Raindrops on Roses and Gravy on Biscuits

Over the years, I have come to the conclusion that food just does not taste as good as it used to taste. I can recall as a child, Dad, Uncle Bug or one of the boys would bring home a watermelon from a roadside stand or a cold gallon jug of root beer from the root beer stand up the road. We would all sit on Aunt Alta’s porch on Calumet and enjoy that melon and that root beer and they seemed to be the nectar of the gods! Now, I taste a piece of watermelon or take a sip of cold root beer and they pale in comparison to my memories.

The fruits, vegetables, and meats are just not as satisfying as those of the past. Of course, back in the day, much of that food was raised by Dad and Mom, Grandma and Grandpa, Uncle Bug and Aunt Alta, Uncle John and Aunt Hortense. Those foods were grown by the consumer and without added chemicals and preservatives and were picked at the peak of perfection. The true taste of the food could shine through. Still, even allowing a handicap for this, the tastes of my childhood are lofty goals that the tastes of adulthood seem doomed to never reach.

I have come to the conclusion that perhaps it was not the food that was that much better than the same food available today. I have come to the conclusion that the tastes of my childhood were so much better because of the beautiful loved ones present while enjoying them. None of the perfect seasoning blends in the world can compete with the flavor boost that the presence of those loved ones added.

When I have my watermelon or root beer today, I cannot enjoy it on Aunt Alta’s porch. I cannot watch sweet Granny pierce the rind of that melon with her huge butcher knife to slice it and pass it out. I cannot hold out my glass to be filled from the gallon jug by Uncle Bug. I cannot hear Denny and Dale teasing Kookie about something silly. I cannot watch Uncle Johnnie upturn his glass enjoying that last drop of sweetness. Most of them are gone now. They now live in the attic of my mind right next to the tastes of my youth.

So, it seems to me that food is not just a taste thing to me. It is more about the family that that food brings to mind that makes it enjoyable. Heck, I can’t even stand some foods, like liver and onions. I remember Mom frying liver and onions when I was young. It smelled so good but I knew how that liver looked prior to frying and I could not even bring myself to taste it. My brother David loved it though and so when I think of liver and onions, I have bittersweet memories of my brother.

As far as recipes go, my family has been filled to bursting with wonderful cooks who for the most part did not use them. Those wonderful cooks did not happen overnight. They helped their mothers in the kitchen. Those mothers had years of experience that was built upon the years of experience of their mothers, and their mothers, and their mothers… Those cooks didn’t grab a cookbook to follow instructions on making biscuits or cooking a pot of soup beans. For the most part, they didn’t even carefully measure ingredients. They may have put in so many scoops of flour or a kitchen spoonful of baking powder, using their years of experience to eyeball the amounts. Perhaps, there is a kind of cooking memory like muscle memory that becomes ingrained in our brains. Perhaps, there is even a kind of ancestral cooking memory that is passed down generation to generation that makes mixing up a batch of biscuits or a skillet of cornbread almost second nature in some families?

 

                      Three generations making biscuits, a fourth generation photographing it.

As far as favorite recipes, I don’t have many. There are some things that I love. I love sweets, which, I believe may be an ancestral sweet-loving memory from my Smith family. Most of my dad’s family loved/love their sweets. Uncle Dale used to put so much sugar in his coffee that it must have been like drinking syrup. Dad and Uncle Wallace used to walk miles over a mountain ridge to go to a store to buy enough sugar to make fudge. I do love my fudge recipe. I never eat fudge but I will make Uncle Wallace a batch of peanut butter fudge when I know that I will see him. I don’t eat the fudge but I sooo enjoy the joy that it brings to Uncle Wallace to be able to eat it. I make a Mocha torte that is a similar recipe. I don’t really care for it, but it sure gives several family members enjoyment and I love that!

 

                                                    Uncle Wallace "licking' the fudge pot.

Most of the foods that I love are simple foods like pinto beans, great Northern beans, green beans, cornbread, homegrown mustard greens, potatoes cooked just about any way under the sun, fried corn, biscuits, gravy, fried tenderloin, fried apples, homemade potato salad, Mom’s fried chicken,… I imagine that my ancestors for centuries have made most of the things that I love and I call those foods ancestor foods. When I enjoy them, I imagine all of the hard-working and loving hands of family members that have prepared them over the centuries. Call me crazy but a lowly pinto bean links me to folks long gone that I have never even had the pleasure of meeting.

 

 

I suppose that we use recipes to make our sweet treats more than anything else. In spite of loving them, we don’t make them often enough to make them without a recipe. German chocolate cake is one of my personal favorite sweets. Dried apple stack cake, caramel apples, and popcorn balls made with sorghum are more favorites.

