I will break it down over a period of several days so it won't take up so much space each day.
Here are the "chapters" of Tera Averett's memories: Not so Plain Food; Dinnertime; Family Chores; Animal Feed; Pastimes; Sunday Meeting; Teaching.
I am not including the part about teaching since neither my mother nor I were teachers. (I did teach middle school for one year in 1989-90 and then in the summer of 1990 we moved from SC to GA and I ended my teaching career.)
Memoir of Tera Averett's Early Life
edited by Georgia Fleming
“NOT SO PLAIN FOOD.
During my childhood, all eight of us girls would gather around the dining table with Papa and
Mama three times a day for a big meal. At breakfast, there were always large, fluffy buttermilk biscuits baked in the. large wood-burning stove. There was bacon or juicy home-grown ham that had been smoked and dried by hanging in the smokehouse, plenty of brown-eye gravy, and sometimes sausage patties or stuffed sausage. Then, there was always one of the following: syrup made from sugar cane we grew and made ready for eating at a neighbor's cane mill, jelly made from blackberries we picked from the rail fence on the farm, honey from our bee hives which were robbed every May 20 and June 10 by papa, or fig 'preserves made by Mama with figs given to us by Grandmother Waters or neighbors .
Occasionally, there was a large bowl of softly scrambled eggs, fresh from the chicken yard. My
mother kept a-large flock of Rhode Island Red hens and one or two roosters. On special occasions and on Sunday mornings, we had fried chicken or fried steak from our own beef calves. When we sat down at the table, Papa sat on one side near the middle of the long table with my mother on his left. The oldest daughter sat on his right. One daughter sat at each end, and the other five daughters sat across the table on a long, handmade bench. My father served the plates and for refills, the children would pass theirplates to Papa and say, "thank you for some bread" Or whatever we wanted. Polite conversation was allowed, but never any loud boisterous misbehavior. If we got too tickled about something, we would excuse ourselves and leave the table.
At lunch, or dinner as we called it, my mother served vegetables grown in the garden the year
around. We had black-eyed peas, purple hull peas, snap beans, butterbeans which grew on the wire fence around the garden, collards, cabbage, onions, beets, tomatoes, squash, pepper, cucumbers, English peas, and turnips.
One part of the garden was set apart for strawberries grown in wide beds. The chore I hated
worse than any other was pulling weeds from the strawberry patch in the summer. But when my mother cooked one of her delicious two-tiered strawberry shortcakes smothered with those crushed berries, I soon forgot the hot summer job I had getting up all that grass.
In another comer of the garden there were hills of sweet potatoes which were covered with
teepees made of corns talks or boards covered with mounds of garden soil. Inside of the teepees, the potatoes were covered with pine straw. We grew two kinds of pears: Keifer pears were used for pear preserves, and Bartlett pears were good to eat off the tree. We also had peach trees and my mother made peach pickles and also canned some. At one time, Papa built a large canner and canned fruits and vegetables in tin cans for us and for neighbors.
We had several pecan trees and visited hickory trees, chestnut trees, and chinquapin trees for
additional treats. We had a large scuppernong vine also, but nobody was allowed to put a finger on the scuppernongs until they had turned brown.
My father and all his girls had a "sweet tooth" and we always had desserts for both dinner and
supper. Dinner was the noon meal. We would have stack cakes filled with caramel or chocolate or
coconut or lemon cheese. We had peppermint candy and jelly cakes and pound cakes made from
homemade butter. We had fruit cake or sponge cake at Christmas time and Thanksgiving. My mother served peach cobbler, syrup custard, egg custard, potato custard, and potato pudding. Even when we went to school, we carried two lunch buckets. One contained the meat, biscuits, and sweet potatoes, and the other bucket contained the desserts. We had never heard of a sandwich. For supper, we ate some of the vegetables and meats left from dinner, but we always had hot cornbread. We called the cornbread hoe cake and it was made from cornmeal, salt, and water, baked in a flat bread baker on top of the wood stove.
In the 1920s, we bought a Model T Ford and many times on a Saturday night, we had homemade ice cream. Papa would buy a 10-pound block of ice and bring it home on the running board of the car. When he got home, he would place the ice in the shade on the ground and put a #2 washtub over the top until we were ready to crank the hand freezer. Sometimes, the whole community would have an ice cream supper. The ladies would bring home-baked cakes and the men turned the freezers to make the Ice cream.
One special food Mama cooked for our family was hominy. She picked the best, firm ears of com from the com crib, shelled off the small grains, and put the big grains in the big iron wash pot. In the first boiling, she put lye in the water and coiled the com until the eye of the grains came off. Then came the many washings of the grains to remove the lye. When she prepared the hominy for serving, she fried it in a little lard with salt and water.
To be continued...
