Jim Casada Outdoors

August 2007 Newsletter

Jim Casada Web site: www.jimcasadaoutdoors.com
1250 Yorkdale Drive E-mail: jc@jimcasadaoutdoors.com
Rock Hill, SC 29730-7638
803-329-4354

Dog Days Doings

If you asked me to select the month of the year I liked least, it would be August. Fishing is afflicted by the hot weather doldrums; it’s so hot and humid, at least where I live, that time outside after about 8:00 a.m. means being soaking wet within half an hour; and even though the opening of dove season lies only a month down the road, it seems impossibly distant. Yet the time of the year commonly known as “dog days” in this part of the world is not without its merits.

An escape to mountain trout streams in my highland homeland of North Carolina’s Great Smokies always beckons, and by the time you read these words that’s exactly where I’ll be. The fishing can be tough—low streams and months of pressure mean the trout are spooky and that “far and fine” is the only way to go if you want to catch fish on a consistent basis. Whenever I retreat to the comfort of those mountain trout streams, I’m comforted by more than just fishing an exceptional natural beauty.

One of the greatest comforts involves looking back to summertime joys of my boyhood. Those memories include biting into thick slices of dark green, “cannonball” watermelons of the kind you never see today. I guess they are too big—Grandpa Joe wanted no part of one unless it weighed at least 50 pounds—and too filled with seeds for today’s hoity-toity consumer. Now we have pygmy melons weighing only five or six pounds, and they don’t even have seeds! How, I would ask, is a body to practice the fine art of spitting watermelon seeds with such a puny fruit? Grandpa Joe would be appalled.

We would have a big watermelon at least once a week once they were “in” (for sale at local fruit stands and then, by this time of year, available from the sandy loam near the river where Grandpa grew not only watermelons but cantaloupes and what he called “mushmelons”). He would place one in a huge galvanized wash tub which normally hung from a nail on the outside wall of the “cannery.” Then a good bit of water and ice would be added. The ice, incidentally, was none of the sissy stuff we get today out of a bag or a refrigerator/freezer dispenser. Instead, it was chipped away from a block purchased from the local ice house using an ice pick. I was allowed to get a long sliver to suck on, and I enjoyed that simple pleasure in the fullest measure.

Once the watermelon was settled in place, always early in the morning, the day’s chores lay ahead of us. They invariably involved considerable work in the garden. It was hot, hard labor. As you picked the last of the pole beans or field peas from vines which had run right out the top of Hickory Cane field corn, there was a pretty good chance of getting stung by a “packsaddle” (a kind of caterpillar which takes its name from its appearance). That hurt like the dickens, or as Grandpa put it, you believed the Devil was sticking you with a hundred hot needles. Or dry corn fodder cut your arms (well—not Grandpa’s, because he never, ever wore a short-sleeved shirt), you might blunder into a wasp or yellow jacket nest, or there was always the possibility of an encounter with a copperhead. Local folklore held that they shed their skins during dog days and would strike at anything which moved. That was likely more fiction than fact, but because it was hot snakes were active.

All of this delicious seasoning of danger actually was mental meat and potatoes for a youngster, and there were treats aplenty to offset any short-lived misery. Ground cherries were ripe, and it was always a thrill to come across them in the corn field. Likewise, all of the garden’s rich bounty was at its peak, and the culinary wonders both Mom and Grandma Minnie could produce still set my salivary glands in overdrive.

Dinner (and in my lingo that means the mid-day meal—you eat supper at night) in the summertime was fairly predictable. There would be a wide variety of vegetable dishes including what was called fried corn (cut off the cob and cooked in a frying pan in its own milk); sliced tomatoes; all sorts of pickles including okra, watermelon rinds, peaches, and bread-and-butter cucumber pickles; fried okra; some type of legume with the main possibilities being green beans; butterbeans; and field peas; chowchow to go with beans; maybe steamed cabbage or else slaw; and of course cornbread. On a banner day that cornbread would be liberally laced with cracklings and almost as greasy as it was good—we didn’t worry about piddling things such as cholesterol and for that matter didn’t even know the word.

There would be some kind of meat dish as well, although family finances and the time of year made vegetables the primary fare. It might be nothing more than fried slices of fatback, or as we called it, streaked meat. Or if a hen had been particularly remiss in her egg-laying duties, there might be chicken. I like chicken any way it might be fixed, fried, with dumplings, or baked. The latter was my favorite when it came to hens, because at Grandma’s I would be allowed to eat that delicacy of delicacies, the little eggs in the making within the body cavity.

