August 2010 NewsletterJim Casada
Web site:
www.jimcasadaoutdoors.com August: The Start of Putting Up Time
The other came much closer to home, because as I noted above, I’m been busy in the putting up business for a week now. Gardens here in the North Carolina high country are presently at their peak of production, and that’s where putting up comes into play. It has always been the term self-sufficient mountain folks used to describe canning, drying, storing in root cellars, and in more recent decades, freezing, goodness wrought from the good earth. In the last week alone I’ve frozen perhaps 40 quarts of crowder peas (also known as clay peas and field peas), lima beans, green beans, and corn. This bounty will taste mighty fine on a cold winter’s day, yet it merely scratches the surface of what my parents and grandparents did by way of making do with what they grew when I was a boy. At this time of the year, and continuing right through until late September or early October when the first frost arrived, there was a constant whirl of putting up activity in both households. For some items, such as preparing a big run of green beans or shelling a couple of bushels of crowder peas, it was all hands on deck (or, more accurately, on the porch, where relaxed conversation punctuated the satisfying sound of beans or peas hitting the side of massive tin dishwashing pans. I also recall, with great fondness, listening to the swish of a churn when visiting at the home of my Great-Aunt Lily and Great-Uncle Walter when such “goings on” were taking place. Mom’s annual goal for green beans was a whopping 100 quarts lining the rows of shelves down in the basement, and Grandma Minnie not only canned beans, she liked to have at least a dozen long strings of “leather britches,” green beans which had been strung and then dried by hanging them beneath barn rafters or placing them atop a hot tin roof. Slow cooked in the dead of winter in a Dutch oven and seasoned with a sizeable slab of streaked meat, they made a mighty culinary fine marriage with a big slice of cracklin’ cornbread. The things we put up were almost endless. There would be a vast array of pickles—bread-and-butter, dill, pickled peaches, watermelon rind, okra, and more. Mom always liked to have at least half a dozen runs of vegetable soup mix. Her old clamp-type pressure canner, if memory serves, held eight quart jars, and she would make one or two runs of soup at a time. The cans pretty well utilized whatever garden stuff was available at the moment, but key ingredients were tomatoes (productive tommytoes joined their larger brethren in making the juicy soup base), corn, okra, and lima beans. Then there was chow-chow, kraut, relish, and peaches. Incidentally, peaches were about the only thing we put up which was store bought. Blackberries would have come and gone, their passage in early July being marked by glistening rows of jam (in this case, in pint jars rather than quarts), but blueberries hit their peak in August and huckleberries were yet to come. Corn is one of my favorite foods and has always been a staple of mountain life, thanks in part to its versatility. If you don’t like cornbread, particularly that made from stone ground meal, I plain out feel sorry for you. Furthermore, anyone who has never eaten a corn dodger adorned with a good measure of home-churned butter or has no experience with cracklin’ cornbread has lived a sad life filled with endless days of culinary deprivation. For all that I have always loved corn on the table—cornbread, corn dodgers, hominy, grits, corn-on-the-cob, creamed corn, corn salad, and more—it can be a booger to put up. For starters, there’s more than a passing chance of an encounter with a packsaddle while you are gathering it, and if you don’t know what a packsaddle is you’ve just admitted you haven’t harvested much corn or stripped much fodder. Similarly, after the fodder dried and was pulled by hand for livestock feed, it could cut with a razor’s edge sharpness if one didn’t pay attention. Mostly though, corn was just hard work. Pulling, shucking, silking, removing tops affected by corn ear worms or weevils, and then cutting it off the cob for cooking then canning were all steps in a lengthy process. Or if corn had been allowed to dry on the stalks (normally the case with field cord—we grew Hickory Cane) and was being stored for feed for the hogs and chickens, or maybe to take to a local mill for grinding, you always knew there was excitement connected with a corn crib. If things were just right, you’d have a resident black snake or corn snake hanging around. They produced an adrenalin rush every time you saw them, but they also kept rats and mice under control. Mainly though, the sight of a corn crib to me meant thoughts of shelling corn by hand. Talk about drudgery, although I loved to throw scratch feed to Grandpa’s chickens! Tomatoes were sort of in a class by themselves. Mom put them up in three different ways—tomato juice, whole canned tomatoes, and a sort of part juice/part chunks mixture which was used in soups and stews. They were so versatile and lent themselves to being part of so many dishes—scalloped tomatoes, soup, spaghetti, hearty beef stews, or eaten cold as a side dish—that Mom never felt like she had enough canned. Dad, for his part, took great pride in growing the finest tomatoes of anyone in the county, and even today he regularly points out to me that my plants and what they produce