Comfort Foods

CHICKEN AND DUMPLINGS
How can such a comforting food make for such a bland picture?

Today’s article might be fittin’ for True Confessions… I woke up with a sinus headache amid overcast skies.  It seems the older I get the more my moods are driven by the weather and winter’s shrinking hours of sunshine don’t bode well for me. 

My life is so filled with blessings that it makes me downright mad at myself when I have these blue days.  A popular topic in many historical fiction novels is the depression frontier women often faced living in the dimly lit sod-houses of the prairie.  In my wide-open home with lots of windows and electric lights if I need them, I can scarcely imagine what those ladies had to deal with. 

But all is not gloom – last night’s supper was chicken and dumplings!  What is it about certain foods that just make us feel better?  It’s certainly not the nutritional value; it’s not even the satisfaction of a full tummy.  There’s just something about dumplings that kinda’ makes you smile. 

We can make dumplings on about anything.  My grandpa remembered his mother making dumplings on pinto beans – that very poor family probably didn’t have chicken very often.  And blackberry dumplings are a personal favorite.  But good ole’ chicken and dumplings are surely a universal favorite.  I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone at my table that claimed a distast  for them.

Of course I learned the fine art of dumpling-making at the hand of my grandmothers.  So much of my cooking reflects those early lessons.  My Grandma Stepp taught me to make a basic dough that she used for biscuits, dumplings or pie crust.  In fact, a lot of the things she taught me were really universal recipes that I fall back on every single day.  Depending on how ambitious I’m feeling, dumplings can be carefully rolled and cut or simply dropped into boiling broth. 

These days it’s hard to find a good, fatty old rooster for your dumplings so my Grandma Livesay discovered packaged chicken broth to enrich the weaker product of cooking lean chicken.  This is not the same as the rooster-method, but it suffices in a pinch.  While on a camping trip this summer I carried a can of chicken and dried broth cubes just in case the fishing didn’t go well.  My family was amazed when my dutch oven produced this staple dish and I was forced to confess the shortcut. 

Perhaps my choice today is a non-traditional breakfast, but there are just days I can’t muster hot biscuits, bacon and eggs.  And before you chastise me for this particular selection, I should admit that my first choice on a day like this is a dish of coffee-and-bread… have we talked about that before?  If not, we need to!

So by the time I had fed breakfast to the children and gotten myself dressed for the day, the sun had popped out and I remembered the leftovers.  The day is looking up already.

Ancestral Properties

This year I received a gift of an Ancestry.com subscription.  It has proven one of the most wonderful gifts ever because I’ve spent hours and hours poring over census records, death certificates and wills.  I’ve learned lots of dates and names and that’s exciting.  But there are little tidbits that really make it worth the time.

In fact, I’m learning so much that I’m really struggling to compose this week’s article in any kind of organized fashion.  So let me just tell you about one document and I’ll try to share the rest in little bits over the coming weeks.

All my life I’ve heard about this one or that one that received a land grant for military service.  It makes you proud to be living on a treasure like that.  Unfortunately I have dispelled most all of those tales. 

In the early days of the United States, the government claimed all the vast lands of the continent and fought numerous wars to insure that claim against other governments who sought to do the same or to wrest the land from the Natives who’d used it for centuries without needing a registered deed.  Then, when they needed to pay their soldiers, they found they had more land than money.  Therefore, many Continental soldiers were paid with land grants.  It was a pretty good deal for both parties since the soldiers were mostly in want of land.  However, after a few decades the place started filling up with people and it was no longer worthwhile to give lands in the East – then opens the homesteading of the Plains and a whole new chapter in American history.  Therefore, the last military land grants were issued about 1855. 

If you’ve heard your own family stories like this, a few hours at the courthouse reading old property deeds will reveal the history of land.  This fella bought it from that fella then gave it to his son and so on.   Now, there were SOME land grants on the mountain, in fact, the Fentress County Courthouse has a “Grants Book”.  However, I’ve not found any of my family in there.

But I did find a land grant in Virginia and it was fascinating. 

James Todd would be my great-great-great-great-great Grandfather on my father’s side.  On February 27, 1796 a deed for riverside Virginia land was decreed to him.  This was “of the lands allotted the officers and soldiers of the Continental line of said state” and the entries before and after are similarly worded.  There is an earlier date on each record that I’m assuming is the date the men actually located and marked their claim.  For James Todd that was in 1784.  Now, there was a process of applying for your land and the early date may be the application date, but ten years seems like a long time even for the government to be working on paperwork.

These old deeds read a lot like their modern cousins giving dimensions by the sixty-six foot surveyors pole .  They are handwritten in the flowing penmanship everyone of that generation seemed to possess – don’t know how today’s scribbling developed. However, being used to the printed word I sometimes struggle to read this.  The deed clearly says it’s for fifty-four and a half acres and while there are some plots of two and three hundred acres, there are many similar to this fifty-some-odd acres.  Here’s where my math gets challenged.  When they lay out the dimensions of the land it seems to add up to a lot more acreage. 

There’s more research to be done here.  We knew of a plantation my Todd family left in Virginia and I would expect this to be the same property despite the Virginia / North Carolina discrepancy.  So I’d like to try to locate the area on historic maps.  Since it lays on a river that should be doable.  And, county boundaries have moved but their history is generally documented. 

