I
grew up poor. However, I never ever went hungry. There was always plenty of
good food, most of it homegrown, home-canned, home-cooked. If I ever complained
to my mother about the food (which was usually if there were no cookies because
we couldn’t afford the sugar) Mother always replied “Venn du hungrich bist, den
schmeck auch jelly-brut gut:” (If you are hungry then also jelly bread tastes
good.) And jelly on top of home baked bread was always available.
I
have no memory of ever eating a meal (or even a hamburger) in a restaurant
until I was in high school. We
always had plenty of vegetables, almost all of which we grew ourselves in our
large garden. Almost every meal featured potatoes. Potatoes were so common that
we had a joke that if there were no potatoes on the table at a meal other than
breakfast one was not required to say grace because without potatoes there
could not be a real meal.
Our
meat came from hogs, cattle, chicken, turkeys, an occasional sheep, goat or
rabbit, which we raised ourselves. Our fried chicken was always fresh as Mother
would catch a fryer or two, cut its head off with a hatchet, batter it in flour
and fry it in lard. Friends by the name of Schwausch would come to assist with
butchering the hogs. The hog’s throats were cut, bled, immersed in scalding
water and the hair scaled off. Then the cuts were made, the intestines and
stomach cleaned and stuffed with sausage. The ham and sausages were smoked in
our own smoke house. One of my jobs was to keep plenty of tree bark smoking so
the flavor would really penetrate the meat. Most of the meat was cut off the bones to make sausage, but
even those bones were salvaged, cooked and served with mustard on top and
mashed potatoes with beet juice over them as the side dishes.
Fish
were a rare treat. My father and Uncle Otto would catch over a hundred small
perch, which we deep-fried.
(Always outside over a corn-cob fueled fire.) Once in a while an itinerant
fisherman would stop by and at very low cost sell us a couple trout or more
likely a big string of catfish. If my memory is correct the first time I saw
shrimp was when I was about 20 years if age.
Vegetables
were in abundance. The earliest crops each spring were those we did not can
- like radishes, onions, lettuce
followed by mustard greens, spinach, turnips, sweet potatoes and carrots, Eaten
fresh or canned by the multitudes were string beans (the plants growing up the
slender bamboo poles along side them) peas, corn, cucumbers, tomatoes, okra,
kohlrabi, and beets.
Of
course there was plenty of fruit (either from our own trees or from neighbors
and relatives) I still see my mother sitting on our back porch, peeling away
enough for literally hundreds of fruit jars to be filled with peaches,
cherries, pears, blackberries, apricots, figs, and pickles.
There
was always plenty of fresh milk, butter, homemade bread and gravy. Desserts
were for special occasions like Sunday or birthdays. I have not a single memory
of wine ever being at the table, but dad did enjoy homebrewed beer, especially
during prohibition. At Christmas time Dad (much to Mother’s disapproval) would
buy a quart of Four Roses bourbon and we would have Christmas eggnog with all
the fresh home-made whipped cream the cup could possibly hold. I do not
remember ever having even one bottle of soda or cola in my home until I was in
college.
Of course, this
was all long before television, cell phones (we did not even have a line phone)
or computers. There were no after school baseball games, dance lessons, or
baby-sitting jobs. So it is that my memories of food enjoyed while growing up
are all warm and fuzzy. They are filled with images of our large family
gathered around the table (I am one of 9 kids) saying the table prayer (often
in German), then passing around those wonderful dishes of fresh nutritious
food, enjoying every bite and
trying our best to keep our mouths shut while we energetically chewed.
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