Let’s talk Laundry

Children are a precious, wonderful, miraculous and infernally MESSY gift from God.  Let’s talk laundry!

I’ve mentioned here before how much I value some of my modern conveniences, especially major appliances.  Well if you ever doubted the value of your washing machine, you’ve never had seven children in your home.  As I told you several weeks ago, our household swelled to twelve when we were blessed with the addition of a missionary family.  This has really opened my eyes to some of the life my great-grandmothers must have lived. 

My children love to play outside and I’m thrilled that we live in conditions where they can.  My son says his favorite thing is dirt and he routinely brings a supply of it inside on the seat of his pants.  He’s probably not unique in this affinity.  So I know that any mother of young children will no doubt completely relate to the endless stack of soiled clothing I battle almost every day. 

Now I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining, there is another mother here taking care of her own children’s needs.  So between the two of us, the lines are always full and while I know the crops and the stock need a little more rain than we’ve been seeing, I’ve been awfully happy for the sunny days that provide such perfect drying conditions. 

In thinking about this chore in historical terms, I took a look at the Foxfire book number two (Anchor Books, 1973) where there Dickersons share the process of washing clothes in an iron pot.

First is the location.  It’s easier to take your clothes to the branch than to pack the water to the house.  Ah, for a good source of water.  Old homes were positioned where water could be found.  If something happened to a spring or a well the family might well leave the place.  You just can’t live where there’s no water.

They heated their water in a big iron pot over an open fire – a whole other discussion when the temperature is 82 degrees as I’m typing this.  The cold water that serves the first rinse would be a welcome break until you started beating the clothes or battling them and that would work up a sweat without the fire to contend with.  This of course assumes you don’t have a factory-made wash board which was patented in 1833 – I wonder how long it took for that idea to catch on?

Of course, any heavy stains will have to be rubbed out with the aid of your strong lye soap.  You made the soap another time and kept a good supply on hand of course.

By now the water’s boiling in your iron pot so in go the properly beaten garments.  Agitating is done manually with a long pine paddle.  While they’re simmering, you’ll need to empty the battling water and refill the tub for rinsing.  Whew, this will be cold water again and I’m betting there’s sweat a’pourin’ off your face after stirring the iron pot over the open fire. 

After a couple of rinses – because you sure don’t want to leave any lye-soap-suds in there, you can start hanging.  Oh, wait, you’ll need to wring them out well or otherwise it’ll take forever to dry them. 

Whew, I’m sorry I complained!

The Faithful Farm Sled

My Daddy recently built a great little toy for my children – a sled.  When I mentioned Ruthie wanted to be pulled on the sled, a friend asked how you could play with a sled in the summer?  Well, if you didn’t already know it, sleds are not just for snow and fun.

In fact, the farm sled has been a mainstay of Appalachian farms from the beginning – and in fact it’s a tool they brought with them from the old country for examples can be found among Viking artifacts as wells as ancient Egypt where they are thought to have been used widely in construction of the pyramids.

For the fiercely self-sufficient Appalachian farmers, this was a conveyance they could build themselves.  Sure, iron runners are a nice addition but every piece of the sled could be sourced from the forest.  Runners could be sawn or formed from large trees but they often utilized naturally bent saplings.  One of my great uncles explained to me that when they were in the woods, they were always watching for trees that would make good runners.  When they found one they would cut it and hang it in the barn for the day a new sled would be needed, or an old sled would need repair.

These sleds could be quite large, as those used to pull logs from the woods by as large a team as could be assembled, or very small and pulled by hand.  The wonderful thing about a tool you can build yourself is that you can customize it to your particular needs.

The Farm Hands Companion website gives general directions for building a farm sled.

I’m sure there’s a lot of history to these humble vehicles and maybe someday I’ll get around to really researching them.  In the meantime, the Farm Hands Companion website wrote an article about sleds way back in 2012 and I found it very interesting.  He shows several examples of sleds as well as instructions for building one.  That author is from Arkansas and his people  called them “slides”.  Have any of you heard that term on the plateau?

In my novels, characters often use sleds in their daily lives.  I wonder how many readers will really understand how common that practice has been?

I loved this sled picture which looked like a sled Daddy built for us to break a pair of colts to harness work.  We didn't have the draft horses but it was intimidating enough to be that close to the ground behind a feisty young horse.

