She's back.
SWMBO (Judith Taylor) writes today about the food of her childhood:
Produce
When I was growing up in the middle of Indiana we lived on a four acre family compound consisting of my grandparents' house down a long lane toward the creek and our house up by the road.
We grew much of what we ate.
Today, for some reason, I started thinking of all the things we took for granted.
There were many trees that produced cherries, pears, yellow apples, red apples, paw-paws, peaches and persimmons.
There were also Concord grapes on an arbor and blackberries and raspberries in a briar patch.
Asparagus and rhubarb came up spring after spring.
Then the hard work started as soon as the weather warmed a bit.
Huge gardens were planted.
Salads grew in our back yard, consisting of leaf lettuce, green onions, radishes, cucumbers and tomatoes.
We also planted old dependables: yellow onions, green peas, green beans, white potatoes, sweet corn, pumpkins, squash and cabbage.
Although they weren't on our four acres, if we went back into the woods in the spring we could sometimes luck out with a discovery of a big bunch of morel mushrooms which my mother would dip in beaten egg and flour and fry in lard.
It was hard to wait for them to reach the table.
Throughout the summer, as things came ready, we canned everything that could be canned, looking forward to the long winter.
Pears and peaches were preserved in a light sugar syrup and my grandmother would drop a few Red-Hot candies into the jars of pears before they were sealed.
They made the pears slightly pink and yummy looking.
Apples became applesauce before canning.
Grape juice was bottled, but never became wine.
Persimmons were turned into pulp and made into pudding later.
Cucumbers became pickles and were saved in big crocks with heavy lids.
The root cellar at grandmother's house held bushel baskets filled with potatoes, apples and onions.
Bees made all the honey we could consume, right there in the orchard.
And we were considered poor.
