Saturday, February 19, 2011

Organic food before hippies.





skippy said...


Ernie, I'm wondering. Was home and restaurant food far better back then? I'm guessing from your story and between the home-raised and cured meats, dairy, Mom and her baking, Dad and his spices, fresh horseradish, and all the elbow grease-- it must've been. For example, a real home-made pie is hard to find. Now everything conveniently comes off a truck-- packaged, pre-made, frozen, homogenized, canned, and using microwaves and all.


Skippy, you have no idea how good we ate.....
Sadly, there is a whole generation, or two, that have no idea how good food can be. When I was a kid, we ate whole balanced diets, which included fruit from the orchards and wild picked berries of various kinds. We always had a vegetable garden that was big enough to feed our whole family and most of the neighbors. What was left over from the garden was fed to the cattle, chickens, pigs, rabbits, or ducks. Which also became food in the form of fresh cows milk, and meat. We made our own butter and cheeses. The meats were cured, the orchard was  picked and laid into boxes of straw, and checked periodically The rotten ones were discarded. As you may have heard “One bad apple can ruin the whole barrel”.

The gardens were kept going year around, root vegetables were left in place to be pulled as needed. The hard shelled winter squash, onions, and garlic was put in the building off the woodshed that held the winter food supplies. There were far more out-buildings than houses, but my whole family including aunts and uncles and cousins lived on the farm. The grandparents were respected for their knowledge and experience. They were an endless form of entertainment for me. I would follow them around just to hear their amazing stories. The barn was for the cattle and storing the hay that was grown in the field next to the orchard. The hen house was for the chickens. There was a pig sty and yard. The granary building held all the grain that was fed to the livestock. When money ran short, the wheat was roasted and cooked into mush. The corn was made into meal and baked. Yum! Cornmeal bread with honey and homemade butter! There was always venison for the poaching. Most ranchers thought of deer as part of their herd. Game wardens were not welcomed. Running out of money didn’t mean tough times. It just meant that you did things differently.

The water was piped in from fresh clean spring in the hills. The water was heated in coils in the wood stove to a galvanized tank behind the stove. The tank was riveted together so tightly that it didn’t leak, then neatly painted to match the kitchen walls.

The cordwood was brought in chopped into the woodshed in large chunks to be put directly into the fireplace. Some of the wood was split into two by twos for the wood stove to cook and heat the water with. Woe be unto the kid that used too much hot water, because it came back too slow with only the cook stove to heat it. In cold weather sometimes and extra tub was put on the stove to heat extra hot water for bathes and washing. The washing was done in concrete “sanitary sinks” and a washboard in the laundry room adjoining the pantry room.

The chopping block was a major part of the woodshed, it was usually made out of oak. The wood being chopped on it formed valleys and groves in the wood so even a crooked piece of wood could be stood with the end grain up, making it easy to split. One of the woodshed rules that little kids learned was, to NEVER leave a double-bitted axe sticking in the chopping-block, somebody might fall on it at night while gathering more wood for the fire in the dark. Lamps and candles were NOT allowed in the woodshed. Common sense should tell you that kindling and fire shouldn't be close to each other unless you actually wanted to build a fire. The chopping block and the woodshed were where chickens were killed. The chopping block was always bloody from the chickens, and the wood shed had numerous feathers on the floor and other places, The feathers escaped the feather bucket from the chicken pluckin'. The chicken scalding bucket was kept hot from the kitchen stove top.They were killed and butchered the day that we ate them. There weren't any thing but fresh organic free-range chickens, hatched right there by the mother hens.

We made our own sausage, headcheese, and pickles. A lot of the garden produce was canned in precious Mason jars. Mason jars and crocks were prized possessions. The crocks were used for making corned beef, sauerkraut, and various pickles. Sausage patties were fried and laid up in the crocks between layers of hot lard and stored in a cool place. When it came time to eat them they were scooped out and put back in a frying pan to heat back up. Amazingly, they didn't end up greasy, most of the grease was cooked out of them.

Every family was known by their sausage or headcheese recipe. I remember when the ladies of the house made headcheese. They were always careful to clean and scrape the pig head carefully. As most people know, to clean hog skin off, first the hog is dipped in scalding water. Then the top layer of skin is scraped completely away. Then the head is sawed into quarters. The brains are removed to eat with scrambled eggs and toast. Brains don’t work good in headcheese, they muddy the otherwise clear gelatin binder.  After the head is cleaned, it is cooked with secret spices and seasoning, Onions, garlic, whole sage, pepperwood leaves, celery and carrots are placed into a cheese cloth bag and boiled in with the meat. The recipe is  known only to close family members and friends. Or, unless somebody asks. But, they have to rave a while about how delicious the family recipe is first.   It is cooked until all the meat falls off the bone. The meat is then scooped out of the pot. The tongue and checks are cubed into small chunks. The snout is fed to the dogs, it is considered poor taste to include hog snout in the head cheese. A person has to have standards when preparing great food! The diced meats are returned to the pot and re-boiled. Once it is reduced enough to jell it is poured into loaf pans, topped with ground pepper and placed in the window box of the pantry to cool.

