Farr - More than moonshine: appalachian, recipes and recollections

THE kitchen has been the center of most family life since the first pioneer settlers erected log cabins in the wilderness. The red- or blue-checked tablecloths and curtains, geraniums blooming on the windowsills, a fireplace, the warmth and smell of good food cookingall these have been spoken of and written about by generations of country people.

They talk about the special times of the year: Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, Easter eggs, fried chicken and homemade ice cream on Independence Day, and the birthday celebrations which almost always originated in the kitchen. They recall how the family gathered there in times of sorrow, in times of trouble, or to visit with each other. They remember how the children sat at the table doing homework while mother cooked dinner. Often, in looking back, they realize how that big, warm kitchen knitted the family together. It was warm enough to welcome, cosy enough without being too crowded, and conducive to private talks or family councils. Family rooms in modern houses have never quite succeeded in replacing the kitchen in the hearts and memories of the family.

I read the other day that a cook in an old-time country kitchen walked at least 350 miles a year preparing three meals a day. My mother, grandmother, and Granny Brock, as well as other women in the Appalachian Mountains, probably walked three times that distanceas they scoured the garden rows and hunted the hills to get food. They did not have cash to buy much, and the corner grocery was miles away. They did not own a cookbook among them, just ancient knowledge and skillful hands, and an instinct born out of desperate need to feed their hungry children.

Families ate what they grew on the place or found in the hills. Busy from dawn to dusk, buying nothing that could be raised, cooked or handmade at home, Mother worked as her mother and grandmother worked before her. Father did outside chores, using handmade tools and methods that Grandpa and his father used.

In the years before and during the Second World War, the hills had plenty of huckleberries, blackberries, raspberries, elderberries, mulberries, strawberriesuntil timber and coal companies came and stripped the land. There were both orchard-grown and wild fruits: apples, plums, grapes, persimmons, and pawpaws. The trees in the mountains produced black and white walnuts, hazelnuts, beechnuts, and hickory nuts. Father hunted rabbits, possums, coons, squirrels, and groundhogs. He brought in wild ducks, geese, grouse, and quail. There were rock bass, trout, catfish, and other varieties of fish in the streams and rivers. Wild bees swarmed and settled, reswarmed and settled again, until numerous colonies were to be found in hollow trees. The honey was taken for use on the table, the bees put into new bee gums to start all over. The men planted cane and made molasses. They raised crops of white and sweet potatoes, squash, pumpkin, corn, and beans.

Each little homestead had its cornfield, its patch of cane, and its bee gums (hives). Somewhere along the creek there would be a watermill where corn was ground into meal. And somewhere in the hillside thickets there would be moonshine stills where corn was bottled, sold, and drunk.

The kitchen has been central to my life as a mountain woman. Iwas born and raised in Appalachiaon Stoney Fork in southeastern Kentucky. Straight Creek, one of many creeks and small rivers in eastern Kentucky, has its beginning on Pine Mountain near where Harlan and Leslie Counties join. For thirty miles or more it is fed by smaller streams and gets deeper and wider before it is lost in the Cumberland River at Pineville. Stoney Fork is one of the little creeks running into Straight Creek. From where it merges with the latter up to its headwaters at Peach Orchard, Stoney Fork is about ten miles long.

Sol Saylormy grandfatherbrought Susie, his new bride, to the head of Stoney Fork during the first decade of this century. He built a house and cleared land for crops. He set out fruit trees and built a barn, coursed wild honeybees to their trees and brought them home to domesticate in bee gums he had made ready. Susie worked in the house, garden, and cornfield until she got pregnant with their first child, my father, who was born August 12, 1911. She bore two other sons and then the charm was broken (as we say) and she had a girl. After resting a bit, she bore two more boys and another girl in the next half dozen years.

Father and his brothers all grew up, married, and moved into coves and hollows to establish their own families. Father married a Leslie County girl and moved her to Coon Branch, just across the hill from Grandpa's place. Uncle Squire married Mother's youngest sister, Mossie, and they lived on Ben's Branch in a flat meadow rimmed round with hills, a place which had been homesteaded years before by a man named Ben. Uncle Otis found his bride, Dellie, near Pineville and brought her to live on Stoney Fork. Aunt Dellie became an important person in my life because she introduced me to the world of books. Uncle Andrew and Aunt Betty stayed near the old home place but Willie B. and Laura, the baby of the family, moved away, Willie B. to Indianapolis and Laura to East Tennessee.

Wilburn and Rachel, my parents, lived on Coon Branch until they had three children; I was the firstborn. When I was five they moved a mile below the mouth of Stoney Fork and the one-room school we children later attended. Father bought logs and lumber at Sonny LeFever's sawmill and built a house in the center of an old orchard near a sulfur spring. Pine Mountain rose up steeply from our back yard.

Pine Mountain is one hundred miles long, running through three counties in Kentucky and on into Tennessee. It is filled with limestone caves and covered with scrub trees. A footpath ran up in front of our house across the mountain to the Cumberland River side. A cliff hugged the highest peak near the footpath, and from a crevice a pine grew, gnarled and twisted from endless winds. I loved to stand or sit on the rock, feel the sun on my face, the wind blowing through my hair, and listen to the sound in the pine branches. Far below, Straight Creek was a crooked silver ribbon and the buildings seemed like doll houses scattered along the road. On the Cumberland side, the railroad played a steel counterpoint to the river. Long trains filled to overflowing with Harlan County coal shuttled along to Pineville and points north and east, blowing their whistles at every small crossing.

When the train whistle sounded clearly on our side of the mountain, Mother said, Children, it's going to rain. Late that afternoon or early the next day it would cloud up and rain. I never questioned the relationship of the train whistle to the rain until I moved to Indianapolis in 1960. We lived near a railroad yard across White River in West Indianapolis. For the first week or so every time I heard a train I thought, It's going to rain, but the rain did not come. Finally I stopped expecting rain every time I heard a train. Mountain customs die hard.