Snacks we ate when I was growing up

Today I was picking up some pecans, cracking them, and eating them on the spot. When I was young, in the fall when we came home from school we would pick up some pecans, crack them between two bricks or with a hammer, and pick out the pecans and eat them.

This was a great snack. We would find pecans outdoors from about October until springtime. Sometimes we would toast them in the oven with a little butter and salt on them.
In the fall we would also have peanuts to eat. First we would pull up peanut bushes, pick off the green peanuts and boil them. Yum yum. Not everybody likes boiled peanuts but I love them. Then when the peanuts were picked and dried, we would roast (parch) them in the oven throughout the winter. Sometimes we made peanut brittle, using cane syrup my dad made. So these nuts would take us through the winter.


In the springtime, we ate things from the garden, including green sweet onions with a lump of salt. Or raw turnip roots. Fruit trees including peaches, plums, and pears furnished us with fruit. We had apple trees but there were usually used for making apple butter since they were always too sour to eat. In May mother would take us blackberry picking to get berries for jelly and jam. In the meantime we would look for berry bushes near the house to pick berries for snacking. We had huckleberries (small version of blueberries) that we would pick in the summer to eat and make jam.

We had a big scuppernong (muscadine) bush that furnished such good berry fruit in the fall. There were some things I never did like, including persimmons. I ate chinquapins but didn't really like them as much as my friends did. In the summer we would dry figs, apples, and peaches to have in the winter. My grandmother made delicious fig newtons with the dried figs.

So much for fruits. Another good snack was to have a hot baked sweet potato in the oven when we got home from school. We would peel the potato and add a wedge of homemade butter. I still love hot baked sweet potatoes - with nothing on them usually. Mother would save left-over biscuits from breakfast and we liked to make a hole on the side of the biscuit with our finger and fill it with soft butter and thick cane syrup. Nothing like a good cold syrup and biscuit.
Another favorite vegetable for a snack was a big ripe tomato, with salt of course. Radishes, cucumbers and carrots were favorite snacks.


Cookies and cakes were for special occasions only. I loved "fruit cake weather". When it turned cold in November, we would start gathering things for fruitcakes for the holidays. I still love homemade fruitcakes soaked in wine or whiskey for several days before eating it. It just doesn't seem like Christmas without the aroma of freshly baked (and fermenting!) fruit cakes and lane cakes, and nobody in my family likes these delicious cakes. I always get slices from some of my friends to satisy my craving around the holidays. Other cakes we had at Thanksgiving and Christmas were "lemon cheese" cakes (a white sponge layer cake with cooked lemon curd filling) and a coconut cake (using freshly grated coconut). I didn't like having to puncture the eyes of the cococnut with an ice pick, draining the juice, and cracking the hard shell with a hammer, and then the hard part - cutting away the dark skin on the greasy while coconut meat. Then we would have to grate the white coconut and I always grated my knuckles and they would bleed and get sore.


I still eat a lot of these nutritious snacks when they are available. I like to drive out in the countryside in the summer and  look for the wild yellow plums in the summer that grow beside the road. They are so sweet and juicy.