Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 17, 1991 TAG: 9104170460
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By BETH MACY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
In honor of the old days when vegetables were boiled with fatback and the keys to cooking were country-fried, Crisco and real cream, we asked readers to reminisce about Retro Food.
We asked area cooks to send us their old recipes, the ones they used B.C.
Before Cholesterol.
The recipes in the stack of mail evoked images of chicken fried in lard, apples fried in bacon drippings and hamburger-bacon meat loaves. We also got stories to go with them - about the days when sausage was something you got from your farm, not the refrigerated section at Kroger.
When you were awakened by the smells of ham and home fries wafting into your bedroom. When a light meal included pound cakes, whipped-cream pies, pickled greens and baked beans with molasses.
Vinton's Vinton's Gloria Hudson wrote of growing up with a high-calorie menu that featured meats and gravy, homemade biscuits and rolls, and corn bread fixed in a cast-iron pan her father made at the Virginia Foundry.
"I still cook and bake the way I was raised. To me there is nothing any better than corn bread and beans," she wrote. And though she couldn't include any of her own recipes - she does them all by memory, no measurements needed - she did include a stack of yellowed newspaper and magazine recipes, including a page from a 1973 McCall's magazine.
Her letter, like many others, seemed to harken to the days when heart disease was neither a worry nor much of a problem.
From Christiansburg's\ Polly Adams Kahle: "As I watch my Mother - age 101 years - stir three spoons of sugar into her morning cup of coffee and add more salt to her egg, I'm reminded of all the `wrong' things the nutritional experts would declare she had done over the years in her cooking methods and eating habits. Yet she continues to defy their predictions."
Kahle says her mother has never taken medicines, never dieted and once went 25 years without seeing a doctor. "And today she is surrounded by all nine of her children and numerous grandchildren."
Similarly, Billie M. Cole of Vinton sent us an entire menu, consisting of fried pickled green beans with bacon, potatoes fried in butter and bacon grease, country-fried streaked bacon, corn bread, and apples and snips with cream.
"This was my grandmother's panacea for anything that upset you - or even pleased you," she wrote. "According to the nutritionists of today, we should all have dropped dead after every meal like this. Or at least [be] too fat to walk through a door."
But despite it all, her grandparents and parents each lived long and healthy lives - not one of them succumbing to anything resembling heart trouble. "Now we are all in our 70s and 80s and no one of us eats this way anymore," she added. "But we are all plagued with high blood pressure, high cholesterol weight gain and yes, heart problems."
Maybe the farm work counterbalanced the calories. One thing is for sure, wrote Bea Spivey of Galax, who sent in her recipe for country ham and dumplings:
"When living on a farm, growing our own pork, this was our favorite eating," she said. She doesn't cook the dish anymore and with "good reason - no home-cured ham. And it sure wouldn't taste the same with canned ham, canned biscuits."
There were plenty of reasons the cooks said they gave up retro cooking, among them:
Store quality just doesn't match home-grown. "Yes, I used to make my own sausage and lard but not any more," wrote Kathryn Whitten of Buena Vista. "We had our own hams, spare ribs and back bones. And we left a lot of meat on them, too, not what you buy today; they don't have any meat on them."
Fear of failure. Dorlee Martin Allison of Roanoke, commenting on her mother's boiled custard recipe, wrote, "Being convinced that it was a difficult feat to accomplish, I did not learn how to make it until after mother's death. Even though I mastered the technique later, Demon Cholesterol has limited the use of this recipe to Christmastime."
Tastes change. Roanoke's Margaret Murray sent in her grandmother's recipe for mush served for dinner, which, she noted, was called supper back in those days.
"I do not make it because of several reasons, namely, real butter is not only expensive, but bad healthwise; pure cream is the same; do not have an iron pot or old cook stove, or a stone bowl to serve it in. And at age 93 years it would not taste the same as it did to a 5-year-old."
Oure guilt. Helen Jones Ames of Salem, commenting on her chess pie in sesame seed crust, wrote, "This is just wonderful, but you're better off not knowing the caloric content. This is a very old recipe - B.C. In those days we thought eggs and butter were good for us."
