January 2008 NewsletterJim Casada
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www.jimcasadaoutdoors.com January JoysA few days back I enjoyed the rare opportunity of shaking hands with the past, and it all revolved around Robert Ruark, the man I consider America’s greatest outdoor writer. Ruark was born on December 29, 1915, and each year a group of devoted Ruark fans gather on that date to lift a glass in his memory and share thoughts on his contributions to the literature of sport. This year’s event was held in Southport, N.C., the setting for most of his “The Old Man and the Boy” stories, and I was privileged to be guest speaker for the celebration. That was thanks to the fact that the book Ruark Remembered: By the Man Who Knew Him Best has just been released. Written by Ruark’s long-time secretary, Alan Ritchie, the biography was completed almost four decades ago. It then languished in obscurity until some Ruark fans from the Southport area came into possession of it. I was fortunate enough to be asked to edit the work, which I was delighted to do. Noted professional hunter Harry Selby contributed a Foreword and George Saffo, who knew Ruark personally, wrote an Epilogue. It was a major undertaking but I’m pleased with the finished product. Incidentally, that’s the signal for a shameless commercial. I have the 284-page book, which is lavishly illustrated with some four dozen photos (several of them in color and a number of them never previously published), in stock. It sells for $40 plus $5 shipping and handling and can be ordered through my Web site. With that crass commercialism out of the way, I need to explain a bit more about shaking hands with the past. While in Southport I visited the house which once belonged to Ruark’s maternal grandfather, “Captain Ned.” It is generally thought he was the model upon whom the “Old Man” was based, but in truth that loveable character was a composite of both of Ruark’s grandfathers. The house is in the process of being remodeled, but to my delight you could still see the crawl space beneath it where Ruark spent rainy days amidst sporting treasures, the grounds till sport the massive magnolia tree where young Bobby got into big trouble for shooting a mockingbird, and the house is still painted the distinctive yellow color of which Ruark wrote. Along with that visit to the “Boy’s” old stomping grounds, one which held great meaning for me, I had the opportunity to meet half a dozen members of the Ruark family (most if not all of them descendants of Ruark’s uncles). I also met a couple of folks who had known him personally; chatted with Texan Larry Cheek, who visited Ruark’s gravesite in Spain a few months back; and in general thoroughly enjoyed myself. All of the above is by way of prelude to the essence of this month’s column, which deals with some of the special joys the month of January can hold. Of the dozens of “The Old Man and the Boy” pieces which Ruark wrote, one of my favorites has always been the story entitled “Everybody Took Sick but Me.” In it, Ruark describes a period in his boyhood when a flu epidemic struck and school was dismissed. In his case this happened in December, but during my boyhood there were at least three separate occasions, all of them falling in January, when I experienced similar circumstances. Looking back on those happy times (at least for me, since I didn’t get the flu and was free to hunt or just ramble about in the fields and woods on my own) got me to thinking about just what January meant to me as a boy. In my family it always started the same way, because you ate special dishes on January 1 (the day this newsletter is being written) in order to prepare for the year that lay ahead. Over much of the South those special dishes include “Hoppin’ John” (a dish of rice and black-eye peas), collard greens, and hog jowls. All are considered symbols of good luck. In our family, we at a bit differently, but Mom was quite diligent in seeing that we clung closely to mountain culinary traditions. We had black-eyed peas, always cooked with what Mom called streaked meat (it’s the same thing as fatback or salt pork, but in this case it always had two or three streaks of lean between layers of fat), which were supposed to represent prosperity in the form of pennies. Somehow I’ve missed the prosperity train, but then as now properly prepared black-eyed peas made might fine eating. They would be accompanied not by collard greens but by mixed mustard and turnip greens, again cooked with some streaked meat and with a couple of turnips diced up to go with them. Mom said the greens also symbolized monetary good fortune, although in this case they represented bills instead of coins. Along with these vegetable dishes we always had some type of pork. Most often it came in the form of backbones-and-ribs, although I can also remember country ham with red-eye gravy and on one or two occasions, the real delicacy of pork tenderloin. Just to make sure we