December 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
Things I Remember
. . . From Many A December
The Christmas season brings warm
feelings, closeness to family and friends, good cheer, and most of all,
at least for me, a flood of fond memories. Accordingly, rather than
launch into one of my typical essays of loosely connected thoughts on
some specific topic, I thought it fitting to share some of the many
memories the season has given me. Most, although by no means all,
revolve around outdoor themes, and we will conclude with a few recipes
which evoke some of my strongest recollections—the wonderful fare
provided by Mom, Grandma Minnie, and a whole host of aunts.
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We always cut our own tree, and it
wasn’t one of those perfectly shaped, tree farm products. Instead,
we found a naturally growing Virginia pine, one Dad and I had been
scouting for since the opening day of rabbit season, and on a Sunday
afternoon the entire family would make an outing to collect the
pine. It cost nothing, brought an abundance of excitement and good
cheer, and provided the sort of simple, meaningful pleasure you
won’t find in a big box store or at a corner lot where trees are
being sold.
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Much of our decorative material came
from nature as well, and on the same cost-free basis as the tree. We
gathered berry-laden limbs of holly from “she” holly trees (like the
persimmon, the holly tree has male and female forms); cut hemlock
limbs for wreathes and the like; took limbs from honey locust trees
and adorned every thorn with gum drops, collected nuts, shells, pine
cones, and other items which were worked into wreathes and
centerpieces; and always had some mistletoe. I particularly enjoyed
the process involved in obtaining the mistletoe, since it was done
by plinking with a .22 rifle. Incidentally, as a quirky aside, it
has always seemed strange to me that a parasite (which mistletoe is)
is associated with kissing.
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The carefree days off from school—we
always got a full two weeks of vacation at Christmas—were special
throughout my boyhood. Every day, except Sundays, would be devoted
to hunting. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays found rabbits the
main focal point of the quest, while Mondays, Wednesdays, and
Fridays (set aside to give the beagles a break) would involved
squirrel hunting or an old-fashioned mixed bag outing. Since I’ve
always been something on a misanthrope (that’s one of the $10 words
which means “loner”), these mixed bag days were ones I cherished.
I’d hunt from dawn to dusk, fortified at noon by three sandwiches
and some type of sweet, and snacking in the afternoon on Red or
Golden Delicious apples from our little orchard on the hillside
below the house. On one of my most memorable days of this sort, and
you need to realize that all my mixed bag hunting was done within
walking distance of home, I killed two squirrels, a rabbit, a
bobwhite, and a woodcock. I also had a “go” at ground swatting a
grouse, but somehow, in a development which perplexes me to this
day, I missed.
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One Christmas Eve I’ll always
treasure involved a morning bird hunt with my father-in-law. Ann and
I had only been married a year and a half, and I think it fair to
say that I was held in something less than esteem by my in-laws.
That changed, at least in the eyes of my father-in-law, with just a
few hours of hunting. This was the late 1960s, the final years of
the golden age of bobwhites, and we hunted with a borrowed pointer
on the farm of a good friend of my father-in-law. The pointer wasn’t
anything special to look at, and he wasn’t particularly stylish on
point. But he epitomized the description “meat dog,” and there was
meat aplenty to be found. The dog located one covey after another,
and my father-in-law produced flying feathers aplenty.
I was severely handicapped thanks to being equipped with the only
shotgun I owned at the time, a single-shot 20 gauge choked tighter
than a miser’s purse, so most of the birds we took fell to his
scarred old semi-auto which had not so much as a hint ob bluing
left. He would give me the first shot then proceed to kill two or
even three birds from the covey with impressive regularity. After a
few hours of this we were far closer than we had been before, and a
feast of quail sealed the deal right up until his death only a few
years afterwards. It was the only time we ever hunted together, but
it remains my most memorable bird hunt.
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As those of you who have been
receiving these scribblings for some time no doubt realize, my
paternal grandfather was, to use the mountain term, “quair.” That
had nothing to do with sexual orientation but rather is the quaint
high country way of describing someone whose approach to life is a
bit eccentric, or to revert to Smoky mountain English, someone who
is a bit sigogglin’ or catawampus. Grandpa Joe dearly loved
Christmas, and if you could get him off by himself in a storytelling
mode, he would reminisce about Old Christmas, which was celebrated
in early January instead of on December 25, recall Yule logs, smack
his lips in savory memories of syllabub, and generally do verbally
what I am presently doing in print; namely, call back yesteryear.
