| Kurt's Saxon's Online Biography: Page 1 of 3 |
I've had feelings of insecurity about food for as long as I can remember. It was my jerky dad's fault. He left our valley and our wonderful peasant heritage to join the wretched ranks of the proletariat.
I was a Depression baby, born March 6,1932 in Wichita. Dad was a peanut roaster at Jett and Wood's. The place naturally went bankrupt. Then Dad packed the family from one town to another doing what factory work was to be done before each place folded.
This went on until 1938 when Dad sent Mama, Winnie, Billy and me to Grandma Dodson's farm somewhere in Darkest Arkansas. It was night when we got there and I remember I was yelling and screaming about something and generally out of sorts.
Grandma stoked up the wood stove and prepared us a quick meal of corn pancakes. They were made of eggs, real butter and whole corn meal. She soon had a pile of them so high I couldn't see over them. I couldn't remember seeing more food on the table than we could eat so this was amazing.
Those corn pancakes were as big as plates and covered with butter. I never tasted anything so delicious and was never so happy. I went to sleep somewhere in mid-bite and even dreamed of corn pancakes.
For breakfast there was a big plate at my place with biscuits opened and covered with good Hour gravy. There were all the eggs I could eat and pounds and pounds of bacon and big glasses of churned buttermilk. There was also lots of oatmeal which I managed to not have room for, being quite used to plenty of that.
After breakfast I tore outside to be further amazed at all the food running loose. There were chickens in the yard, real ones with feathers on; not like those at the butcher's, hanging upside down and all naked.
Grandma went out with a hatchet and chopped the heads off two big ones for dinner. She served them Southern fried in a way that would have made the old Colonel hide his head. And with the chicken were big blocks of steaming hot corn bread. I would crumble it up and ladle out great dips of pinto beans in lots of rich bean soup on the corn bread and watch it soak in and the steam rise. Fantastic!
That afternoon I went out and killed six chickens. We had chicken in every way Grandma knew how to fix it for several meals. I was delighted.
A few days later we went down the road to visit Mama's brother, George. He had a lot of goats; an animal I didn't know existed.
My little cousin, Jenny, led one up a ramp and milked it into a tin cup. I tasted the milk and liked it. I asked her, "Jenny, what kind of dog is that?" She answered, "This here's a goat."
Later, I called my older brother aside; he was eight. I said, "Billy, these here goat dogs are great. Ain't nobody in Brooklyn ever heard of them. What we gotta do is take some back. We can corner the market in dog milk."
After Mama got finished visiting her people we went seven miles away to my Granddad Saxon's valley. He seemed to own the whole world. He had his own flour mill, saw mill, blacksmith shop, country store, post office, winery and even something brewing up the hill in the forest.
Naturally, he had his own farm with lots of every farm animal known to man. He raised every bit of his own food and only bought things like salt, sugar, spices, etc. And what he bought, he got wholesale from his own personal country store.
Grandma baked all the bread and canned all the food for winter. She still had time to mess with us kids. For awhile she couldn't understand Brooklyn and we couldn't handle much Southern. But we made out pretty well by pointing and grabbing.
The place that fascinated me most was the storm cellar. This was a great concrete bunker about ten feet by ten feet inside. It was lined all about from floor to ceiling with shelves of double rows of quart jars of food.
There were even bedrolls and a lamp so people could stay all night there. It was used mainly for storing food. As a storm cellar, it was naturally used for staying during heavy storms and was used also by the hired
hands and my cousin Valerie.
I will never forget the oodles of quart jars of sausage patties on the shelves. There was every other kind of food down there but it was the sausage patties that really grabbed me.
They were half cooked and put in jars and covered with fat. That way they would keep for years and when fully cooked they tasted like they had been put up the day before.
Their aroma would really wake us up and get us out of bed. Their quality was so great that there is nothing on the market today that I would care to eat. Such a comparison is not just an exaggerated childhood memory, either.