A Pound’s a Pound, Right?

Am I the only one that’s flabbergasted at the soaring costs of food?  I recently remarked that either we are eating a lot more or the prices have really gone up – could be a little of both and I need to work on one of those! 

I made a birthday cake this week – a chocolate robot and his arms and legs were Swiss Cake Rolls.  I decided to use the Swiss Cake Rolls after buying a box of strawberry filled Shortcake Rolls.  Then we had a little communication breakdown and two of us bought two different boxes of Swiss Cake Rolls.  They were both the same brand so imagine my surprise when the cakes in one box were considerably larger than those in the other box.  It’s the sort of thing where you think one store has a better price until you look really closely at the details. 

I’ve seen a similar trend in restaurants.  Of course, in America our portion size is so large that we could do with a little downsizing.  However, the price didn’t come down with it and that kind of makes you feel short changed, doesn’t it?  I used to frequent a little tea room where the Victorian Tea Service would more than feed two adults.  Imagine my surprise when I took my young teenage neice and we ordered that standard meal only to discover there was barely enough for one.  More food had to be ordered and the bill was significantly higher than on previous visits.  Smaller portions is an easy way for restaurants to raise their prices without reprinting their menus – or alerting patrons too quickly. 

A quick internet search shows me other folks have been noticing this since 2009 – about the time I started noticing that portions were smaller in restaurants.  But that was a tough time for business, they were doing whatever they could to stay afloat.  Anybody want to comment on whether the portions have increased with the growing economy?

Well you know I’m always comparing these realizations to history.  It occurred to me that our grandparents would not have had such a surprise because buying a boxed cake was nearly unheard of on our rural plateau.  Even in more metropolitan areas, purchased foods would have been made by a local baker to whom you could clearly voice your complaint if you suddenly thought you weren’t quite getting your money’s worth.

The packaged cakes we all take for granted now came about in the mid twentieth century.  Little Debbies started in the mid-1960’s and Twinkies were first created in the 1930’s but I wasn’t able to learn when they were first boxed.  More likely they were sold in a bakery.  Remember that grocery shopping as we know it, strolling along aisles and filling a cart, didn’t come about until the early 1930’s and their growth followed the popularity of the automobile.  Just think, have you ever seen a picture of a Kroger parking lot filled with horses and wagons?

Still, the question at hand is whether shrinking product size and rising prices is a modern invention.  I doubt it.  After all, King Solomon declared way back in 947 BC (according to the Reese Chronological Bible’s [Bethany House, 1977] estimation of the timeline) that there is nothing new under the sun. 

Businesses and businessmen have always had a reputation of fairness or the lack thereof.  Wiley housewives have long known that the cornmeal lasted a little longer if this mill ground it or that a pound of coffee made an extra few cups if you got it from that grocer.  Again, not a new problem.  Moses addressed fair weights and measures in Deuteronomy (Deuteronomy 25:13) as an absolute command – “Thou shalt not have in thine bag divers weights…” and verse fifteen gives a promise of long life for fair dealings.

I didn’t mean to get started on a sermon, but I wonder if the snack cake manufacturers ever read those verses?

Tent Graves

Two weeks ago I shared Highland Cemetery with you and some of the pictures prompted further research and comments from readers.  (You can’t imagine how happy that makes me!) The comments are always available for everyone to read but I thought today I’d share with you some of the research it led me to.

Shawna asked me what are the graves that are covered with large slabs of stone.  Believing I knew the answer, I confidently explained these tend to be among the oldest graves in the cemetery and were certainly placed before the availability of airtight coffins and vaults.  The stones would secure the burial site from digging animals.

She kept looking.

Sure enough, a simple Google search revealed a website www.TheGraveWalkers.com which asserts that these types of graves are predominately found along the Highland Rim and especially in Overton County, Tennessee.

I found a blog article here That shared lots of pictures of these graves and lots of information but no hard and fast conclusions.  The Tennessee Sate Library has a photo collection of these tent graves dating through the 19th century, with a few as late as the 1920’s. 

The Hutchison blog noted that these graves are more prevalent in family cemeteries and most often represent the first and second generation of immigrants to the area.

Irish Cemetery:  Don't those little houses look a lot like our Tent Graves?