Grandpa never had much “cash money,” but what little he did have was
willingly and delightfully spent to get some small gift for each of
his many grandchildren. It might be nothing more than a pair of
socks, but the spirit behind it would have trumped the riches of
Donald Trump. In addition, he always had the capacious pockets of
his jacket filled with stick candy—peppermint, horehound (which I
didn’t like), wintergreen, and other flavors—and he made a point of
buying several pounds of the big red California grapes we saw only
at that season.
No adult, with the possible exception of Mom, took greater delight
in opening gifts. He would smile his quiet smile, one which spread
laughter lines across his face in much the same way lines of blue
will delineate the drainage of a mountain stream on a topo map, and
dutifully open and put aside various presents of practical clothing.
There would likely be a suit of long johns, maybe some
Sunday-go-to-meeting wear, a pair of overalls, and the like. But the
highlight of every Christmas, for him, came when he got to a big,
rectangular box holding is favorite chewing tobacco, Apple Twist. A
good chew was his one vice (he despised alcoholic spirits and
wouldn’t even touch a “dope,” which is what he called soft drinks).
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My favorite Christmas story, and it
is one I did not experience personally, traced back to my father’s
boyhood. As I’ve already hinted, Grandpa Joe and Grandma Minnie were
mighty poor, at least in terms of worldly goods, throughout their
lives. That was doubly the case when Dad was a small boy and they
lived on a hardscrabble farm on Juneywhank Branch, back of beyond in
what is now the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Dad wanted a
pocket knife in the worst sort of way, but the simple truth of the
matter was that his parents couldn’t afford it. They did the best
they could and in his stocking was a piece of hard candy in the
shape of a folding knife.
It was a bitter disappointment to Dad, and that’s no doubt why he
always saw to it that my brother and me, and later his grandsons,
got knives for Christmas. He cherished what many would vote for as
the ultimate tool, and even today, in the fullness of his years at
the age of 98, you won’t catch him without a razor-sharp pocket
knife in his pants.
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Finally, there are the culinary
memories, and those take me straight back to thoughts of Mom and
Grandma Minnie. They were wizards in the kitchen, and at Christmas
you could count on delicacies which we didn’t savor at any other
time of the year. As those who know me personally can readily vouch,
my profile isn’t exactly that of a fellow who could hide behind a
three-quarter-inch water pipe. I’ve always had a keen sweet tooth,
and my, oh my, was it satisfied at Christmas.
Mom’s specialty in the dessert line was an applesauce cake. She
baked them before Thanksgiving, blending applesauce into the batter
along with raisins, black walnut kernels, and sometimes (though not
always) candied cherries. This would age and mellow, kept moist with
periodic infusions of wine or apple cider, until it was pure
perfection by late December. She also baked lots of oatmeal cookies,
liberally lacing them with raisins and black walnuts. They were
ready at hand any time you felt peckish and formed standard fare in
a hidey hole in by Duxbak jacket whenever I set out hunting.
Grandma Minnie likewise made good use of apples in her baking. Her
piece de resistance, at least to my way of thinking, was an
apple stack cake. Six layers of wonderful cake, with each one
separated by spiced applesauce which mixed, mingled, and eventually
married the cake in a melt-in-you-mouth form of perfection, awaited
those who dined at her holiday table. But her use of apples (our
most commonly used and plentiful fruit) didn’t stop there. The
family had always dried a portion of the harvest and she could make
fried apple pies using those reconstituted dried apples which were a
joy to behold and a pure pleasure to eat. Hot off the griddle and
anointed with a slab of real butter, they were absolutely
irresistible.
Of course there was plenty of fine fare
leading up to the desserts, and a fair amount of what we ate involved
foodstuffs you don’t encounter much anymore. To my way of thinking, we
are poorer for not dining on cracklin’ cornbread made with stone-ground
meal, ham and hominy; home-cured country ham accompanied by redeye gravy
with cathead biscuits; candy roasters (a winter squash); leather
britches (dried green beans); peach and pumpkin leather; biscuit bread
(biscuit dough cooked in a pan rather than cut into individual
biscuits); a regiment of pickles made from things like watermelon rinds,
peaches, Jerusalem artichokes, and okra; and backbones and ribs. As this
suggests, our meat dishes ran heavily towards pork, something which I
now know was a long-standing situation in the mountains. But we would
have turkey, or more likely, two or three hens, during the holidays as
well.
I remember chocolate-covered cherries;
those huge, sticky raisins which came in clusters and were called seeded
Muscats; branches of kumquats, which to my knowledge have no culinary
use, mixed in with the citrus; barrels of mixed nuts where the Brazil
nuts went by a distinctly racist name I’ll forbear to use here; and
enough hard candy to provide a world class belly ache. There were far
more of the “cooking” apples around then than seems to be the case
today—Limbertwigs, Jonathans, Winesaps, Staymans, and others—and the
citrus was so special that the women folk even utilized the peel. Orange
peel went into a cranberry-based preparation, lemon rind found its way
into lemon chess pies, and sometimes even a bit of grapefruit zest was
used.
