Can that be right? Will someone please correct my misunderstandings about molasses?
Thank you, Robert, for mentioning grits! I love them. I was always raised to eat them with salt and butter. I loved mixing all my food together so I could get a taste of grits, sausage, and egg all in one bite. I also love them with shrimp. If I want to change things up a little, I’ll throw some cheese in.
Funny story. My father-in-law was born and raised in Detroit. When he was on his way to WWII, he went for some of his training to “Camp” (now Fort) Rucker in Alabama. He got leave to go with one of his local buddies home for breakfast one day. He couldn’t understand why they served “mashed potatoes” with breakfast. He soon found out about grits. Poor man. He took a big ol’ mouthful and almost died. He hadn’t salted, buttered, sugared, or put syrup on them, so a big mouthful of plain grits. He didn’t know what to do, so he managed to swallow them. Never again did he eat “a grit.” I’m smiling when I’m writing this because, try as I might, this Kentucky-native girl never could get him to try ’em again. Didn’t feel so bad when my Kentucky-native mother-in-law told me she’d given up years before.
This is a trip down memory lane for sure. So many of these things are so familiar to me and I will add a few more. Mayonnaise sandwiches, sugar sandwiches, peanut butter mixed with molasses, my father-in-law loved mustard sandwiches. My mother-in-law made a big pot of some kind of hash or stew as she called it with spare-ribs, liver, all kind of stuff, something called lites in it, not sure. It was good but I wasn’t ever sure what I was eating, lol. She made the best cornmeal dumplings with chicken livers also. Growing up I ate my share of brains and eggs also. I went to school one time and told what I had eaten for breakfast and some of the town kids thought I had lost my mind. One last thing, my mama used to soak soda crackers in her coffee, and I tried it and loved it also. Thanks Mr. Jim and Tipper also.
Gloria, the “lites” you mentioned in your post got my attention. The older folks like my grandparents on both sides called the lungs of an animal the “lites”. Not sure if that’s what you meant. They used it to make an older Scottish dish they called haggis. The ingredients are a sort of the same as a stew or hash. My grandparents made it from beef rather than sheep. They wasted nothing. I’ve never tasted it or tried to make it myself, but they seemed to think it was quite the treat especially soon after they butchered the animal.
Yep, that’s what the “lites” were. After all these years, glad I found out. Thank you!
“Lites” are the lungs of the animal. We never kept them when we butchered an animal.
Glad to finally know what the “lites” were. I probably would have never eaten it had I known it. Back then, there wasn’t Google to search it. Thank you!!
this brings back, so many fond memories. My dad loved cornbread & milk & I remember my grandfather sipping coffee from a saucer. These are just a couple. My Grandma used to make, what she called Suet Pudding; it was wonderful little puddings wrapped in cheesecloth & boiled. She served them with a creamy sauce poured over it. We looked forward to these every Christmas. Your blog, makes me homesick for the past & so grateful for the memories. Simple food certainly was enjoyed by many!
It seems like no matter where you live in Appalachia we share many of the same food customs. I remember my Grandma Shuman drinking her coffee out of her saucer. When I was a boy my cousins introduced me to peanut butter and syrup on my pancakes. And I always loved to eat raw turnip, rutabaga and rhubarb, I would go on a hike in the woods with a brown bag containing Miracle Whip sandwiches. My tastes were similar to my moms. We both like sandwiches of radish and butter, a slice of onion and creamed Limburger cheese on white bread and fried green tomato sandwiches.
Dad loved cornbread with milk and sugar while mom liked her cornbread with buttermilk, salt and pepper. Also dad would often have a snack in the evening of light bread with coffee, milk and sugar over it. He just called it bread and coffee and would feed me little bites while I sat on his lap.
My whole family love to drink buttermilk and we drank ours with salt and pepper in it.
We also loved corn meal mush which we called Mursh. We liked it fried with butter on it or with syrup. Mom and I were the only ones that enjoyed our hot mush with butter, salt and pepper on it. And my Grandma McPeek lived with us for years and always sat next to me at the table. When we had a mess of squirrel grandma loved the heads where she would dig the brains out. Then she always put the heads next to my plate so it would look like I had eaten them.