And of her ham-macaroni casserole recipe, she wrote, "When I used to make this many moons ago, the pasta was the `fattening' ingredient - not the cream, ham or cheese."
Even Spam made the list.
Northeast Roanoke's Jerry Overstreet sent us his recipe for fried potatoes and Spam, noting that his family's "retro meal planner was made to knock the socks off with a variety of mainly country food in a city kitchen. . . . The then family of eight pleased [palates] despite being poor."
Roanoke's Nancy Jordan sent in a recipe for spoon bread that has been in her family for generations. Quantities were described in old-fashioned pint and teacup measurements, and doneness was tested by piercing the treat with a stalk from a broom.
\ Lorie Yarborough of Salem sent a detailed description, including a diagram, of her meat-loaf making methods. She's been using the recipe since 1940, which she called "B.C. - before children."
"I am unfamiliar with what `Retro Foods' is," she added, "but I was born in a small country village in Tennessee called Retro."
And Salem's Peggy Harris didn't enclose any family recipes at all because her mother never wrote them down. In those days, she wrote, "You didn't mind getting up. You could smell the food coming all the way upstairs."
Back then, food stayed with you so you could perform hard physical work, she wrote. "A lot of the food today is just too light; the other stuck to your ribs." She closed her letter by commenting on the process of recalling Retro Foods:
"This has really made me hungry. I'll just have to fry some ham before long."
And on that note, we present as many of the recipes as space allows, with one disclaimer: We haven't tested these recipes, with one exception - Mom's Pot Pie, which inspired this story a few months back. It was a particularly bad and rainy Monday, when the only thing to do was pull out the rolling pin and the Crisco, and give this century-old recipe a try.
You'll note that it, along with the others, is written in the language of the cook. So if the pot pie wording seems a bit motherly, keep in mind that to a 9-year old who absolutely lived for this dish, the raw dough was every bit as good as the end product.
Mom's pot pie
1 cup flour
1 tsp. Crisco
2 eggs
Chicken or beef broth
Put flour in medium-size bowl and mix in Crisco with your hands (after washing).
Beat the eggs with a fork and add to flour mixture. Hopefully you will have a dough. Roll out with flour very thin. Just when you think it's thin enough, turn it out and roll it out again. Cut into squares, about 2 inches across.
Have broth boiling, and drop in one piece at a time (DO NOT eat raw dough!!) Cook approximately 10 minutes, stirring occasionally (but don't cover).
Serve over top of a mound of mashed potatoes.
- Sarah Macy Slack, Kettering, Ohio.
Open-faced tomato sandwiches
1 large red home-grown tomato
2 pieces toasted white bread
4 strips bacon cooked and drained thoroughly on paper
1 Tbsp. flour
1 Tbsp. bacon drippings in pan where bacon was fried
1 cup whole milk
Salt and pepper to taste
Dip tomato in hot water, then peel and slice. Place two slices on each piece of toast.
Make gravy by stirring flour into bacon drippings, then stir in the cup of milk, adding the salt and pepper to taste.
Pour hot gravy over tomatoes on toast. Place two slices of crisp bacon on top of tomatoes - and enjoy! Serves two.
Cook's note: "A favorite B.C. recipe which I still make for a quick lunch or supper when the home-grown tomatoes are in. The little bit of bacon drippings in the sauce gives it an irresistable flavor." - Marjorie Baker James, Lexington
Rhubarb pudding
3 cups diced rhubarb, or two packages frozen
3/4 cup sugar
3 eggs
1 1/2 cup breadcrumbs
1/4 cup oleo
1 cup sugar
3 Tbsp. flour
Add 3/4 cup sugar to rhubarb. Line baking dish with breadcrumbs. Top with filling of remaining cup of sugar, oleo and egg yolks.
Then cream together with the flour and spread over rhubarb.
Bake 30 minutes at 350. Top with beaten egg whites, adding an additional 6 Tbsp. sugar and 1 tsp. vanilla; then brown in oven 5-10 minutes longer. Serves 8.