I know I’m always saying this, but here again I’m left with more questions than answers.  It’s just that the questions are new ones and that alone is progress – isn’t it?

Please share with me any stories your family has passed along about lands that were given to them.  Have you done any research and learned the facts behind those stories?

A Humble Pone of Cornbread

I was raised to understand that every meal had to have bread.  It was very often cornbread.  Certainly my grandparents’ generation ate cornbread because flour was scarce and everybody grew a field of corn.  I guess they got used to eating cornbread about everyday and they kept doing it even as they fed children and grandchildren when store-bought flour was easily had.

Well since I don’t follow a horse and plow all day, chop corn or walk to church I’ve had to rethink a number of these food necessities.  Therefore, we don’t have cornbread very often.  But when we do, it’s a special treat.  I have a girlfriend who’ll eat every bite of cornbread you’ll feed her.  She’ll eat it cold.  She’ll eat it if you leave it in the oven a little too long. 

In fact, I’ve found a lot of folks off the mountain who just don’t quite know what to do with a pone of cornbread.  I guess I find this a little ironic since cornbread is something we mountain-folk can stir up in a minute and have a skillet full before you know it.  We can put it in milk, smother it with pinto beans or slather it with jelly.  And we can make it anytime – gritted if the corn’s not yet dry enough to grind, fried if the oven’s not hot.

My grandpa remembered carrying it in his dinner bucket – he said he just couldn’t enjoy cold cornbread.  But when you’re taking your midday break in the belly of the earth covered in coal dust, you eat what you brought and you’re glad to get it. 

If there’s a slice of this pone left over tomorrow – we’ll be heating it in the microwave.

Out of the Mouths of Babes

I don’t usually give much thought to whether my children have a Southern accent or use mountain-terminology.  I guess they sound pretty much like me and all my people so it’s just normal.  But you know that I’m fascinated with the Appalachian vernacular, we’ve talked about there here before. 

A blog I enjoy reading (The Blind Pig) regularly shares Southern-English terms.  I’m often shocked to read words or phrases there that I thought were just regular English.

So when my daughter recently began adding “right quick” to both requests and observations I kind of did a double-take.  The first time it was something like, “Get me some juice right quick.”  Well you can imagine that brought on more talk – we don’t tell Mama to hop to things, we don’t even order Mama to get the juice.

However, it isn’t just the demands of a little diva.  While watching an old Western where the good guy was tied up she said, “He’s gonna’ get loose right quick.”

Where did this come from?  I didn’t realize that I used the phrase, although I suppose I do ask the children to ‘come here right quick’ or ‘pick that up right quick’.  I asked some family around me if they routinely say this and no one admits to it.

It’s always amazing to me the things little children pick up on – and I’m sure glad we are not a family that’s ever accepted ugly language in our home because you can bet they’d pick up on that too!  So I guess listening to them will be a bit of a mirror on our dialect.

So what do you think?  Is right quick widely used or is this a mountain-ism? 

Harvest Season

The picture leading this blog is from our church bulletin last week.  Don’t those little folders have some of the prettiest pictures?  Well this one is such a familiar scene that it got me to thinking about the memories of the season.

There’s something heady about the harvest season.  The air is cooling (cooling slowly this year), the leaves are hinting at the autumn-brilliance they’ll soon wear and the work of summer is drawing to a close.  Of course the work on a farm never ends and there are certainly hardships in winter.  But we don’t think about those things in the fall.  Instead, we can look at clipped fields and barns bulging with winter stores.  We see the garden turned and waiting for a little grass cover for the winter.  The can house is filled, kids are back in school and it’s simply time to take a deep breath.  All of this is a beautiful picture of God’s blessings.  Even in droughts or floods, when it’s too hot or too cool, when the bugs eat more than their share or disease hits the crops, God blesses us. 

Some things never change.

I think our forefathers more keenly felt this reliance on the land – and on God.  Of course, from way back in Bible times people have been getting the idea that they can manage on their own and don’t really need God.  Every one of those ideas ended badly of course.  It seems to me that it’s getting easier to make that mistake these days.  Now we think we can get a public job and buy our groceries from the store if the crops don’t do too well.  Food does seem to magically appear on the shelves, doesn’t it? 

In 1906 Alfred Henry Lewis said, "There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy."  There's a whole prepper movement afoot today that would probably agree with him, citing that in most homes all the food they have in the house would maybe last nine meals.  Can you imagine what your grandmothers would have said to that statistic?  It would not have been kind!

Barring years of very severe weather and long economic hardship, most mountain farms could go months without a trip to the grocery store.  In fact, many never expected to visit a store more than once a month.  And those visits only brought home coffee, a little sugar and maybe a treat for the kids along with a few dry goods.  Of course, you might have to take a turn of corn to the gristmill, otherwise you’d be eating gritted bread.  And your menu might be a little limited, but don’t most of us eat pretty much the same things all the time anyway? 

For those hard working farmers, if the cow doesn’t go dry, the root cellar doesn’t flood and the barn isn’t hit by lightning then there’ll be something in the pot through the cold months of winter.   Do you think that’s why fall is such a beautiful season?