To make a head cheese sandwich, the cheese is sliced about ½ inch thick, placed on fresh baked lightbread toast and eaten with German mustard and maybe a slice of garden onion and tomato, possible a leaf or two of butter lettuce, depending on your tastes.  A homemade glass of homebrew goes good with it. I have tears rolling down my cheeks remembering how good we ate!

Our diets were ALL organic and naturally balanced. We didn’t know what a vegetarian was. Nobody on the whole farm liked killing animals, but it was accepted as a fact of life. The family needed to be fed and the Old-Timers did it the best that they knew how.

The scenes that I described here were much the same from 1855 to 1955.... When most people got electricity

26 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well I just have to put my two cents in here. I get tears in my eyes thinking somebody might have made me eat headcheese. That will be a cold day in hell I tell ya, along with the brains in the eggs. I always made sure grandma Ruby scrabbled my eggs first before she cooked hers. I didn't want my eggs cooked in a contaminated pan.
Ernie forgot about the corned deer meat. Now that was good along with the canned deer meat.
Grandma Ruby told me that back during the depression she would bury the crock pot with deer meat in the orchard.
I'm not sure why, but my family always seemed to have more fear of game wardens than I ever did.

Oregon

olmanriver said...

I am with you there Oregon. My family tried to pass off brains as another kind of scrambled eggs...yuck...lying to your kids, hmmpf.
But if someone likes headcheese, and I don't even like to type the word, I will try not to judge their food tastes... and also try not be in the room at the same time.

Different tastes for different folks...

Anonymous said...

I with you on that one olmanriver. I was wondering why I was having a hard time typing that hc word.. LOL

Oregon

Ernie Branscomb said...

Sissies!

If the headcheese is done right its pretty good stuff. The broth needs to be filtered through a cotton filter cloth, then only clean meat put back in the broth, it turns out real good. The eyeballs are cleaned out before cooking. The ears and other cartilage needs to stay in it to add gelatin, to make the loaf jell properly.

I really have to trust someone to eat their headcheese. The other thing that I won’t eat unless I know who made it is chorizo. I like my chorizo made with good fresh meat, not kidneys and intestines ground up in it.

But, you must remember, these recipes came from people that were trying to save enough food to survive, there was no prima dona bullshit about “Oh I wont eat that” because they wouldn’t give a darn. That would just save all the more for the hungry people. I think that just about anybody would eat good cleanly prepared headcheese if they got hungry enough. You also have to remember that only the best meat went into anything. The meat scraps were fed to the dogs, and they really weren’t fussy.

Ernie Branscomb said...

Nobody ever tried to lie to me. I didn't have to eat if I didn't want to. A kid can get pretty hungry waiting for something that he likes before eating.

Anonymous said...

Well Ernie, your right but I guess I was spoiled on that account. I always had fresh home grown beef and salmon was always plentiful too.
If I ever really got that hungry I could always shoot a rabbit or squirrel.
Better yet, I could go to the soda fountain or the bar in Briceland, I always ate good in those places. Did I mention they had great hamburgers?

Oregon

olmanriver said...

No doubt I am a spoiled thing with ample food choices and hunger nowhere near. My mother was raised in a similar fashion to you, large country garden and every scrap of everything utilized if possible.
It was at my grandparents where an innocent suburban child was deceivedly offered scrambled brains... less for me is more for others and I am fine with that. But you were lucky to get all that homegrown food to eat. I am... selectively jealous.

In my early health food years I took some alfalfa sprouts to eat while visiting my grandparents. My grandfather kept watching me eating them and finally could hold it no longer and said "If I had known you ate that kind of food I would have told you to graze away in the back 40".

Nice to hear of your Briceland years Ernie, thanks for sharing more of your family's history.

Ben said...

My mother loved brains!.. She just fried em up and ate em. She tried many times to convince my sister and me but we drew the line. Liver, once in a while but no brains. I had never heard of headcheese 'til I came here. Still haven't tried it and I'm not looking.
In the annals of hippie history, vegetable gardening was the first thing that forged friendships between the hairy newcomers and some of the old timers. we discovered that plenty of the locals also subscribed to Organic Gardening magazine. Later, the topic was Hippie Corn. That stuff had its attractions too.

skippy said...

Thanks, Ernie. Another fantastic read and all the questions answered. Food was better and those times were golden.

I liked all the poster's comments, too. I liked when you said, "Running out of money didn’t mean tough times. It just meant that you did things differently."

Also, "my whole family including aunts and uncles and cousins lived on the farm. The grandparents were respected for their knowledge and experience. They were an endless form of entertainment for me. I would follow them around just to hear their amazing stories." Nice.

I liked everything else in between... except for the headcheese. I believe you, it must be very good. Smelled Grandad's limburger cheese once, though. That was enough.

