RECOLLECTIONS 1934

RECOLLECTIONS

Corn bread and hominy, the big one bushel pot hung in the kitchen large corner fireplace, a

colored mammy cooked large oven pones, six, maybe seven inches thick, twelve or fifteen

inches across, cooked all day. Eating was eating.

Most families had ten or twelve children and again that many slaves to feed.

There were no 'cook stoves' , all cooking was done over an open fire in the immense fire

place, in the kitchen corner. Food cooked and simmered all day.

Cereals were ground by water wheel power windmills. But not the hominy, it was beaten

in a mortar with an iron pestle that left blisters on the hands after doing your fair share.

Once or twice a week we had johnny cake, wheat bread and Maryland beaten biscuits.

There would be cracklings all ground up in the hominy. There was corn bread with oysters,

they were eysters then , a mush like sponge bread, with bacon, or hog belly as old timers

remember it.

Sorghum was home raised and made up into wooden barrels. Fish, mostly mackerel, was

broiled over the same fire where the pot hung.

The hogs ranged and fed in the white oaks and the acorns they ate gave the pork a nutty taste.

In the fall, when it was 'cold', we did up maybe twenty hogs, weighing 150 to 400 pounds,

and dressed out a beef cow every winter so we lived well to do, food wise.

The spinning wheel and loom were household necessities as all raised their own wool,

flax and cotton.

A decanter sat on the big 'sideboard' , yet no one ever got drunk, though there was wine, peach

and apple brandy to fill the decanter and a reserve in the closet which was locked and mother

` had the key. Mom did the brandy distilling too.

Source: Baltimore Sun, Tuesday March 13, 1934, by Thomas Hackett, age 77, a druggist \

in Hurlock, Dorchester County, Maryland, who could only write with a pencil because he

had been 'hit' twice by a tin lizzie.

Abstract March 13, 2018 for www.delmarhistory.blogspot.com by Harrison Howeth.