Sour milk, clabber, was stored in Mason jars and eaten with sugar.
Editor’s Note: At the request of his readers and in memory of Warner M. Montgomery, Ph. D, we will continue to publish his Adventure Travel stories for the time being.
In his Memoirs, Uncle Jay (J.K. Gourdin IV), described the food that was grown and prepared in Pineville during his childhood, the Depression years. In those days, there were few grocery stores in North Berkeley County and even fewer restaurants. There was always plenty to eat, but the fare was simple.
Uncle Jay remembered his father (known as Mr. JK) driving to Bradwell Wholesale in Cross, 12 miles away, to purchase their staples—rice, sugar, flour, butts meat, lard, and syrup—in bulk. As a treat, he also bought several boxes of smoked herring.
The herring was fried and eaten with grits. It smelled up the house but was enjoyed by all. Likewise, butt meat was fried and eaten like bacon.
Since they kept cows in the yard, there was plenty of milk, cream, and butter. Early on, butter was churned by shaking cream in a two-quart Mason jar. Later, they bought a real churn that consisted of a gallon jar with a hand-cranked paddle mechanism that screwed on top of the jar.
Curdled sour milk, known as clabber, was saved and eaten with sugar. Jay’s mother, Irene, hung clabber in a cloth bag so the liquid would leak out leaving cottage cheese.
Ice cream was made by hand-churning cooked custard and cream with fresh fruit. Since there was no refrigeration, the people in Pineville ordered blocks of ice from the ice plant in St. Stephen once a week. The ice was kept in a box of sawdust under the house. Anything, such as milk, that might spoil was placed in the sawdust box.
Chickens, turkeys, and geese ran loose in the yard supplying plenty of bird meat and eggs. Irene had a brooder house in the backyard. It had a tin roof and a kerosene heater. Irene’s flock was able to hatch about 100 eggs at a time in the brooder house. She nursed the biddies carefully, rubbing asafetida, a fetid herbal medicine, on their sore heads and tended to their damaged feet and feathers. She also killed any chicken snake that dared enter her brooder house. Once the biddies reached a certain age, they were turned out in the yard to await their fate.
Once a year, during the winter, a hog was butchered. The hams and sides were salted and stored in the basement. The rest of the animal was ground into sausage or made into hog’s head cheese.
Uncle Jay loved sweet potatoes. He went with his father in the fall to the fields to dig for them. They were roasted over a fire by the side of the field and eaten as the syrup bubbled out of the skin. Any sweet potatoes that weren’t stored in the curing barn were immediately made into sweet potato pone by baking them in water with brown sugar, butter, and ginger for three hours.
The Gourdins had an orchard near the Big House with peach and pear trees and also a grape vineyard. A small garden plot was used to start carrots, watermelons, and other vegetables.
Mr. JK and his carpenter, Jim Draton, built a greenhouse so they could start the seeds earlier to get a better price at the market. They used window pane glass that slipped into tongued-and-grooved boards. In the long greenhouse were two parallel earthen banks. A stovepipe ran horizontally from a wood-burning firebox along the ground heating the seeds that had been planted in lard trays.
Once the word got out about the early crop of watermelons, Mr. JK realized it would be tempting for thieves. So, to harden the target, he built what he called “stopper guns”—short sections of galvanized pipe attached to short boards and loaded with 16-gauge shotgun shells. A nail triggered by a string around the watermelon patch would fire birdshot at knee level across the melons.
Mr. JK held an announced demonstration of his stopper guns one afternoon. As expected, no one was ever shot, and no watermelons were ever stolen.
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