My first thought on reading these articles was that I knew I’d seen pictures of similar graves in Europe.  We know that the area was predominately settled by Scots Irish so isn’t it logical that this is a tradition that simply immigrated with them?  However, I guess the absence of these graves in North Carolina and Virginia’s Appalachian Mountains precludes the immigration theory since that population was even more directly Scots Irish. 

Plaque Graves near Culross Scotland

Looking online, I found several pictures of old European cemeteries with covered graves, but one in particular whose coverings look so much like the tents we’re familiar with.  I didn’t actually find examples among Scottish cemeteries which surprised me because I would have thought the Scots Irish would have brought more Scottish traditions than Irish.  However, there are examples of unique approaches to graves in Scotland.  Near Culross are three graves of siblings who died on the same day in the seventeenth century.  They are known as the Plaque Graves and do seem to have a huge plaque atop each one. 

The greater European area has lots of examples of covered graves, although they all seem more ornate or finished than the slabs we have around here.  Could these Appalachian Tent Graves represent a crude, frontier representation of the tradition the people observed in the old country?

These graves always seem to represent a lot of work to me.  Often the cemeteries are far from established quarries and these are big, heavy slabs of stone.  However, in so many cases the names were either never clearly inscribed or never maintained so now we have these very visible grave sites with no idea just who they are memorializing. 

Finally, it occurs to me that the very tradition this blog seeks to celebrate and perpetuate fails in this area.  Our oral tradition has preserved family details carried for centuries.  We’ve learned and continue to use skills that our ancestors brought from their foreign homes.  Yet here is a tradition that no one seems to have explained as the years passed.

Old West Kirk of Culross, Scotland

This professional photo (used with permission)  is representative of work available at www.ghgraham.com

What do you think?  Does it seem like these are just a style of burial site?  Or do you think it’s some tradition that came with early immigrants but didn’t last very long on American soil? 

Fried Chicken

I’ve kind of been on a food-thing lately, haven’t I?  I mentioned to you that I’ve been trying to be more disciplined with my food – and that just makes you crave all the good stuff.  But today’s thoughts are more about feeding a large group of people.

You’ll remember from a few weeks ago that I have a full house right now.  It’s a blessing and a challenge.  I’m unaccustomed to regularly cooking for a group of eleven.  Therefore when Fried Chicken rotated up on my menu list, it was a new cooking opportunity.  Something was said about cooking special foods and I thought that fried chicken was just regular country-cooking, albeit maybe Sunday-dinner kind of cooking.

I’m no expert at frying chicken, although I did learn at the feet of my grandmothers.  My finished product doesn’t come close to theirs and whether that’s my skill-level or years of practice I can’t say.  But you can’t buy the stuff.  Sure, deep fried, heavily battered chicken is a fast food treat occasionally but it’s just not the same as the homeade version.

I don’t have any secrets to my recipe, although one grandma always used garlic salt instead of regular salt and that does add an extra layer of flavor.

I fry in a big iron skillet, just like my grandma did – in fact, she had a special skillet that she callled the chicken fryer.  Whether it was originally produced and named that, I don’t know but it was very deep – you could really have deep fried in it if you’d wanted.  That depth allowed a neater cooking experience because the stuff will pop everywhere. 

Iron seems always to be the cooking medium of choice in these old recipes.   I guess it has long been available and more modern non-stick surfaces are really quite new.  Plus, cooking on wood or coal prohibitted many of the plastic-handled pots we enjoy today.  It provides an even heat and holds the heat well while your cooking.

In feeding nearly a dozen mouths, I did notice the cooking time was pretty long.  I was able to stick the finished product in the oven so everyone got warm chicken.  How would I have done that on a wood stove?  Did you use the oven the same way?  I guess there’s no reason not to, in fact it might be easier because the oven box of a wood stove is always a little warm owing to the proximity to the fire box.

Of course I have chicken in the freezer and I can’t help but think that a whole other layer of complexity would be added if I’d had to ring the neck of the beast, pluck it and clean it before I began frying.

One question I’d like to answer is breading.  Do any of you remember your grandmas frying chicken without flouring it?  We’ve talked many times about the scarcity of flour on the mountain in years gone by.  Were cooks willing to use a little of that precious resource to coat their chicken?  It is certainly a different food if you don’t bread it.

All in all, a meal of homeade fried chicken, gravy, green beans, potato salad and hot biscuits is a pretty nice treat and a welcome reminder of meals at my grandma’s table.