My Continued Stories will resume soon. Hope you have liked these short stories while waiting.
I must have been every bit of
four when I became enamored with the big skillet at our house. We had some
other size skillets but they were extra for when we had the kin folks over.
What really got me going was
when we had company and Gram would get up early (I’m talking like four in the
morning) and start the fire in the cook stove.
As I lay in bed I would wait
to hear the big skillet being dragged across the top of the cast iron stove and
then the sizzle of some corn dodger being fried first.
With every clatter a new
image popped into my mind for I knew just what was happening. The sound of the dodger being scraped from the
skillet and being put into the warmers over the stove (That dodger was great to
snack on between meals) meant the next step was the ham being fried in big
batches.
The smell of that ham was
always too much for me and out of the bed I came and into the kitchen in my
drawers. I would sit myself down and as soon as the first batch of ham was done
I would ask Gram for a slice.
I would trim off the fat
around the ham while waiting for it to cool enough to eat. Then it was just me
and that mouth watering slice of ham. That would hold me until the grits,
biscuits, eggs, potatoes and two kinds of gravy was ready.
That skillet full of fried
potatoes would feed all that could fit around the table and more. Gram had some other skillets that weren’t
quite as large as the big one but it was my favorite because it would hold much
more.
The old coffee pot was about
four times as big as a regular one it took a lot of drinking to empty it out.
The cast iron pot was always
ready for whatever kind of beans Du’juor. A lot of those large butterbeans had been
cooked in that pot and a lot more to come. They were about the size of a
quarter when done.
Polk salad and turnip greens,
yams and everything pork, I ate it all.
Possums I skipped for they
were too greasy even for me.
Squirrels and rabbits were a
delight and of course chicken finger licking fried or boiled with dumplings.
The orchard provided fresh
fruit in the summer and then canned for the winter.
The bees made honey and the
sorghum cane gave molasses.
The skillet and the pot made
it all but gourmet eating for us country folks.
Thinking about this made me
hungry for some “Corn Bread and Butterbeans” and my honey across the
table.
Thank you Robert for sharing and for the corn bread you made tonight with your home made soup. Yumm
ReplyDelete