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