I now realize that we weren’t exactly
well off, and periodically Dad reminds me of the terrible spot I put him
in when I “volunteered” him for a five dollar donation for some cause or
other connected with school. At that point in time, in our family, five
dollars was an appreciable amount of money. After all, the house I grew
up in, four bedrooms and perhaps 2500 square feet with a basement, with
an acre of land thrown in for good measure, cost my parents all of
$2500. However, we had more than some, and since precious few in the
mountains had much, I was blissfully unaware of the truth of our family
financial situation. All I knew was that we ate well and lived well, and
at Christmas we lived wonderfully well. Truth be told, and putting money
matters aside, we were rich!
My memories are rich ones as well, and
they soothe and sustain me at this season even as I hope my
granddaughter will someday have memories of her own to cherish. No doubt
she will, but they won’t have the same closeness to the land or anything
like the same degree of simplicity. Still, we somehow got along without
a television, made do with a wood-burning cook stove for my early years
of life, raised a fair amount of what we ate and shot or caught a good
bit more of it, and lived a good life. It was never better than at
Christmas, and I hope you have some memories of the same sort to call
back at this season, and here’s hoping that each and every one of you
who are readers have a joyous holiday season. If I can help out with a
book or two for someone’s gift list, by all means
let
me know.
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SMOKY MOUNTAIN STACK CAKE
4 cups plain flour
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon soda
2 teaspoons baking powder
¾ cup lard or shortening
1 cup sugar
1 cup molasses
1 cup milk
3 eggs
Sift flour, salt, soda, and baking
powder. Cream the shortening, then add sugar, a bit at a time, blending
thoroughly. Add molasses and mix. Add milk and eggs, one at a time,
beating until smooth. Pour 1/3-inch deep in greased 9-inch pans (keeping
the layers of cake thin is important) and bake until golden brown. When
cool, slather apple filling between each layer. The filling can be plain
applesauce, but dried apples cooked into a sauce and slightly spiced are
better.
FRIED APPLE PIES
No dessert more truly reflects mountain
days and high country ways that fried apple pies. Cooked in an iron
skillet, they were made from stewed dried apples, although occasionally
some other fruit or perhaps jam would be used as filling. The apples
would usually be slow stewed with some brown sugar used to sweeten them.
The dough was just simple biscuit dough, rolled thin into a circular
shape. Stewed apples would be added and the dough folded over to make a
half moon shape, then crimped with a fork before being introduced to a
hot iron spider. Eaten hot with butter or cold (they were one of my
favorite after school snacks), fried pies were an index to pure
pleasure.
SQUIRREL AND SWEET TATERS
This was a staple on our family table
throughout the fall and winter, holiday season or not. We all loved the
meat, I took great delight in providing the squirrels, and Mom could
work wonders. She had several ways of preparing bushytails, but my
favorite was when she parboiled the squirrels in water to which she had
added a bit of soda, removed them and washed off the soda residue, and
then baked them. She would dot the baking squirrels with a pat or two of
butter shortly before taking them from the oven. With a side dish of
baked sweet potatoes, cut open and swimming in the middle with more
butter, it was a feast fit for a country king.
A variation on this, commonly done with
young, tender squirrels, was to fry them and use the leavings to make
milk gravy. Sometimes Mom would tear the meat from an especially tender
squirrel, chop it fine, and add it to the gravy. The result, poured
across a big sweet potato and with a couple of back legs and a back or
two from another squirrel, made a might filling and fulfilling meal.
APPLE QUAIL
Sticking to the varied uses of apples,
here’s an unusual and to my taste, wonderful way to prepare the petit
prince of game birds. Incidentally, to my wife’s way of thinking, and I
find it difficult to argue with her opinion on this, quail is nature’s
bounty at its best.
¼ cup flour
½ teaspoon salt or to taste
1/8 teaspoon paprika
6 whole quail
2 tablespoons butter
¼ cup chopped sweet onion
1 teaspoon chopped fresh parsley
¼ teaspoon dried thyme (or ½ teaspoon fresh thyme)
1 cup apple juice
Mix flour, salt and paprika; lightly
flour quail pieces. Melt butter in heavy frying pan and brown quail.
Push quail to one side of pan. Add onion and sauté until tender. Add
parsley, thyme and apple juice. Stir to mix well and spoon juice over
quail while bringing all to a boil. Reduce heat, cover and simmer until
quail are tender (about an hour). Serve quail atop a bed of rice with
sautéed or stewed apples on the side.
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