Read this and "Drunk Hogs" to the Mrs; She liked it very much. She said we should've lived on a farm after your descriptions of these good times.

Of course, I said: "I bet Ernie's like an experienced bronc rider. When he gets thrown he calmly says on the way up and with hat in hand, "The higher the buck... the cooler the breeze."

Yup.

Joe said...

I don't care how materially wealthy or sophisticated one's early years were, they just could not have had richer experiences than the ones you described, Ernie. I was also fortunate in that regard. Growing up on the ranch was a precious experience during the forties and early fifties. We ate well, too. We had big gardens, lots of berries, deer meat, delicious fried chicken and dumplings (and, yes, the chopping blocks were similar to your description), mutton on occasion, beef (less often--until we got electricity and a big chest freezer). Fresh milk and butter we churned--the whole deal. The aunts and uncles and cousins visited often and had their own cabins. And the fishing down on Dry Creek was great, and not bad over in Panther Creek on the Bull Creek side. And we rode our horses and were accompanied by our dogs every day. You can't buy that experience today.

Joe said...

Oh, but we were not blessed with head cheese. The first time I wrote "but, we were not blessed with brains." I was afraid no one would challenge that assertion, so I changed it.

Robin Shelley said...

Not one mention of beef heart here. Good with eggs!

Liver & onions? Yummy!

All fried in bacon grease from the drippings jar, of course.

But brains & headcheese? No thank YOU!

Snidely Chitlins said...

Headcheese... isn't that what happens to the mind from listening to Grateful Dead music?

charlie two crows said...

Ernie......In your story about family life growing up with the whole family living on one farm. You mentioned respect for the grandparents. I was raised to have respect for not only family but elders, neighbors,etc. I was

thought to say mrs. and mr. So one of the basic codes of our childhood in the 60's is respect. Ernie what ever happened to respect?

charlie two crows said...

Ernie......In your story about family life growing up with the whole family living on one farm. You mentioned respect for the grandparents. I was raised to have respect for not only family but elders, neighbors,etc. I was

thought to say mrs. and mr. So one of the basic codes of our childhood in the 60's is respect. Ernie what ever happened to respect?

spyrock said...

i was taught that way about respect as well. sometimes it included other little kids who did something to me i didn't like. but i was taught to respect everyone back in the 50's. it was a smaller world back then. real local. i didn't really understand why they were so hard on me until i read genocide and vendetta about what it was like in covelo back in the day. the bad ones walked the street the same as the good ones, and they would tip their hat to the ladies too. when my mom died at 91, all the grown up bikers who had gone to her school showed up at her funeral. because she had both given and taught them respect.
just like the word biker, the word hippie dehumanizes someone. its not a respectful word and sometimes we lose sight of the fact that everyone is an individual with their own story. organic food didn't start showing up until the early 70's basically because many young people were converting to eastern religions some of which were vegetarian. it wasn't a hippie thing. the organic so called spiritual yoga people were very self righteous in the early days. they told me that i would never be enlightened drinking pepsi. so i switched to diet pepsi.

spyrock said...

i don't know what head cheese is but my girlfriend told me that i could get it if i didn't take a bath at least once a week. so i make sure i take a bath or shower more often these days. in fact, i now understand the importance of being clean all over and the utter bliss that can result.

charlie two crows said...

Robin.....Have you ever eaten chocolate covered bacon? Its like the old look candy bar, but its bacon. I make it and give dozen piece gifts. The taste of sweet and salty bacon is so good your tongue will beat your forehead to death trying to get at it.LOL

charlie two crows said...

Robin.....Have you ever eaten chocolate covered bacon? Its like the old look candy bar, but its bacon. I make it and give dozen piece gifts. The taste of sweet and salty bacon is so good your tongue will beat your forehead to death trying to get at it.LOL

charlie two crows said...

Sorry for the mistakes. Sometime my blackberry just won't listen to my hands!

Anonymous said...

CTC, bacon goes good with anything:-)

Oregon

Anonymous said...

should have said everything***

Robin Shelley said...

Oregon & I share a love of bacon although I do try to limit my consumption. How do you make chocolate-covered bacon, Charlie? Sounds interesting.

charlie two crows said...

Robin.......fry good 1/4in.bacon with a weight to keep it flat. Or you can use side bacon if you like the pork chop taste more. Drain and dry bacon. Melt your favorite chocolate in double boiler add paraffin wax the kind used for canning. Dip bacon in chocolate until completely covered. Let chocolate cool. Re dip if needed. The wax will keep chocolate from melting. Enjoy!


Ernie.... I have a history question. In the late 60's the forestry was going to let someone build a ski resort east of Garberville. Was it going to be over at Solomon peak?

Robin Shelley said...

What do you think, Oregon? Should we try it?

Anonymous said...

I think I'll eat mine plain and besides I always keep Look bars in my ice chest.

Oregon