never match what he once did. Far be it from me to argue, although I’m passin’ proud of my Cherokee Purples and three types of tommytoes (and a half dozen other species are doing quite nicely as well). August saw the brunt of the canning work, and at that season our house always had savory smells running through it. The kitchen was invariably hot—we hadn’t so much as heard of home air conditioning—but you knew that of an evening time it would cool down and those twilight hours on the back porch formed moments of remembered magic. The most important putting up effort of September focused on apples. Dad had a small but meticulously tended and highly productive orchard, with Red and Gold Delicious apples being the featured varieties. When they “came in” the whole family was busy. I loved the picking part—watching bushel baskets fill up with satisfying rapidity as the fruit which could be reached from the ground was gathered. Then came step ladders for higher-up apples, but my favorite part of the process was the two-man effort where one used a long cane pole or stick to break the apple loose and the second (usually me) endeavored to catch it as it fell. I deemed myself the Willie Mays of apple orchards. Like green beans, canned apples were a staple for us. Of course we also stored carefully selected, unblemished ones fresh in the coolest part of the basement. Likewise, we dried a couple or three bushels, cutting them in thin slices and letting the bright sun of Indian Summer remove the juice. The results would to be used in fried apple pies and to make sauce for stack cakes. The cusp between summer and fall was also the time to gather pumpkins, kushaws, and other winter squash. Only those which were unblemished went into the basement (at our house) or the cannery (at Grandma’s). Ones with signs of rot were fed to the hogs. Cabbage could be stored away, carefully surrounded by straw with special care taken to be sure no cabbages touch, beneath corn shocks. Turnips were treated the same way. Dried items were placed in bags made of cheese cloth or, in the case of hot peppers, the whole plant was simply pulled up, hung from a convenient rafter beneath a tin roof, and allowed to dry. Peppers, once dried in this fashion, would keep all winter and could be used for seasoning as needed. Putting up time was a busy time, but never so much there were no hours left for fishing. Virtually every day, once my morning chores were completed, I’d board my trusty bike or maybe just rely on shank’s mare to take me to the creek. I fished two streams for the most part—Deep Creek and its major feeder, Indian Creek—and then as now I knew them intimately. Just last week I spent a day on the latter and, once in the creek, never saw another fishermen and only a handful of souls. That despite the fact that on the trailhead getting to and from this small stream which has always haunted my dreams, tubers and dawdlers were thicker than fleas on a dog’s back. I might also add that I caught dozens of trout and brought home a mess which Dad and I thoroughly enjoyed. They were all dressed up in corn meal dinner jackets, another fine use for corn, and fried. With sides of roasted potatoes fresh from the garden (and I forgot to mention both spuds and sweet potatoes above, but both were part of the family gardening enterprise), crowder peas, and fried squash (again with corn meal being used to coat the sliced sections), we ate like kings. Slices of black walnut cake finished it off. About all that was missing was the tray of assorted pickles which always graced Grandma’s table, and I reckon it’s been thirty years since I savored a sampling of pickled watermelon rind. Putting up was and is a lot of work, but the end results make every drop of perspiration, every encounter with a packsaddle, and all the plowing, planting, hand weeding, hoeing, and harvesting worth it. When my good wife makes a fine pot of soup this winter using various things I put up, with ground venison forming a base and a golden brown pone of cornbread on the side, my satisfaction at the moment will be matched by the sense of accomplishment in knowing I made do with what I grew. That’s always been an integral part of the mountain way of life. A PUTTING UP TIME DINNER MENUFirst of all, for those of you who think dinner is eaten in the evening, such is not the case in the mountains. The three meals of the day, in the order they are consumed, are breakfast, dinner, and supper. We don’t have lunch and never have, so you can count me out of any participation in a “lunch bunch.” With that out of the way, let’s turn to a typical August dinner menu, and the first thing you might realize after you finish reading the dishes offered below is that meat is lacking. In that regard, see my note on streaked meat at the end. FRIED OKRA (OR SQUASH)Slice the vegetable into convenient pieces—no more than a quarter inch thick in the case of squash or a half inch thick for okra. Drench in a thoroughly beaten egg (this is easily done in a bowl which can first used to beat up the egg). Coat with stone-ground corn meal, dust with pepper, salt a bit, and fry in a cast iron spider using bacon grease or that from streaked meat. The grease should be piping hot before the vegetables are placed in the pan. Fry until golden brown, turning as needed. Allow to drain a bit on paper towels and keep warm in the oven. SLICED TOMATOESAllow one medium-size tomato per person (although my good