got a full ration of pork, there would also be cracklin’ cornbread. We’d round it all off with some kind of sweet—maybe some applesauce cake if we were fortunate enough to have some left from the Christmas baking, or else fried fruit pies Mom often fixed for breakfast. All of this was squarely in keeping with mountain food traditions, since in the Smokies the main meat on most everyone’s table throughout the winter months was pork (supplemented by game on a regular basis). Much of the fare associated with pork, such as vegetable dishes cooked with streaked meat and liberal use of lard in baking, was a cavalcade of cholesterol. But everyone worked hard and if there were health downsides, we didn’t know about them. Come to think of it, I never heard of cholesterol until long after I was grown. Suitably fortified with Mom’s fine fare, whether on New Year’s Day or at any other time during the month, I was ready to head off for a day in the woods. On a typical outing I’d stuff my hand-me-down Duxbak hunting coat with three sandwiches (one of which was always a “dessert” sandwich of either peanut butter and jelly or butter and brown sugar), a couple of Golden Delicious apples from our orchard, some hard candy, a fistful of nuts, and a huge chunk of Mom’s applesauce cake. That might sound like a passel of provender for a boy who wouldn’t have weighed 100 pounds on his best day, but all day hunting burns a bunch of energy and I had no intention of getting peckish. I didn’t carry anything to drink. Dopes (a widely used term for soft drinks) cost money and weighed one down, and in the Smokies there were springs scattered pretty much everywhere. I wouldn’t necessarily drink from them today, but I did as a boy with no discernible negative effects. Interestingly enough, the fare I carried with me when hunting by myself varied appreciably from what we ate when Dad and a couple of his buddies, along with some of the boys who were my best friends, went on an all-day rabbit hunt. Then we would have “store bought” stuff such as Vienna sausages, sardines, potted meat, Saltine crackers, and belly washers. All this was, to be sure, supplemented by some of the same kind of foodstuffs I could get together at home. The difference was that the adults didn’t mind spending a bit of money at whatever crossroads store happened to be handy come lunch time, whereas I seldom had any money and since my hunting relied totally on shank’s mare I couldn’t just drive to a store and get stuff off the shelves. As for the hunting, it was pretty much a mixed bag, take it as it comes deal. I’d almost always be accompanied by whatever beagles we happened to own at the time, the only exceptions being days preceding a “big” hunt. Dad wouldn’t let me work the dogs two days in a row, rightly figuring that two back-to-back sessions of daylight to dusk hunting would be too tiring for them. Funny thing is, it never seemed to be too much for me. That meant rabbits were invariably my primary focus of attention. Lots of times though, fortified by the kind of breakfast I wouldn’t think of eating in today’s reality of a bowl of oatmeal or half a grapefruit starvation rations, I would spend the first couple of hours of the day shivering atop a stump or log at some prime place in the squirrel woods. Only when I got too cold to keep still or when it seemed the bushytails had stopped moving would I head back to the house. There I’d whistle up the dogs and exchange a mature hardwoods setting for broom sedge fields, abandoned farmland, brushy hillsides, and other prime cottontail habitat. A typical day might find me jumping half a dozen rabbits, likely killing one or two on the jump and another or two after the beagles worked their magic (sometimes the races would be quite long, because rabbit hunting with dogs is really a group proposition). Others would tree in groundhog holes or manage to shake the pursuing beagles. At some point in the day I’d likely stumble into a covey or two of quail (I could always count on finding the one on the uplands back behind the house), maybe flush a couple of grouse, and less frequently get a shot at a dove or a woodcock. At day’s end, with light fast giving way to night, I’d trudge wearily homeward. I never thought about getting lost, and it says a lot for my parents’ trust in me and the community at large that they let me make such outings. It’s something most folks wouldn’t let their kids do today, and that’s understandable. There may have been sexual predators, pedophiles, and other unsavory elements around in my boyhood, but if so I never knew about them. A lad like me could walk right through the heart of the town, with a gun cradled in his arm and a pair of beagles on leads, without anyone paying much attention. Similarly, no one except what the locals disparagingly referred to as “Floridiots” (seasonal residents from Florida) posted their property, and those summer visitors weren’t there in the heart of the small game hunting season. It