Cook's note: "I am a retired home economics teacher, and this is my very favorite recipe!" - Nell Wilbourne, Salem
Bacon-cheese biscuits
2 cups self-rising flour
1 Tbsp. sugar
1/3 cup shortening
1 cup buttermilk
1/2 tsp. baking soda
3/4 pound sliced bacon cooked crisp and crumbled
1 cup (4 ounces) shredded cheddar cheese
Combine flour and sugar; cut in shortening with a pastry blender until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Set aside.
Combine buttermilk and soda, stirring until soda dissolves. Add buttermilk mixture, bacon and cheese to flour mixture, stirring until dry ingredients are moistened. Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead lightly 4-5 times.
Roll or pat dough to half-inch thickness; cut with a 2-inch biscuit cutter. Place on a lightly greased baking sheet. Bake at 425 for 10-12 minutes. Yields about 18 biscuits.
Cook's note: "These biscuits are about as full of no-nos as they could possibly be and couldn't be better, especially when spread with real butter." - Mary Ellen Sanders, Roanoke
Sausage gravy
1/2 pound pork sausage
1 heaping tsp. salt
3 heaping Tbsps. flour
1 tall can evaporated milk
1 can water
Fry sausage in heavy skillet, breaking it up with spatula as it cooks. When well done and brown, add salt.
Stir in flour and cook on low heat until brown. Add milk and water. Cook and stir until thick.
Cook's note: "My children always request this when they come home for a visit." - Donna G. Hall, Christiansburg.
Best pound cake
2 sticks butter
1/2 cup shortening
3 cups sugar
5 eggs
1 tsp. baking powder
3 cups flour
1 cup milk
1 tsp. vanilla
1/2 teaspoon lemon extract
Cream butter, shortening and sugar until smooth. Add eggs one at a time and continue mixing.
Sift flour and baking powder and add to the mixture, along with milk, vanilla and lemon. Mix well. Preheat oven to 350. Pour batter into greased and floured tube pan and bake 1 hour, 20 minutes. - Lucile Lester Waugaman, Roanoke.
Fried breakfast apples
2 apples per person, preferably Golden Delicious
1/4 to 1/2 cup sugar
6 to 8 Tbsps. bacon grease
Slice peeled apples into black iron skillet with 2-3 Tbsps. water to prevent sticking. Cover, bring the water to boil and steam on medium high until apples look slightly limp (about 10-15 minutes). Continue boiling, uncovered, until liquid is reduced by half.
Sprinkle thickly with sugar and add bacon grease. Reduce heat and\ SLOWLY cook, uncovered, until the apple slices are translucent and caramelized around the edges. Turn carefully and sparingly.
Budget 45 minutes to 1 hour for this entire process. If rushed, the apples will stick with a vengeance or fall apart into mush.
Cook's note: "This recipe comes from the old cook on my grandparents' orchard in Daleville. Passed through my father's childhood, to my mother and on to me, Cora's apples remain the actual taste of September." - Dr. K. Douglass Hopkins, Buena Vista.
Oyster and bacon poor boys
4 slices bacon, fried until crisp, reserving grease
1 sliced onion
1 chopped green pepper
2 stalks celery, chopped
1 clove garlic, chopped
1/2 tsp. seasoned salt
1 tomato, chopped
1/2 cup mayonnaise
1 tsp. hot sauce
2 hoagy buns, buttered and toasted
1 cup cracker meal
1/2 cup cornmeal
Salt and pepper
2 eggs, beaten
6 ounces oysters
Saute onion, green pepper and celery in 1 Tbsp. bacon grease with garlic and salt. Add tomato, and reserve in a warm bowl.
Mix together mayonnaise and hot sauce, and reserve.
Dip oysters in eggs, then into a mixture of cracker meal, cornmeal, salt and pepper. Then fry them in bacon grease, 1 1/2 minutes, turning once.
Spread mayonnaise on bread, add bacon, vegetables and oysters. 2 servings.
Cook's note: "My husband and I love this recipe and fix it occasionally when we just can't stand to watch our calories any longer." - Brenda S. Feeny, Martinsville.
by CNB