September 2008 NewsletterJim Casada
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www.jimcasadaoutdoors.com September’s SplendorAs this newsletter is being written I am once more, as I have been much of the summer, in my boyhood highland homeland. You can already feel the first hints of autumn in the mountain air, with just a hint of delicious chill at dawn and dusk. Cardinal flowers, Joe Pye weed, and ironweed are blooming in colorful splendor, and already some of the first leaves to turn—dogwood, sassafras, and sumac—serve as harbingers of fall. Each of those examples of early leaf color take me directly back to boyhood days, and as is so often my wont in these monthly ramblings, they involve fond memories. As doubtless some of you who were privileged to know experiences in adolescence similar to mine, dogwood is an exceedingly hard wood which lends itself to fashioning a fine slingshot. In those halcyon days of youth I never passed a dogwood without giving it the once over checking to see if there might be a fork with just the right angle and size for crafting a slingshot. I might also note that we used dogwood in a quite different way. A good piece of dogwood, carefully seasoned and shaped, makes a first-rate wedge for splitting wood. Dogwood is that hard and costs mountains folks absolutely nothing but a bit of elbow grease, whereas a steel wedge could be dangerous, was affected by rust, and cost cash money. Sassafras was noteworthy for the its bark. Sometime during the period between leaf fall and the budding-up time of spring, we would always grub out a number of sassafras sprouts for the bark. This was dried and stored for its aroma, as a way of keeping insects out of seeds which had been saved for the next year’s planting, for use in flavoring home-made candy, and most of all as the basis for “sass” tea. The latter was considered an all-purpose tonic and the perfect “pick me up” at the end of winter. Sumac garnered less attention, but anyone worth his salt when it came to woodsmanship knew that deer ate the plant’s bright red berries. The berries were also used to make a refreshing drink with a somewhat citrus-like taste, and Mom always dried a few of the clusters to use as Christmas decorations atop the mantle or in dining table centerpieces. Of course there was plenty of work to be done during the month as well, particularly as late garden crops matured, apples and pears ripened, hogs were being fattened for slaughter in November, and autumn vegetables—cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, turnips, mustard greens, radishes, and lettuce—were being tended. I particularly remember apples, because we had a small orchard and there was nothing more delightful than to come home from school and pick the biggest Red Delicious I could find from the tree and chomp down into juiciness which would almost choke you. The apples were a delight, but they also meant a lot of work. Mom’s annual goal was to can 200 quarts of apples, and in addition we dried a lot more for use in fried pies, applesauce stack cakes, and the like. The choicest apples, carefully set aside by hand, would be stored in Grandma Minnie’s cannery and in our basement. They would last, provided you went through them once a week and sorted out any apples which were going bad, until towards the end of winter. Pumpkins; winter squash such as cashews, candy roasters, butternut squash, and acorn squash; black walnuts; hot peppers to be dried and strung; green beans (to be turned into leather britches); October beans and field peas; and chinquapins were also gathered and stored. By month’s end Grandpa Joe and I would be casting longing eyes at persimmons beginning to show orange hues, knowing that within a week or two they would ripen and begin to fall. That translated to competition with all sorts of creatures—foxes, ‘coons, ‘possums, bears, and deer—to get our share of this particularly sweet example of nature’s bounty. If you’ve never eaten a properly made persimmon pudding, suffice it to say, as Grandpa put it, “there ain’t nothin’ quite like it to satisfy a man’s stomach and soul.” There was one striking feature of September which I was denied during my youth. This was the joy of a real popcorn popper of a dove shoot. We just didn’t have enough big fields and large-scale agriculture to produce doves in large numbers. Mind you, I’ve since made up for that bit of boyhood deprivation. In fact, I greeted September this year with a truly memorable Labor Day dove shoot (the season always opens here on either Labor Day or the first Saturday in the month). I’ve been singularly privileged to participate in a family shoot (not my family but one with which I’ve become good friends) which dates all the way back to 1949 and now spans four generations. The Turner family, to put it the best way I know how, have got the dove equation figured out to a “T.” This year I spent a bit of conversation time with the patriarch of the family, Gene, and his wife, both the day before the shoot and the afternoon following it. As is always the case, we talked about food, farm crops, and the pleasures of a life lived close to the good earth. I took them some of the last blueberries from my prodigiously productive bushes and a half bushel of Stayman apples. In return I came home with a jar of a real delicacy, pickled figs, two little containers of fig preserves, and some rooted flowers to add to one of my beds. Then there’s the delicious memory of a post-dove shoot meal. Kerry Turner, Gene’s daughter-in-law, had prepared one of my all-time favorites, a chicken bog, and she has it down to an art. A bog, for the uninitiated among you, is a rice dish prepared with chicken (or some other meat), kielbasa, stock, and plenty of black pepper. The one Kerry makes is so tasty it would, as Grandpa put it, “bring tears of pure joy to a man with a glass eye.” Accompanied by a bevy of other culinary delights, with a scuppernong pie made by Johnsie Turner (Gene’s wife) to top things off, the day sent me home with a limit of birds, a supper which was the stuff of delicious memories, and yet another perfect start to a fall filled with hunting. While actually afield, Roy Turner (Gene’s son and the third generation of the family involved in the hunt) and his boys, Joey and Michael, provided me with an endless source of delight. I’ve seen the boys grow from the point where they couldn’t keep still and were fetching downed birds when scarcely out of diapers to quite competent wing shots who now understand what their father is talking about when he calls opening day “Christmas in September.” If you’ve been privileged to be a part of a shoot such as the one with the Turners, you are a fortunate soul. Such outings lie at the very heart of what hunting life in the South is all about. I’ll finish by saying that today, having returned to the mountains after that wonderful dove shoot to be with my elderly father, I sort of relived a bit of both the near and distant past. Morning found me gathering and shucking the final crop of corn from the garden I raised in the same spot my father cultivated from the age of 33 until he finally put away his hoe four years ago at the age of 95. It is now processed and frozen, promise of many a fine winter’s meal in the months to come. While doing this I paused a couple of times to eat some ground cherries, and twice I rested and enjoyed a bunch of Concord grapes so full of sugar they seemed like candy. Now if I could only supplement them by finding a huge vine of fox grapes growing along some creek and turn them into a tangy, toothsome jelly and educates a cathead biscuit in a most remarkable way. Still, our lunch featured doves I shot on Labor Day, and a new recipe proved mighty fine. I’ll finish by sharing what I did. For starters I removed the dove breasts from the bone in a process I learned years ago. While doing this I had several slices of bacon frying in a skillet. Once the bacon was done I set it aside and used the hot grease to brown the dove breasts, which had been coated in flour. The breasts were set aside as well and the drippings, with the addition of flour and mile, became a pan of gravy. Then I added the breasts, crumbled the bacon, and covered it all to simmer for 45 minutes (this meant moist, tender dove meat). Just before serving I added some leftover chicken bog, although a side serving of rice topped with the dove/bacon/gravy mix would have worked just as well. How I wish Grandpa Joe could have joined Dad and me at the table, but Dad’s comment judging the dish “right tasty” (and it was) served as praise enough. It’s a dish I’ll prepare again and a moment to store away, like so many others from Septembers past, in memory’s fond vaults. Thank you for subscribing to the
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