was a simpler time, and as Ruark rightly pointed out, no youngster who was busy hunting and fishing had time to get into trouble or become a juvenile delinquent. Maybe the world in which I grew up was overly innocent, but to my way of thinking it had a lot going for it which is missing today. Two-parent families were the norm, no one condemned hunting or fishing (even if they didn’t participate), welfare was unknown, and even the poorest of folks were proud and understood the value of a good work ethic. Mind you, no such thoughts troubled my youthful mind. I just loved to hunt and fish, and the thought of being lonely never occurred to me. It’s possible that even then I was a misanthrope in the making, and I won’t deny for a minute that I cherish times to myself now every bit as much as I did then. I’d get a full dose of them in those joyful January times when flu closed school, and what a wonder it was to venture out, day after day, not knowing exactly what the game bag might carry at day’s end but with every assurance of an ample measure of pleasure. When I got home for supper, which might be anything from cold cornbread crumbled in milk (back when milk actually still had butterfat which accumulated at the top when a jar set for a time) to rich, savory soup or game from a previous outing, I was invariably deliciously tired. I use the word “deliciously” advisedly, because there’s no other way to describe that bone-weary, satisfied feeling you had when the day’s kill was cleaned and stored in the refrigerator or on the cold back porch. You knew a not soak in the old claw-footed bath tub awaited, enjoyed with a good book in hand, and the end to a perfect day came curled up beneath several layers of cover (we didn’t have heat in the upstairs) with a good book in hand. It might be one of Zane Grey’s Westerns, a selection from the Hardy Boys series, a good mystery such as those by Erle Stanley Gardner or Sax Rohmer, or something on the outdoors from Horace Kephart. On rare occasions I even enjoyed the luxury of a “store bought” copy of Field & Stream (where Ruark’s column, along with Corey Ford’s delightful “Lower Forty” one, appeared) or Outdoor Life. We didn’t have subscriptions to those publications, although we did get Reader’s Digest and the Saturday Evening Post, both of which offered plenty of fine literary fare. Whatever the case, I would read until my eyelids grew heavy, and then turn off the light knowing Dad would awaken me the next morning (he always arose at 5:15 a.m.) for another wonderful day of January joy. As the above suggests, mountain fare was simple, hearty, filling, and mighty tasty. Here are some thoughts on two of my favorite desserts along with a recipe which utilized the rabbits (or squirrels) which were the main items which went into my boyhood game bag. MOM’S APPLESAUCE CAKEInterestingly, the name notwithstanding, the apples in this cake were finely chopped as opposed to being sauce. They always came from apples we grew and stored in a big bin in the basement. 3 eggs Mix eggs, sugar, oil and orange juice in a large bowl. Sift dry ingredients together and add egg mixture. Add vanilla, apples, nuts and coconut and mix well. Bake in a greased and floured tube pan or bundt pan at 325 degrees for an hour and 20 minutes. Leave in pan. Make a sauce to top the cake using one-half cup of butter and one-half cup of buttermilk, one cup of sugar and one-half teaspoon soda. Mix thoroughly, bring to a boil and pour over the cake. Let sit for at least an hour before turning the cake out onto a cake plate. Alternatively, do not make the sauce but splash a bit of wine (or brandy) over the cake to keep it moist. Mom often did this, making the cakes at Thanksgiving and keeping them right through Christmas. I actually preferred those which had been kept this way, getting a weekly anointing with a bit of wine. FRIED FRUIT PIESMom normally used apples for her fried pies, but occasionally she would opt for peaches. In each case the fruit had been dried during the summer and would be stewed before being put into pies. No dessert more truly reflects mountain days and high country winter ways than fried pies. Cooked in an iron skillet, they use biscuit dough and stewed fruit to make a pure delight. The fruit should be stewed until it is very thick. Roll your dough quite thin in a circular shape, add fruit and then fold over into a half moon shape. Crimp the edges with a fork before introducing to a hot iron spider which has been greased with a bit of lard or a piece of fatback. Brown on both sides. Delicious eaten hot with a pat of butter or saved to make a cold snack or field dessert. CROCKPOT BRUNSWICK STEW4 cups chicken broth
(or homemade broth from the Christmas turkey) Place broth in crockpot. Add chopped game, venison, and remaining ingredients. Cook on medium for 6-8 hours or until potatoes and vegetables are tender. Thank you for subscribing to the
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