When it was butchering time mom and dad always used the heads to make souse and headcheese as well as old fashioned mincemeat. They also made a big stone jar of pickled meat for cooking beans and pickled pigs feet.
Of course we would have big pots of wild greens in the spring with pans of cornbread and in the summer we would have wilted lettuce with a dressing of bacon grease and vinegar with a little crumbled bacon in it. My dad had a frequent breakfast when he was young that included Salt Fish. I remember Mom would find the salt fish in a small wooden box and she would soak it over night to get out the salt and rehydrate it. Then she would coat it with seasoned flour and fry it along with a plate of eggs for my dads breakfast.
Another common dish on our table was a salad of tomato, onion and cucumber with buttermilk, salt and pepper over it. And my mom would make salt pickles and then can them stuffed with ground horseradish.
Other than these common foods at our home we frequently had rabbit, groundhog, deer and coon. Dad never hunted anything that we didn’t eat.
I am very interested in this ‘souse’ that you mentioned & have read about it in the Foxfire books. Tried to make some & the recipe called for vinegar. It that right? It tasted all right, but I was the only one willing to eat it & the consistency seemed odd. Maybe the meat wasn’t shredded/ground to the right texture, so there was big chunks of meat & then bigger chunks of the ‘jelly’ part. Do you remember how it was done, by your parents? I raise hogs & have been curious about this. Is it like the old fashioned counterpart to Spam???
I forgot to mention earlier that my brother used to have our Mommy fry glazed Krispy Kreme donuts in butter. He loved eating them like that.
I often eat cornbread smeared with yellow mustard. Herelately I’ve been eating it with sriracha ketchup.
Bologna and applebutter sandwiches.
Peanut butter on a spoon. Lick it like a popsicle.
Somebody beat me to cabbage cores. My son Dusty loves them. He has always called them cabbage “cobs”.
Mater biscuits. Split a biscuit and remove most of the fluffy part. Insert ½ inch thick slice of a juicy tomato. Two or three of them will make a meal.
My mother would eat leftover biscuits like that too and if she had cheese she would put a little piece of cheddar cheese or “flat cheese” (Kraft singles) on top of the tomato and put it (toaster) oven to melt the cheese. And then she would fuss at herself because she might forget to get it out in time and it would be burnt which was not tasty.
Reading Jim’s post brought back a lot of memories, and we still eat a lot of these today. One of my Mommy’s neighbors said she crumbled up chocolate cake in her soup beans. When I first heard of it I thought didn’t think it was such a good idea, but I guess you shouldn’t knock it till you try it. One of my old friends use to put mayonnaise in her chilli. I did try that, and it wasn’t half bad. And my Mommy used to eat tater chips and ice cream.
I am familiar with almost all of the ways of eating foods mentioned in Jim’s article. It sent me down memory lane of foods I ate growing up on the coast of NC. One of my favorite memories and I still enjoy to this day is mixing butter with King Syrup and eating it on a hot biscuit.
I am familiar with nearly all of these. We need to be sure our grandchildren are exposed to these things so they will have something to tell about when they get old. Ha.
I guess slicing cornbread and spooning on it pinto beans and the liquid they are cooked in is my favorite.
My wife likes raw turnip slices with peanut butter between them.
I was thinking the other day about eating saltine crackers with soup as a boy and remembered the crackers came in a larger square of four crackers, I think. I don’t know when and why they changed to individual crackers in a sleeve.
Yep, I recollect four crackers in a square. Had lost that memory. Syrup and butter stirred together OR syrup and bacon grease stirred till cream colored. Add a hot biscuit or two and thank God for such good fixings. Mama made corn meal mush by stirring corn meal in a black iron pot of boiling salted water. Daddy loved it. Squirrel and rabbit for breakfast-Yummy. .
I misspoke a bit in my earlier comment. Black locust blossoms are not poisonous, at least not to bees. They make some fine honey out of it.
I used to watch my Grandfather put a pad of butter on his breakfast plate and cover it with Kero syrup or honey, mash it up and eat it on a biscuit. That and a cup of coffee, which by the way he poured into a saucer to drink was what he had for his morning meal.
