CROWDED FOR SPACE

Of the time period I am writing about there was my two younger brothers and myself still living at home of originally nine children. There was four boys and five girls. I was the youngest by several years and a bit spoiled by the older siblings so I was told. My brothers missed much of their schooling helping my dad on the farm. That was not an unusual thing in the depression years, just to survive was the main object. When they were out of work the two older brothers were forced to bring their families back to the folks farm and sleep anywhere on the floor where there was room for a pallet. There was always plenty of work helping my dad on the farm and food was always plentiful. Though we were a bit crowded for space. Fortunately they found other jobs in a month or so. The older girls were married by the age of around sixteen and had places of their own and managed quite well.

Preparing Meals

There seemed to always be something needed done. My pop butchered pigs and calves during the cooler weather so the meat wouldn’t spoil as quickly while he was preparing it. I watched a few times for awhile. It was not a pleasant sight, nor was it a pleasant task for my dad but it had to be done. He would hit the animal on the head with a heavy mallet to kill it and then hung it by its legs on a limb of one of the fruit trees near by in the shade. Next, he cut its throat to bleed it into a wash tub sitting under it to catch the blood. I don't recall the blood being used for anything, ugh! When this was done there was a large tub of boiling water waiting to dump the pig in so its hair could be scrapped off. Then the next step was to gut it and section it into pieces, like head, feet and body parts. Everything was saved and eaten later. He cleaned the best guts and stuffed them with sausage he made. He later smoked it in the smoke house along with bacon and anything left that was eatable. Then it was stored in a cellar. A cellar was the way most of the poorer farmers had to keep food in and I don’t remember there being much, if any spoilage. It was used up too fast to spoil. My mom and pop both worked preparing the meat. Mom made headcheese and cracklings, and pickled the pigs feet, or just boiled them, they were good eaten that way also. She used the cracklings in cornbread and some of her other dishes. And it could be eaten by itself for a quick snack. Our snacks could be anything we could find that was at all eatable. After school a cold biscuit and green onion from the garden tasted pretty good, or a peeled raw potato with salt in one hand to dip it in. A raw tomato with salt was also good, and radishes and turnips. We were always welcome to eat what we wanted from the garden within reason. We were supposed to leave the strawberries alone though. They were picked and sold in town except for the ones mom picked for us to make a big crock of short cake she made with layers of pie crust instead of cake, topped with real whipped cream. She would fix that and a big pot of vegetable soup and cornbread. That was one of our favorite meals for supper. She had a style of cooking that was hard to beat.

REMEMBERING THE GOOD OLD DAY'S

We always had a good sized garden, different kinds of fruit trees, chickens, pigs and calves for our meat. There were cows for milk and butter and two hard working mules to pull my pops farming equipment for plowing and harrowing the fields where he mostly planted corn and alfalfa. The corn was used for all sorts of things, but mostly food for the animals and also he made molasses and sold it. I loved to dip a short stick of cane that I had chewed one end to make it bushy, into the boiling foam of the molasses. I burned my mouth many time. And to just chew on the sweet cane tasted pretty good also, though it had a way of splitting my tongue while chewing on it. The mules were switched off periodically pulling the tongue around in a circle that went to the big bin that caught the juice from the cane as it was ground by this procedure. Then the juice was dumped into a huge long metal bin with fire under it to boil the juice into molasses. Prier to this everyone helped stripping the cane so it could go through the process of being juiced for the molasses of which was quite a task and hard on the hands. Those same mules pulled a wagon when needed which was quite often, for all sorts of odd jobs. They hauled water, brush, wood for cooking and the heating stove in the winter. Work slowed down a bit in the winter as there was often snow on the ground in this show me state of Missouri.