wife can eat two without a second thought, and since free-range chickens can half starve themselves to death feasting on tomatoes, I reckon that’s acceptable). Remove the core, and if you want to be really nice, peel ‘em before slicing. Momma always took that bit of extra trouble and I like peeled maters best. If you want to be upscale and hoity-toity, add some virgin olive oil and fresh basil. FRESH CORNCorn straight from the garden, and the closer you pick it to dinner time the sweeter the taste, was always prepared at our house in one of two ways—what Mom called “fried” corn although stewing might have been a more accurate term, or on the cob. For the latter, a short dunking in boiling water is all that is required, and for goodness sake don’t “bile” it to death. In truth corn on the cob is delicious eaten without any cooking at all. For “fried” corn, cut it off the cob with a sharp kitchen knife, being sure to scrape each cob afterward to get all that wonderful goodness. You’ll need at least an ear per person and for my tastes, two ears isn’t stretching things one bit. Place the corn in a hot frying pan which holds a bit of bacon or streaked meat for grease. Cook briefly and try to finish just as lunch is to be served. I personally like to cut sliced tomatoes up in the corn and eat them together, but that’s just an individual quirk (taken straight from Grandpa Joe). GREEN BEANSString and break your beans in advance, and mountain folks ain’t into this fancy tender-crisp stuff. When you cook green beans, you cook them the holy way. That is to say, you cook the hell right out of them. That means putting the prepared beans in a big sauce pan (or for a large bunch of folks use a pot), adding plenty of water, putting in a couple of slices of streaked meat, and bringing to a rolling boil. As soon as the pot is boiling merrily, reduce the heat and let the beans simmer for an hour or so. They’ll take up wonderful flavor from the streaked meat, and since it has plenty of salt, don’t add salt until serving (let each person season to taste). CROWDER PEASShell the peas (this can be done in advance, with the uncooked peas being kept in the refrigerator until ready to cook) and prepare the same way given above for green beans. It will also work with limas, and for that matter, with any type of dried beans which have first been soaked in cold water for a few hours. The dried beans will take longer to cook. STEAM FRIED CABBAGEChop up cabbage into small pieces or chunks and place in a large frying pan in which a couple of pieces of streaked meat have been fried. Drain part of the grease and save, but leave enough to keep cabbage from sticking. Cover the pan with a lid and cook on low heat until the cabbage is fully tender. If you wish, crumble a bit of cooked streaked meat on top before serving. JIM’S NEVER FAIL STOVE TOP ROASTED POTATOESThis is the one recipe offered here where I cheat a bit. The cheating involves cooking Irish potatoes (leave the jackets on) in a microwave to the point where they are almost done. Remove them from the microwave, allow to cool to the point you can handle them, and slice in sections no thicker than a quarter inch. Set aside momentarily. Place just enough oil (you can used canola oil, or, to continue on what may by now be a noticeable pattern, use grease from fried streaked meat) in the pan to prevent any sticking. It should be piping hot when you add the potatoes. Keep the heat up pretty high and turn as the potatoes brown. Once they are nice and crusty on both sides remove from the pan for serving. The above fixin’s, accompanied by a big pone of cornbread (sometimes liberally laced with cracklin’s) and a glass of cold milk or ice tea, were standard fare on our dinner table as a boy. They would be buttressed by a dish holding various types of pickles and relishes, and dessert would likely be leftover fried fruit pies from breakfast, a berry cobbler, or cold slices of watermelon and cantaloupe. STREAKED MEATWhile we often did not have a meat dish as such, you could always get a bit of streaked meat (also called side meat, fat back, salt pork, and other terms) from one of the dishes. Also, both Mom and Grandma Minnie would usually set a saucer of fried streaked meat, cooked to the point where the fat portion of it was fully crisp, on the table. It was so salty a little bit went a long way, but my was it good. It formed the base for a lot of mountain dishes, and it should be noted that pork and chicken were the main meats for Appalachian folks. Seldom indeed did they dine on beef, although diary products—milk, butter, and buttermilk—loomed large in their diet. The above fare may seem a bit heavy on the cholesterol, but I would simply conclude by stating that both my paternal grandparents lived until they were around 90, Mom lived well into her 80s, and next week we will celebrate Dad’s 101st birthday. I suspect they could eat this kind of fare with regularity because they knew the meaning of hard, physical labor. Furthermore, I can assure you that there was no lack of a solid work ethic in any of them, they had a keenly developed sense of using to the fullest extent that which the good earth gave you, and they took pride in all they did. Well to the forefront in that pride were shelves bulging, ready for the hard times of winter, thanks to putting up efforts in the dog days of summer. Thank you for subscribing to the
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