Jim’s list reminds me of my childhood in the piedmont area of NC. I also enjoyed an onion biscuit. Open one of Mama’s biscuits and put a thick slice of onion on it, sprinkled with salt. Also, the cabbage core was always a treat that Mama saved for me when cutting cabbage. I sprinkled it with salt. Finally, when Mama fried chicken, I always got the gizzard and she got the heart. Delicious memories.
I have done and still do a lot of things Jim mentioned. My grandparents would pour the coffee in saucers. Their coffee was Louisiana, if that is not correct maybe it is close enough for someone to remember the correct name. Along with Dixie Dew syrup there was Bob White and Uncle Remus but usually it would be homemade they had bought. Granddaddy would crumble cornbread up in strawberries and their juice for dessert. Cornbread and milk is one of my favorite things to eat. I never finished one of my wife’s meal if it included her cornbread with out finishing it up a small bowl of cornbread and milk. Daddy would put dried pods of Cayenne pepper in his stews. Just this weekend I put peanuts in a Coke cola and salt on an orange or added a little bit to orange juice to sweeten it up. One unusual thing I have done would be to put apple jelly on top of my daddy’s sweet potato pies.
Randy, it was Luzianne coffee. Their coffee and tea is still around.
My dad always put cornbread in his buttermilk and sometimes sweet milk. My oldest sister Linda loved putting peanuts in her Pepsi. I remember sucking the dew from the Honeysuckle flowers as a child. Salt on watermelon always made it sweeter and I still do that if the watermelon I get don’t taste sweet. Using cornbread or biscuits to sop up any juice from meats, beans, soup or stews is still a thing I do. I’ve seen people put their hot coffee or tea in a saucer to cool while drinking, which I always thought was funny. Many times my mom would put cream on hot cooked fruit as our dessert. We put my PawPaw Nelson’s home made Hot pepper Chowchow on any type of cooked beans. I’ve never found any that tasted as good as his and sadly never got his recipe. This brought back lots of good memories! Thank you for sharing, Tipper!
I grew up in the western Piedmont of North Carolina and am familiar with all but 3 of the items on Jim’s list. Here are my additions to the list:
– For a snack, spread mayonnaise on a slice of light bread. We called it the original title of mayonnaise-on-bread.
– We put mustard on sardines and ate with saltines which we called “soda crackers.”
You can buy sardines that are already in mustard sauce.
Now Jim Casada and the others have sent me off on a cold track. When we had fried squirrels at home, I would “call” the heads. We didn’t waste much around our house. The heads also went into a pot of squirrel pilaf, or pilau–we called it “purlow”–along with the rest of the meat. Oddly, I never had a desire to save or fry rabbit heads. Go figure.
The one that springs to my mind is hog brains and scrambled eggs, a favorite of our neighbor’s while I was growing up. He butchered hogs every year and loved brains and eggs for breakfast. A local restaurant still offers this dish on its menu.
We put salt on watermelon, cantaloupe and apples. We recently watched an old episode of Good Eats where Alton Brown explained the science of why salt is used to enhance sweetness. I don’t remember much about it, but it is why most cookie and cakes call for salt. So we are not just imagining the use of salt on sweets.
I ‘spect thar eating oatmeal would fall under this. A spoonful of brown sugar & a few ounces of rich milk and Do Not stir it up is how I prefer to enjoy it. My late husband would treat it like he was going to mix up a whole new concoction, several spoonfuls of white sugar, after melting butter in it, followed by a ounce or two of milk then mix it all together hard. And several slices of toast was a must!
Then, how we drink our coffee and/or tea, I believe fall under this category besides cooling it. Who burns lips? I usually get the back of my tongue. That said, my daughter does with fresh baked pizza.
BTW, I do not add salt to watermelon cause I want to enjoy the sweetness on its own. Cantaloupe usually needs salt unless it comes from your own garden so it can be enjoyed at its peak of flavor.
At breakfast, my cousin’s kids 6 or 7 of them, would take their spoon and dip into a bucket of fresh ground peanut butter then plopping it into their morning bowl of ‘cornflakes’ & milk.
