25 LOST Survival Meals Every Appalachian Grandmother Made During the Great Depression

My grandmother fed eleven people through the worst years this country ever had, and she was still cooking the exact same way thirty years later, when there was money in the house and no reason left to do it. That is the part nobody tells you about the Great Depression. It ended. The money came back. And the women who had carried their families through it went right on cooking the same, for thirty more years, because they did not believe it. Her name was Dicey. She was born in nineteen oh five up a hollow in eastern Kentucky, and she was twenty four years old with two babies on her hip when the banks went down in nineteen twenty nine. I was not alive for any of it. I was born in nineteen fifty three. But I ate it. I ate it every Sunday of my childhood at that woman's table, and I did not have the first idea that was what I was eating. I thought that was just how food was. Here is what I have learned since, and it is why I made this video instead of one more list of old recipes. Somewhere in the nineteen fifties this country decided that the way she cooked was something to be ashamed of. It came in on the television and in the magazines and on the shelf at the store in town, and what it said was that a modern woman opens a can and a backward woman soaks a bean. Her own daughters heard it. My mother heard it. And I watched my grandmother, who had kept eleven people alive on cornmeal and grease and what grew wild on a bank, start to apologize for her own table. She would set down a pan of soup beans that had been going since daylight and she would say, now, it is nothing fancy. Nothing fancy. Four years ago I paid twenty six dollars in a restaurant in Asheville for a bowl of those beans with one square of cornbread beside it, and there was a paragraph about it printed on the menu. They called it heritage. They shamed her out of it for forty years and then they sold it back to us with a paragraph. So here are twenty five of them, in the order she went to them. Soup beans and the pot liquor that is the whole point of them. Fried potatoes as the entire supper. Cornmeal mush at night and the same mush fried in slices the next morning. White gravy with no meat in it and pepper standing in for the meat. Killed lettuce. Poke sallet and the three boils, which I will be careful with you about. Shuck beans strung on a thread and kept through the winter by air. Souse. Cracklin cornbread. Vinegar pie. Dried apple stack cake, which the neighbors built on the table one layer each. Milk toast. Flat dumplings, which are the Appalachian dumpling. Creasy greens out of a February pasture. Hoe cake. Blackberry dumplings. Fried apples. The second day of the beans, and the third. An old hen that had quit laying. Corn pone baked in the ashes. Chow chow, and what it is actually for. Tomato gravy. Salt rising bread. Sorghum and butter worked together with the back of a fork. And number twenty five, which is the only one that is gone for good. I will also tell you the truth about the three or four that were not good, because some of it was not good. Some of it was hunger with a recipe wrapped around it, and I am not going to lie about that just because I loved her. At the end I answer the question I put off the whole video: how many of these twenty five are still made in this house. The number is not twenty five and it is not zero, and the sixteen that fell away did not all fall away for the same reason. Some went because we got something better. Some we handed over. There is nothing to buy in this video and there never was. That is probably the reason nobody ever said any of it out loud. Nobody sells you a pot of beans.