Unless you grew up on a farm you probably would be thinking dinner as being the evening meal. It was only 10:00 AM and several hours of hard work were behind us. Supper was still about eight hours away. Dinner for us was a hearty meal served at noon with a lunch break around 9:30, consisting of coffee and maybe a sandwich. We also had an afternoon lunch break of coffee or iced tea with cookies or some kind of dessert. You would think we would have been obese but calories were unheard of and none of us were even slightly overweight as our hard work just built muscle and no fat.
Back to 10:00 AM and what’s for dinner. My mother told me it was my choice, just pick out a nice fryer and make sure not to get an old hen or rooster. Old hens are for stewing and roosters have more work to do, if you can call it work. Having watched my mother many times, by the time I was twelve, it became a job that seemed pretty easy and didn’t bother me knowing what the finished product was going to be. I grabbed the long wire with a hook on the end that we kept in a tree so it would be handy when it was needed. Surveying the chickens that were scrounging for their meal, I would sneak up behind an unsuspecting spring chicken and catch that bird by hooking a leg with the long wire. Bringing it back to me, I would hold it by it’s two legs and take it to the chopping block, lay it’s head and neck on that block of wood and with one quick blow of a corn knife, the head would be separated from the body. Releasing the headless chicken, it jumped around until almost all of it’s blood was gone. Sometimes I would toss the headless chicken into a nearby bush so it wouldn’t jump so far away. The next step was to dunk the bird in boiling water so the feathers could be plucked. With the chicken ready to be cut into the right number of pieces, seasoned and breaded with milk and flour, it was ready for the frying pan. By 12:00 the aroma of that fryer was something I can still imagine today. I’ll never be able to taste chicken that fresh again.
My preferred method of putting food on the table was hunting for pheasant and for every bird I shot, a chicken was spared for another day. A real sportsman would never do this (and it was illegal) but because of the cost of ammunition and my lack of money, I could get the same results with a 22 rifle bullet as I could with a shotgun shell. I sometimes wondered if a game warden knew what I was doing and felt sorry for us and never confiscated my gun or arrested me, knowing he would probably then have to feed me and maybe my family if he did either. Pheasant tasted much like the chicken, maybe better.
Fishing occasionally provided food on our table. We lived in the community of Dry Valley and it was several miles to any river, pond or stream so fishing wasn’t done that frequently. My first catch would have been a mess of bullheads out of a dirty creek and after some salt, pepper and flour they were good to eat. Memories still linger of the first catfish I landed. I was so excited when I hooked it that it flew over my head, and landed way up on the river bank. How good that catfish tasted and it was large enough to feed our entire family.
So with all of those good memories, “What’s for Dinner?” How about some beef, fruit and milk?
With cattle bringing more money than hogs, they were rarely butchered and we usually sold them at market. But when we did butcher a beef, that Hereford meat far surpassed the taste of the Angus that is so widely advertised today. More frequently, we butchered hogs and always invited a neighbor to help and share and we would return our services with another neighbor. The gory images of how we slaughtered hogs is still quite vivid in my mind. That critter would first receive a blow between the eyes with a sledge hammer and while still stunned its throat would be slashed so the blood would drain from its body. One of our good neighbors would always catch that blood in a pan and use it to make blood pudding and blood sausage. When the product was finished he would want to share it with us but I don’t recall ever eating it. We did eat just about all of the pig, the knuckles, tongue, brains, the lard, the rinds, the intestines, (they were used to make sausage links) and it was often said we even saved the oink and made oinkment (ointment) out of it.
When the life of that pig was completely gone, a rope attached to the limb of a tree would hoist the critter up with a pulley and back down, dunking it in boiling water so the hair could be removed. That water came from the house where it had been brought to a boil on our old kitchen kerosine stove. Butchering required the teamwork of the whole family and we all worked late into the night, preparing slabs of bacon and ham hocks for curing and smoking, cutting up meat, grinding with a little hand grinder attached to the table and dicing the fat for rendering lard. The lard was then used for baking and cooking or making soap. That evening we usually had a hearty meal of fresh pork as most of the meat had to be canned, beings there was no refrigeration other than a small ice box and ice wasn’t always available.
To balance our diet, my father had planted an orchard of apple and cherry trees and we always had a garden for a variety of vegetable and a lot of potatoes. Our diets were supplemented with wild berries that grew in the roadsides ditches and in the pasture. Wild plums, choke cherries, crab apples, mulberries and goose berries grew quite abundantly in the wild. Along with the good we always had to contend with the bad – chiggers. Sometimes I think I can still feel that itching sensation from their bites around my waist.
We always kept several milk cows, oh how I hated milking cows, balancing myself on a T – shaped stool, fashioned from two twelve inch two by fours nailed together, as the cow kept swinging her tail to shoo flies away, slapping me in the head while never hitting a fly.
And then came the drought and depression. The pasture and crops withered away and our cattle died as the pastures couldn’t provide food because of the lack of moisture. The fruit trees also died and were cut down as were other trees to be used for firewood to heat the house during the cold winter months. After wild animals devoured what little meat was on the livestock and the bones were bleached by the sun, we would pick up those bones and sell them for pennies.
It was too much for my father, watching his dream home and land go to ruins and no way to provide for the family. His health deteriorated and he died at the age of 58, leaving a wife and five children with nothing but memories of “What’s for Dinner?”