For dessert, and Grandpa had a mighty sweet tooth so there was always something for “afters,” we might have fried apple or peach pies left over from breakfast; a whopping slice of that wonderful mountain delicacy, stack cake; peach or apple cobbler; or possibly just some sliced fruit over a piece of pound cake. If you were still a mite peckish, and Grandpa Joe was a trencherman of the first water, you could always finish up with either a pickled peach, a helping of apple sauce, or a leftover cathead biscuit from breakfast slathered in butter and adorned with blackstrap molasses.

We’d let our food settle a bit while sitting in rocking chairs on the porch, where Grandpa would opine on whatever was on his mind, usually concluding his thoughts on any contentious subject with a somewhat gloomy “they’ll learn,” or else tell stories of his boyhood. I loved those stories, because he had killed a cougar (he called in a “painter”), seen snows waist deep, and shot squirrels without number when the American chestnut still reigned supreme in mountain forests.

Along about 2:00 p.m. it was time for some more work, but I didn’t mind it much. I knew we would knock off around 4:00 p.m. or thereabouts and enjoy a couple of hours of piddling before Grandma called us to supper. Since a river filled with catfish, knottyheads, redhorse, and panfish ran right in front of the house, fishing was a prime source of piddling at this time of year. You could always roust up plenty of red worms in the chicken lot, and sometimes we would plan in advance and catch grasshoppers in the early morning when dew still had their wings so wet they couldn’t fly.

Grandpa’s equipment was the essence of simplicity, but I do believe the only things he possibly liked better than fishing were hunting or eating watermelon. He figured a couple of cane poles were enough for anyone, and that’s all he ever used. We would “make” two or three fishing poles every summer, and that exercise in do-it-yourself effort remains a fond memory. Let’s conclude this month’s treatment with a look back at some carefree cane pole days.

For a lot of casual fishermen from my youth, not to mention some pretty darn serious ones like Grandpa Joe, a cane pole was the only way to go. It was cheap, effective, easily replaced if broken in a mishap, and could be stored under the eaves of the house or in the corner of a barn quite conveniently.

There was a time when it was a common sight to see someone driving down the road with a car or truck window partly rolled down and a whole bunch of poles sticking out. Sadly, I can’t remember when I last saw such a simple, satisfying sight.

Grandpa Joe always had three or four cane poles tucked away somewhere handy, and although you could buy them for a quarter apiece at the hardware store, Grandpa was both too poor and too frugal to have any of that “buy a cane pole” nonsense. Instead, he did what the majority of folks used to do—he fashioned his own. It’s as easy to do today as it was in the 1950s, and just in case you are looking for a bit of do-it-yourself nostalgia or perhaps want to share a meaningful project with a youngster, here are the basics.

Every youngster really should, somewhere between the age of five and 10, be involved in “making” their own fishing pole from cane. The process is a simple, straightforward one which will give them a meaningful sense of accomplishment along with producing an inexpensive but functional tool for catching fish.

Cane of about every imaginable size, from the switch canes common along rivers in this part of the world to giant members of the bamboo family reaching toward the sky, is readily available. Once established, in fact, cane can become an invasive nuisance.

The first step is to select a piece of cane of an appropriate length, then cut it at the base, taking care to saw squarely through a joint. Next, use clippers or a sharp knife to strip away all the leaves and limbs from the main section of cane. You are then ready to “cure” and straighten your fishing pole in the making.

Use a piece of cord or slender rope to tie a weight to the small end of the pole—a couple of bricks or a cinder block will work quite nicely. Then find some place to suspend the pole in the air, tying the butt end (opposite one from where the weight is tied) to a tree limb or the rafters of a barn. This was my approach as a youngster.

Leave the weighted pole hanging for a few weeks. It will turn yellow and be perfectly straight. At this point, take it down and remove the weight. You can paint the cane with clear varnish if you wish. This is not essential, but it will appreciably extend the life of the pole.

At this point, you are ready to rig your fishing outfit. Cut a length of monofilament in a suitable weight test (four- or six-pound test is ideal for bream, but you’ll want heavier stuff if you plan to deal with catfish or bass). You should tie one end several joints back down from the tip of the pole, then tie again at the tip. The reason for doing this is to provide a fail-safe fall back if a big fish or a bad move on your part should break the pole. It could very well save you a trophy fish.

The length of monofilament which remains should be three or four feet longer that the pole—just enough to be manageable while you hold the pole in one hand and the baited hook in the other. If it is too long to let you lob the hook out into the water, the monofilament needs to be shortened.