Kate, I am teasing you when I write this. To true southerners the only time oatmeal is good is when someone else is eating it, only grits for us and we never have to worry about burning our lips or tongues with tea, only sweet ICE tea for us. I do like to put salt and even black pepper on cantaloupe even on the good home grown sweet Athena cantaloupes. Any watermelon is better with salt and in my earlier comment I said I put salt on oranges and have add a small amount to orange juice. I worked with someone that would add some salt to the coffee grounds when he made coffee. He said it would take the bitterness out of the coffee.
My dad liked to put ground black pepper on cantaloupe too! And I have heard my aunt say the same thing about a little salt in the ground coffee to brew coffee to help make it less bitter.
When I was a small boy my moma picked cotton in the fall to supplement my family’s meager income. I would always be carried along to play in the woods on the side of the fields or whatever mischief I could get into. Our standard lunch on those days was 2 saltine crackers with mayonnaise in between.
Two other southern staples I can’t believe no one has mentioned yet are fired baloney sandwiches and tomato/mayonnaise sandwiches with fresh tomatoes right out of the garden.
Charles, you are right on with with the fried baloney sandwiches, I will even fry wennies and sandwiches with home grown tomatoes and DUKES mayonnaise can not be beat. One other thing I have not seen mentioned is God’s gift to outdoors men , Vienna sausage and sody crackers ( soda crackers). I ate a fried baloney sandwich yesterday.
You’ve covered a number of our food memories here. Most of our favorite dishes involved sorghum molasses and butter and the pot likker. Smoked ham hocks are a staple in any bean or cabbages dish.
Special dinners for celebrations involved a country ham that was salty and smoky. Paper thin slices were still strong in flavor. Pork chops were for special Sundays and always served up with “milk gravy” and taters or rice. The only complaint about food in our house was that there was never enough gravy made. Granny could have made 5 gallons and it would not have been enough. LOL.
I don’t find the customs unusual as most were an everyday way of life in my eastern KY home. It’s been a long time since I have seen anyone pour peanuts into their pop but the memory sure makes me want to try it again. The egg bag was our favorite part of the chicken and it was usually big enough for all four of us kids to get a tasty bite. That memory brings up a good question. Wonder why we can buy chicken livers, gizzards, and necks at the store but not the egg bag?
I still love cornbread and milk, mixing butter with honey or syrup and eating it on a hot biscuit, and pouring cream or whole milk on oatmeal or fruit cobblers, My mother never wasted any part of a hog when Dad butchered a hog. She cooked the head and we ate the brains and she used the meat to make souse we ate just a slice of or put it on a sandwich. She also made pickled pig’s feet and cracklins when she rendered the fat to make lard. Some of the parts were made into sausage which she would make into patties, fry, and put into jars and can for later use. When we were young we would go to my aunt’s house and for a snack we would open a cold biscuit and put butter and sugar on it. I love all of the stories you share.
My family has so many of these habits! I am familiar with all but the young eggs in a chicken and the fish tail. My family surely has Appalachian roots❤ God bless you and yours❤❤
To clarify something in Jim’s post, it’s only the pods of the Gleditsia Triacanthos or Honey Locust that are edible. All parts of the Robinia Pseudoacacia or Black Locust are considered poisonous.
I had cornbread and milk for dinner a few days ago. I mix half buttermilk and half sweet milk then add the cornbread with some black pepper too. Sometimes I will put salt on cantaloupe and watermelon.
I grandfather would “sasser” his coffee sometimes and a Coke with a bag of Tom’s peanuts poured into it was my favorite snack when I would go to my dad’s service station after school.
We had cornbread and butter milk for dinner last night. Cornbread baked in our wood cookstove. Then later I went back and had a slice with some fresh sweet cream butter just churned by my dear friend. I love living in “the middle of nowhere” in the middle of Appalachia.
