Pickling and Preserving: The Foxfire Americana Library - Foxfire Students (2011)
VEGETABLES
The following recipes for fresh or canned vegetables come from interviewees who used them to feed their own families for many years. Many of these recipes were passed down from mother to daughter for generations and still frequently grace the kitchen tables of grateful families throughout northeastern Georgia.
BAKED BEANS
Pick [white half-runner] beans when they turn yellow. Shell them out. Place the beans in a pot and cook in water until they’re tender. Drain water and put some onions in them, then add bacon, salt, tomato catsup, and a little vinegar. Pour them into pint canning jars and let them come to a boil, in a pan on the stove, to seal them.
—Margaret Norton
BEETS
Choose small beets and wash them with the skins on. Then cut the tops off, leaving about an inch of the top on the beets so they won’t bleed. Then you boil them until they’re tender with the skin still on. When they are done boiling, cool and just slip the skins off with your hands and slice the beets up. For buttered beets, add enough water to cover them, salt and butter to taste, and simmer for around 10 minutes. For pickled beets, instead of adding butter and salt, you add, again, enough water to cover them, and then vinegar and sugar to taste, and simmer for 10 minutes.
—Juanita Kilby
CABBAGE
For fried cabbage, you wash and coarsely chop a head of cabbage. Then you cook it in about a cup of salt water with streak o’ lean drippings [streak o’ lean is pork meat that is salt-cured and has one streak of lean meat running through fat meat] and about a teaspoon of sugar until it is tender.
—Juanita Kilby
CORN
Select about 6 ripe ears of corn and shuck, wash, and silk them. Then cut the corn off the cob and scrape the cob. Combine this with ½ cup of water and ¼ stick of margarine in a black skillet and cook in the oven, stirring it every now and then. It needs to cook approximately 30 minutes.
—Juanita Kilby
GREEN BEANS
ILLUSTRATION 10 Bertha Waldroop
Pick the green beans from the garden. Wash them and string them. Put them in a pot and cover them with water. I add Wesson oil, but you can put a piece of fatback [a piece of fat pork meat] in them too. Add salt to taste. Let them cook down until they’re tender and almost dry.
—Bertha Waldroop
HOMINY
The various methods of preservation lent different tastes and textures to ordinary garden vegetables. These methods helped women provide many tasty and interesting meals for their families with a small number of vegetable choices.
Certain vegetables seem to have been more versatile than others. Corn, for example, had many uses, from vegetable to meal for bread, from snack to decoration of the family Christmas tree. Another use for corn was making hominy. Served as a starch, hominy is a delicious variation of a very prevalent vegetable in the mountains.
Although the making of hominy is generations old, the method has changed little through the years. In fact, Belle Wilburn Henslee, who learned how to make hominy from her mother, told us, “The process of makin’ it hasn’t changed any except according to what you lye it with. I used soda to lye mine, but old people used to use lye off of ashes, corncob ashes or hickory wood ashes.”
For those who don’t use “bought lye,” making the lye with which to make the hominy is the first step in the process. To make the lye, water is dripped through oak or hickory ashes that have been saved from the fireplace. The ashes are placed in a metal barrel (which may be made of iron, plastic, or porcelain, but not aluminum, as it corrodes in the presence of the lye) with a spouted hole in its bottom. A few gallons of water are slowly poured over the ashes and allowed to drip into another bucket beneath the metal barrel, yielding the lye. The lye-making process should take about two hours.
Once the lye is made, approximately a peck [¼ bushel] of dried corn is shucked, silked, and, according to Mrs. Algie Norton, shelled by hand “so y’ could get all the sorry grains and things out of it” and placed in a large washpot along with one part lye and two parts water to cook over a fire. After several hours of boiling, the skins and shells of the corn should begin to come off, at which point the pot is taken off the fire, and the corn is removed. The next step is to thoroughly wash the lye off the corn. Belle Henslee stated that “you wash it an’ wash it—I don’t know, about a dozen times or more!” Mrs. Norton agreed with her, saying that “you’d have t’ wash it through maybe a dozen waters and rub it t’ get all that skin off.”