Once you attach a hook, sinker, and perhaps a bobber, everything is set. You are ready to go fishing, and this rig will serve you with a surprising degree of versatility. You can shorten your line and reach back under overhanging trees or docks, make “casts” of considerable distances with longer poles (basically, just a bit over twice the length of the pole), and deal with many species of fish using a wide variety of tactics.

One bit of trivia in closing. It was quite common in yesteryear to see extra-long cane poles laid across two or three nails in the side of a barn or chicken house. There were always extra-long canes of this sort at Grandpa’s. I wonder how many folks realize that these poles were not always used for catching fish? Instead, when equipped with a very short piece of the nylon line once used on casting rods, along with a hook, they could be used to catch a chicken for Sunday dinner.

All it took was a tidbit favored by chickens, such as a worm or kernel of corn, a stealthy approach, and a bit of patience. In fairly short order an unwary hen would “take the bait,” and could then be pulled in, squawking and flapping, for the requisite neck chopping. Today this approach would likely send PETA members, those bumbling idiots who wouldn’t know a mule’s rear end from the south end of a north-bound pig adorned with a prime pair of hams, into the sort of paroxysms mountain folks call a red-eyed hissy. Yet catching chickens flat-out worked, and that was what mattered.

As anyone who ever tried to chase down a free-range chicken will tell you, it’s a mighty difficult task. Even lifting a hen from the roost at night can be problematic, because this causes a chicken coop ruckus and leads to hens slackening off in their egg-laying performance. I doubt if anybody “fishes” for chickens today, but it was once an integral part of carefree dog day doings.

RECIPES

Food looms large in my dog days memories, and here’s a sampling of recipes focusing on foods mentioned in the narrative above.

SMOKY MOUNTAIN STACK CAKE

Of all the desserts I’ve ever sampled, and as someone who loves “afters” (there’s been a precious plenty of them), this is my favorite. Grandma Minnie knew this, and right up until just a year or so before she passed I could count on a welcoming stack cake when she knew I was coming home. Like most mountain cooks, she did it all from memory, not measurement, but here’s a close approximation. I would note that the filling, whether applesauce, preserves, or something else, soaks through the cake after two or three days. This marriage of cake and filling is a wondrous thing, and much like a properly made banana pudding gets better when it has been made for a day or two, so does a stack cake.

4 cups plain flour
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon soda
2 teaspoons baking powder
¾ cup shortening
1 cup sugar
1 cup sorghum molasses
1 cup milk
3 eggs

Sift flour, slat, soda, and baking powder. Cream the shortening, then add sugar, a little at a time, blending as you go. Add molasses and mix thoroughly. Fold in eggs one at a time and add milk, beating until smooth. Pour into greased nine-inch pans (1/3-inch deep—the key is to make thin layers for the stacking) and bake until golden brown. Cool separately and then stack the layers (this will make six or seven) adding filling as you go.
My favorite filling was applesauce made from dried apples, with peach sauce made from dried peaches being a close second. Grandma also used blackberry or strawberry preserves from time to time.

CRACKLING CORNBREAD

Cracklings (always pronounced “cracklin’s” by mountain folks) are solid morsels left over when you render lard. Mountain folks didn’t want any part of the pig but the squeal, and cracklings were regularly used to make cornbread. Basically, just use a cup of them for every cup of meal in your favorite cornbread recipe. Here’s one from Swain County, North Carolina, where I grew up.

1 ½ cups cornmeal
¼ cup flour
½ teaspoon soda
¼ teaspoon salt
1 cup buttermilk
1 ½ cups finely diced cracklings

Mix and stir all the dry ingredients, then add milk and stir in cracklings. Pour into a well-greased cast iron skillet and bake at 400 degrees for 30 minutes or until done. Cracklings were usually crushed with a rolling pin to make them fine and easy to mix.

PICKLED PEACHES

Pickled peaches, a sweet-and-sour treat for sure, were a staple on Grandma Minnie’s table. She put up several dozen quart jars of this delicacy each year, and for me no dinner was complete without a peach on the side, cold, dripping with juice, and tantalizingly tangy with every bite.

1 gallon ripe peaches
3 pounds white sugar
3 cups cider vinegar
6 cinnamon sticks
Whole cloves

Select unbruised, firm, ripe peaches. Place a few peaches at a time into a pan of boiling water for 30 seconds to make the skins slip with ease. Then immediately plunge the whole peaches into cold water and remove the skins. Next, in a kettle, combine the sugar, vinegar, and cinnamon and bring to a boil. Simmer for half an hour. Add six peaches at a time to this hot syrup and cook until tender (making sure they don’t turn mushy). Lift out and pack peaches into hot, sterilized jars, adding a clove or two to each peach as you do so. Fill jars with hot syrup and seal.

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