I heard of most of these except maybe a few at the end. I take pinto beans and add tomatoes (canned, juiced, fresh cut) liberally and top with onion and cornbread. When I was in “the field” as a soldier, I was often called upon to make the “soup” which is Ramen noodles mixed with tomato juice. All the folks requested it. Since I was a kid I like tomatoes and butter on noodles with salt and pepper. I can think of tomatoes and my mouth waters… lol
Wow. I remember so many of these eating customs, like milk and cornbread or pot likker. I still put salt on watermelon and I like salt on sliced apples too. The one thing I remember my grandfather teaching us as a kid was to take fried cornbread patties, cut them in half and eat out the middle part leaving only the crust like a little cup. Then we’d pack the crust with leftover purple hulled peas, corn, onions and anything else and then eat those as a snack. Great memories.
I remember being very young, standing at the kitchen table at Grandpa’s and watching an older relative “saucer” her coffee. When I asked her why she did that she said, “because it’s hot!” Who knew? But now that I think about it, I’m much older now than she was then.
My granny and a cousin both dipped their biscuits into coffee, much like I do a donut. I am familiar with most of the habits mentioned in the article, especially the sopping, sassering, Dixie Dew syrup mixed with softened butter and spread on biscuits, still do it to this day, but can’t get Dixie Dew anymore. I think that was a Winn-Dixie brand back in the day when Winn-Dixie and A&P were the only two major grocery chains in town. We did have several small neighborhood groceries. Fond memories of my cherished grandparents!
As a little boy, I learned how to get that tiny, wonderful bit of nectar from a honeysuckle blossom. I still enjoy that! I am familiar with the list that Jim Casada made. My grandfather always saucered his coffee and my father loves cornbread and milk or buttermilk.
Oh gosh, here in East Central Illinois I grew up eating cornbread with milk on it! And the large square of crackers with milk on them too (before saltines came in a rack like nowadays.) My mom was from Morgantown KY so she helped the Appalachian lifestyle move North ….haha As a kid we ate raw turnips from the garden after rinsing them with a few pumps of water from the well.
Yep to most of these all the way here in Texas. Both hubby and I enjoy most of these things even to this very day. Instead of crumbling hot peppers in beans or peas we pour hot pepper sauce in them that I put up every summer homemade. I make it simple like my mama did. It’s vinegar and hot peppers. Tabasco peppers make a real good and hot pepper sauce.
Some things we haven’t tried such as eating fish cheeks or eggs found in the hen fresh from the barnyard. I ‘spect our mamas secretly eat those before the hen made it to the table.
I love the crispy fried tail of bream. Of course we eat cornbread with milk as a bedtime snack. We’ve never tried Matt’s pizza dip, but it sounds interesting.
Our family food habits include the following: Our grandson loves peanut butter smeared all over his pancakes and then puts syrup on top of the peanut butter. Another grandson pulls turnips or any vegetable straight from the garden and eats it out of hand. He used to eat the vegetables without washing them until I threw a conniption fit and made him start washing them before eating.. especially turnips, taters, carrots, onions, and radishes. Hubby crumbles his cornbread in a bowl and puts field peas, soup beans, greens, or cabbages in the bowl on top of the cornbread then soaks it all with a good amount of pot likker. My daddy poured ketchup on the top of cooked white lima beans.
We really enjoyed this post by Jim Casada. Thanks Jim and Tipper. Yes, we eat like this too here in southeast Texas but both our folks came from Appalachian stock. Guess they brought their food habits with them. Although I can say most of the things you have listed here are quite common in our small area. However, a lot of folks here descended from there too. We have always just called it good country eatin”.
I really enjoyed reading this! We love cabbage and cornbread also. My daughter use to mix ketchup and mayo also to dip pizza in and sometimes she would put ranch dressing on her pizza. I just love all the comments on here. Thank you Tipper for your YouTube program! I listen every day!
My wife said her and her folks would out sugar over the Red Eye Gravy which they called “Freckle face gravy”
Putting a packet of salted peanuts in a bottled Coca-Cola or Pepsi and combining a soft drink and snack.
Jim Casada
The Peanuts “float” in a regular Coca-Cola or Pepsi but sink to the bottom of the container if poured into a diet Coca-Cola or Pepsi?
jsmck
These are all familiar! We break up cathead biscuits in coffee and we call it “sop”. One of my favorite things is crumbled saltines in milk. We eat a Ky steak, peanut butter, and cheese sandwich on occasion. My papaw always put a spoon of peanut butter on his fried egg and spooned it on his biscuit! So good!! I reckon I remember Daddy eating cornbread and buttermilk at least twice a week. Sometimes Momma would put sweetin in the cornbread.