After being washed to remove all the lye, the corn is placed in a pot and put back on to boil until it is tender. Once the corn is tender, it is ready to be consumed by those eager for the rewards of their hard work, fried with bacon grease, or “put up” by either freezing or canning it. According to Mrs. Norton, once the corn has been cooked, “y’ take it out when it’s good and tender and done. Then y’ had some good eatin’.”
ILLUSTRATION 11 Granny Carrie McCurry
Granny Carrie McCurry told us her method of making lye. “For hominy, I always take hickory wood and burn it and take them ashes and put it up and drip the lye to use. Or you can keep the hot ashes and tie ’em up in a rag and do it. Fill your pot with water and put the corn in and the lye in and boil that until the skin [of the corn] comes off, and then you take the corn out and wash it, parboil it, soak it, and get the lye out of it.” If you’re doing it with a bag of ashes instead of lye, she adds, just get a handful and tie it up in a rag, stick it down in the pot, and boil it with the corn.
The best place to cook hominy, Mrs. Norton and Belle Henslee agree, is in a big, black iron washpot. Belle Henslee suggests waiting for a clear day in order to get a good fire and to make washing the hominy numerous times much more pleasant. Mrs. Norton added that “y’ always make it in the wintertime. Houses were open enough ’til y’ had plenty of ice, and anything y’ had froze in it. Out somewhere away from the chimney or fireplace, it’d keep for a week.”
MUSTARD GREENS
Pick a mess of greens and wash them at least 4 or 5 times until the water is clear. Then take out the stem and boil the greens in salt water until they are tender. This takes about 1 hour. Then take them out of the water and place them in a skillet with streak o’ lean drippings, add about a teaspoon of sugar, and fry them for about 10 minutes.
—Juanita Kilby
PARCHING PEANUTS
Preheat your oven to a moderate temperature. Be careful not to let the stove get too hot. Put the raw, dried peanuts in a shallow pan and place in the oven. Test them every few minutes to see if they are parched to your satisfaction. It will usually take 15 to 20 minutes.
—Ruth Cabe
COOKING PICKLED BEANS
ILLUSTRATION 12 Ruth Cabe
Wash pickled beans once to get the salt and vinegar taste out. Then cook in a small amount of water with 1 tablespoon bacon grease for 15 to 20 minutes, just long enough to heat them throughout and to cook the water out.
—Lucy York
POTATO SALAD
For 6 to 8 servings of potato salad, peel, wash, and dice 6 Irish potatoes. Then boil and drain them. Add about ¼ cup cubed pickles or relish, a tablespoon of mayonnaise, a teaspoon of mustard, 3 chopped boiled eggs, and salt to taste, and mix.
—Juanita Kilby
RUTABAGAS
Peel them and slice them, and cook them in salt water to cover with approximately ¼ cup of brown sugar and drippings of streak o’ lean. They should be cooked until they are tender and almost dry.
—Juanita Kilby
SAUERKRAUT
Another vegetable that was transformed by good cooks into many different, tasty dishes is cabbage. Aside from the obvious slaw and fried or boiled cabbage, sauerkraut is an ingenious way of both preserving an easily grown vegetable and providing more variety at the dinner table.
Lizzie Moore gave Russell Bauman instructions on how she makes sauerkraut—a favorite use of cabbage in northeastern Georgia. “I make my sauerkraut by the full of the moon because my mother and grandmother made it that way, and their mothers before them made it that way. I always make my kraut on the full of the moon ’cause it’s always harder and firmer then than it is at any other time. I like my kraut hard and firm. I don’t like soft kraut. Other people may have different times of the moon when they make theirs—I don’t know about that. As far as my pickled beans and kraut go, I have always made mine on the full of the moon.
“Don’t put the kraut in a tin barrel. Put it in a wooden barrel. A tin barrel’ll rust, and you can’t eat your kraut. To make kraut in the barrel—now, this is an all-day job—you take your cabbage, trim the outside leaves off, and save them for later. Wash and chop up your cabbage in a washtub. I got a number two washtub, and I just wash mine in that. If you want to make chopped kraut, you chop ’em up as fine as you want it. If you want to make shredded kraut, you can just take your cabbage, cut it into quarters, and slice it just as thin as you can make in those little strips—either way. I don’t make the shredded ’cause I like chopped the best. Just take it, chop it up, and put it in your barrel.