My Grandma Smith made dried apple stack cake. Her daughter Hortense made it also and used to take it to our reunions. Now, Mom makes it. Here is our family stack cake recipe as passed down from Aunt Hortense:

Old Fashioned Apple Stack Cake
4 ½ cups flour 

1 cup brown sugar
2 tsp soda 

2 eggs
3 tsp ginger

¾ cup sorghum
1 tsp salt ¾ cup buttermilk
1 cup shortening

Sift flour with soda, salt, and ginger. Cream shortening. Add sugar gradually and beat well. Blend in eggs. Add sorghum and beat. Add dry ingredients with milk and beat well until smooth. Chill dough 3 hours. Divide dough into 5 or 6 parts. Use a well floured board to roll out dough and pat into greased pans. Put fork holes in top of each layer. Bake at 400 degrees for 10-12 minutes or until done. Cool in pan 5 min before removing. Cover with dried apple filling (below). Do not put on top layer.

Dried Apple Filling for Stack Cake

1 lb dried apples.

1 cup brown sugar

½ cup white sugar.

½ tsp allspice

½ tsp cloves

3 tsp cinnamon

Wash the dried apples. Cover with water and cook until tender. Mash thoroughly. Add the sugars and spices. Cool before spreading. Put filling on top of layers. Do not put on top layer. Stack layers.

 

Popcorn balls have been made by generations of my family too. My ancestors usually had popcorn and sorghum on hand and they knew that mixing the two resulted in a bit of heaven on earth. This is a version of popcorn “balls” that I make into bars:

Popcorn Bars

Pop four separate batches of popcorn using a nearly full six -ounce yogurt cup of corn each time. Sift through the corn after it is popped to get out any unpopped or partially popped grains. We have to take care of our teeth!

Put the popped corn into three large containers, you need stirring room and set them aside. Also, get two to three shallow cooking sheets ready for the popcorn bar mixture by spraying with cooking spray. I place a piece of wax paper on the sprayed surface so that the paper is greased too and doesn’t stick to the bar mixture.

After the corn is popped, mix equal parts, or 2 cups each, of brown sugar and sorghum in a good-sized saucepan. Use a bigger pan than you think you need because it will expand quite a bit. Heat the mixture over medium heat stirring constantly until a bit dropped into a cup of cold water balls together in a sticky mass. Then take it off the heat. Cooking time is probably about five-plus minutes.

After removing from the heat, add a heaping spoon of soda into the sorghum/brown sugar mixture and stir it in well. This is when the mixture expands quite a bit. Then pour the mixture over the three mixing pans with popcorn. At this time, have stirring help handy as you need to stir the sorghum into the popcorn before it cools too much to mix. Stir the sorghum into the popcorn until it is mixed well.

Next, pick the greased wax paper up from the prepared pans and pour some of the mixture into each of the waiting pans. Put the wax paper on top of the popcorn mixture and pack it down into the pan good. After cooling, slice into squares. If you like, you can butter your hands and form the sorghum/popcorn mixture into balls instead of putting it into pans.

 

 

As I sit here thinking about what I have written, I have begun to see a bit of folly in my ways. I think that the reason that foods just don’t taste as good today as they used to is because of the absence of loved ones who aren’t still here to enjoy them with me. Then I think about all of the new loved ones that I enjoy meals with now that weren’t there back then; my husband, my children, my granddaughter, my niece, my in-laws. I think of all of those beautiful loved ones that I have present now and I have to smile. I know that ten years in the future, I will be looking back to today and wistfully think that food just doesn’t taste like it did back then!

And to end this rambling mess, here is a silly bit of my rhyming:

Ode to Simple Fare

Now some folks salivate at the mere mention of liver called foie gras,

Well, Granny sees fried chicken livers and whoops a loud “Hoorah!”

Eatin’ crisp green beans almondine makes some folks catch their breath,

While I need smellin’ salts waitin’ on shuckies, cooked nigh to death!

Some folks take their tomatoes blended with other veggies in a cold gazpacho,

Grandpa eats a warm mater straight from the garden; well, because he’s macho!

For some folks, scalloped or au gratin potatoes will fit the billet,

Others prefer those taters fried golden brown in a cast iron skillet.

Some deglaze their pans with wine and pour those juices over their elegant food.

Others throw some flour and milk in those drippings and make gravy oh soooooo good!

For some, croissants, pitas, facaccias are the types of bread that make them swoon.

Give me a slab cornbread with my pintos and mustard greens and I’m over the moon!

There are those folks who love their fruit brandied and rolled in thin crepes,

Others prefer their apples fried and a hot buttermilk biscuit on their plates.

Presentation is very important to lots of folks and fancy garnishes, there are many,

I say give me a plate of plain, simple food; just don’t skimp and make it plenty!