Oh my goodness, I almost posted about the peanut butter, but thought that’s just too weird, but my dad always put peanut butter on his bologna sandwich, I assumed he was the only one ever did that in the history of mankind ha ha ha ha ha
Our family puts peanut butter on everything! When Momma was young a lady traveled around trying to teach the women how to get more protein in their diets. Momma said Mamaw always put peanut butter on their plates. I figure the lady was from the county welfare department. They ate soup beans and cornbread every single day. Maybe she thought they needed the extra protein and pb filled the void. We eat a lot of weird things…too many to mention LOL
There were lots of interesting ‘discoveries’ being made about peanuts/peanut butter during the early part of the 1900s. This was due to George Washington Carver’s research and experimentation with peanuts & peanut oil. There were some thoughts that peanut oil massaged into the limbs could be used as a treatment for polio. Peanut butter was being pushed as a cure all & a good source of protein on the cheap. Also, the government was pushing the crop production of peanuts after some of these discoveries. Cotton was wearing out the land/weevil problems/price fluctuations & the gov’t was subsidizing the switch over to peanuts (and other crops as well) so they had a vested interest in getting lots of people to eat peanuts in one form or another. George Washington Carver is one of my ‘heroes’ & a fascinating man to learn about. If you have never read anything about him, take some time & check him out.
I recently binge-watched The Waltons series. Grandpa Zeb can be seen at least once “sassering” his hot coffee. I remember my grandparents always putting salt on their watermelon slices. These same grandparents had a cabin which had well water that needed to be pumped up. They would fill a bucket first thing in the morning and keep it cold under the sink cabinet with a dipper inside. It was wonderful to come inside on a hot day a grab a dipper-full of that delicious water. Some of the things you and Jim mention I have never heard of, but I’d sure like to give them a try! Hugs
My Papaw ADORED cornbread and buttermilk, me not so much lol My late Daddy loved it too. My Granny loved to sasser her coffee and would dunk toast in her coffee, something I do to this day myself, it makes me think of her. Love Mr. Casada’s stories. Have a blessed week everyone!
My grandmother saucered her coffee and after eating chocolate
cake she had to have a few more bites of fried chicken. My dad loved sweets and put sugar on cantaloupe and pancakes. And it was a thick layer, too, just butter and sugar on the pancakes without the otherwise Karl syrup or sorghum. We used mayonnaise or Miracle Whip dressing on turnip greens. I just recently talked to a friend about mixing butter with Karl syrup or honey spread on cold biscuits for an after school snack. Mother would sometimes spread butter on cold biscuits and toast them in the oven for a unique flavor. I never acquired the taste of cornbread and milk as my parents and grandparents ate but still love good crusty cornbread.
Sassering” coffee was one I’d never seen
here in East TN but a friend from England would. do it. the one that brings back some grand memories from my youth was sucking the nectar from honeysuckle blooms. When we were young one could spend a lot of time on these tiny blooms.
Jim, Sassering coffee was pretty common here in Northeast TN. My paternal grandparents were the first ones I can remember seeing sassering, which I assume came from their ancestors.
struggling to remember a poem, i found this:
”My grandfather ate his with a knife, which most 19th century Irishman were skilled enough to do.
Unfortunately, the likes of Emily Post frowned upon such table shenanigans, so I never learned the art form. But the practice did lead the nutty poet Ogden Nash to write: “I eat my peas with honey. I’ve done it all my life. It makes the peas taste funny. But it keeps them on my knife.”
actually, it was probably emily post’s frown that led to the poem.
OH MY GOSH, I didn’t realize I accessorized ‘cornbread’ so much. My Dad, an Osage from Arizona used to use biscuits with sugar and milk as a desert years ago. Amazing how ‘country’ and perhaps Appalachian I am, to not be from Appalachia. Always interesting read and looking forward to your new cookbook with Mr Casada. Have a Blessed day.