“When you get your cabbage chopped up, put it all into that fifty-gallon barrel. Take those green leaves that you trimmed off the outside of your cabbage, wash ’em, and put ’em over the top of your barrel. Just take those leaves and lay ’em agin’ your barrel so that none of your chopped kraut is showing. Get a big ol’ flat rock and lay it down on top of your cabbage. That weights it down. It keeps the cabbage down in the bottom of the barrel instead of coming up when it starts working. With a fifty-gallon barrel, I’d say you’d have to get two pretty good-sized rocks to go across it and weigh it down. You don’t pack it in the barrel. These rocks pack it for you. Pack your cabbage in there ’til it comes up six or eight inches from the top. I forgot how much salt you put into a fifty-gallon barrel, but the way I do when I make it is I’ll take my water and taste of it and get it as salty as I want it. Pour your salt water in that barrel and put it away to set for a while.
“It’ll take anywhere from two to three weeks for a fifty-gallon barrel of kraut to work off and get sour. After it gets sour, you have to take it out of the barrel. Take your hands and squeeze all of the water out of it and put it in a cooker or a dishpan. Run cold water over it, wash it, and take your hands and squeeze all of the water you can get out of it again. Put it in another pan, put water over the top of it, and put it on the stove. Don’t let it come to a boil. Just let it get ready to come to a boil. Stir it so the heat can get all the way through. Pack it in your cans and don’t put no more salt or nothin’ in it. Pack it in your cans, seal it up, and set it away.
“You can eat kraut with just about anything. You can make kraut with weenies. You can make fried kraut. If you want to, you can always put pepper in your kraut. Now, a lot of people don’t like pepper in their kraut. I do, but now, a lot of people don’t. I like hot pepper in my cabbage. You can eat it out of the can. I usually just get me some out in a bowl and eat it raw. To me, beef’s not good in kraut like pork is. You can also eat kraut with cracklin’ bread.
“Another thing you can do with your cabbage is to take your stalks that are left over and pickle them. Take the stalk, peel it off, and drop it down in your kraut. It’ll sour and be good too. When you get ready to eat it, put ’em in a pan of grease from bacon or fried meats. If you ain’t got that, just put your Crisco or lard in a pan, let it get hot, and eat it. That’s all there is to makin’ kraut. Of course, when you’re makin’ it, it takes longer than it does to tell about it. When you make it in a fifty-gallon barrel, oh, my goodness, that takes fifty pounds of cabbage!”
Lola Cannon told us how she judges the correct amount of salt to put into the barrel of cabbage and how she knows when the kraut is through “making.” “I’ve always judged how much salt to put in by the size of the container I’m using. If it’s a gallon container, I put two tablespoons of salt, fill the container with water, and weight the top down carefully. Then I watch till it ferments. You can tell by the bubbles coming up in the jar. The time it takes to ferment depends on the heat. In cool weather, it will take quite a bit of time. I just have to watch it.”
SQUASH CASSEROLE
ILLUSTRATION 13 Effie Lord
I make a casserole out of squash, and the Florida people say I’m the only person they know that knows how to cook squash to eat. I take real small squash, and I always scrape them and cut them up in thin pieces. I put them in a pan and put onions and crumbled-up Ritz crackers on top. Then sprinkle a tiny bit of water and some grated cheese and dots of butter over the crackers. Then I put aluminum foil over it and put it in the oven to cook.
—Mrs. Effie Lord, Proprietor of Lord’s Cafe, Clayton
SWEET POTATOES
For candied sweet potatoes, I peel and quarter about 4 large sweet potatoes, put them in a pot with enough water to cover them, a cup of sugar, a dash of cinnamon and butter, and I let them boil until they’re tender and the juice is syrupy.
—Bessie Ramey
TOMATO SOUP
For tomato soup, take the juice from 1 quart of home-canned tomatoes. Stir 2 tablespoons flour into a small teacup of milk. Pour tomato juice into the flour-milk mixture and heat. Add ½ teaspoon sugar to taste.