Old-timey foods that I miss

[theHandpuppet]

My grandparents raised just about anything they needed for a full and wholesome diet. I miss paw paw season and my grandmother making paw paw butter from the ripened, banana-like fruits. The wild blackberries made into everything from jams to medicinal potions. Black walnut cake... huckleberries and gooseberries... a big pot of Kentucky pole beans simmering on the stove along with a good portion of fatback... picking a patch of kale after the first frost... hot corn pone from a cast iron skillet... delicate cakes of sweet, homemade butter wrapped in wax paper... getting a treat of the honeycomb suspended in a blue mason jar full of just-harvested honey... cherry picking for the cobblers and the aroma of fried apple pies...

How about you??

[JimDandy]

1. Thimble berries off the vine

boysenberry jam, huckleberry syrup, canned purple plums and tasty homegrown tomatoes.

[theHandpuppet]

2. Bake Bread Like A Pioneer In Appalachia ... With No Yeast

I may just have to give this a try. The recipe can be found at the link below.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2014/04/23/305659383/bake-bread-like-a-pioneer-in-appalachia-with-no-yeast
Bake Bread Like A Pioneer In Appalachia ... With No Yeast
by Glynis Board
April 23, 201412:21 PM ET

Growing up in West Virginia in the 1960s and '70s, Susan Brown would have a slice of salt rising bread, toasted, for Saturday morning breakfast. Her grandmother baked the bread with the mysterious and misleading name.

There's little or no salt in the recipe. No yeast, either. The bread rises because of bacteria in the potatoes or cornmeal and the flour that goes into the starter.

The taste is as distinctive as the recipe. Salt rising bread is dense and white, with a fine crumb and cheese-like flavor...

...Their research hasn't yielded the definitive origin story. The best guess is that salt rising bread dates to the isolated Appalachian region in the late 1700s, where enterprising women who did not have access to yeast figured out a way to make a yeast-free bread.... MORE

[Tanuki]

3. I miss hand-cranked ice cream, cornbread made in the special cast iron pans shaped like

rows of corn ears, half runners either right out of my uncle's garden or from my grandmother's canning jars all winter long, sassafras from our back woods, pawpaws from granny's pawpaw patch...and most of all, I miss the beloved people from older generations of my family who shared these with me but who are now gone....

[theHandpuppet]

5. Do you like pole beans?

I guess some folks call them Kentucky pole beans. I haven't had any in years and none of the local farmer's markets carry them. It's kind of sad how a lot of folks have either never heard of the old heirloom crops and probably wouldn't try them. I don't have any room to expand my garden or I'd plant some myself.

[Tanuki]

6. Yes, but then I am fairly promiscuous in my appreciation of beans.

Not so with my W.Va. relatives, who believed that half runners were the only rational choice in a green bean, much as the cushaw was the only squash to use when making a pie!
Btw, if you change your mind about growing some Kentucky wonders, you can get organic seeds for them and many other heirloom plants here:
http://www.seedsavers.org/onlinestore/bean/Bean-Kentucky-Wonder-Pole.html
My grandmother planted by the signs and would say that a certain crop should be planted "when the moon was in the hands", or wherever. I don't remember the proper location for beans!

[theHandpuppet]

4. How many of you folks have eaten paw paws?

My grandparents always had them and they would make paw paw butter in the fall; some folks, I hear, even make paw paw brandy. Paw paws always reminded me of banana custard. I always figured that the only reason they aren't more popular is that they bruise so easily and don't have much of a shelf life. It's a shame they're so hard to find now.

[theHandpuppet]

7. If you don't know beans, you don't know Appalachia

CNN - Eatocracy
If you don't know beans, you don't know Appalachia
Editor's note: The Southern Foodways Alliance delves deep in the history, tradition, heroes and plain old deliciousness of Southern food. Sheri Castle is the author of "The New Southern Garden Cookbook." She wrote this essay for the Appalachian-themed issue #51 of the SFA's Gravy quarterly.

This is a story about pinto beans. But first it’s a story about my mountain people and one of our curious traditions.

The Appalachian Mountain South is to the rest of the South what bourbon is to whiskey: It is distinguishable from the rest, yet part of the whole. That includes our food, which is rooted in our geography. Like the rest of the rural South, mountain people traditionally ate off the land. Unlike the rest of the rural South, my people live up and back in one of the oldest mountain ranges on the planet, where the landscape and climate are quite different. On a map, we’re in the South. In practice, we claim our own place.

Mountain people were, and are, notably self-reliant, eating what they can forage, hunt, or raise for themselves. Farming in the Appalachian mountains is hard now and used to be nearly impossible. The land is combative. The growing season is fickle and fleeting. The ground can be as rocky as a dry creek bed.

Old timers quip that the easiest way to plant crops in the mountains is to load a shotgun with seed, stand on the porch, and blast it into the hillside. To survive the harsh and threatening winters, people preserve what they can’t eat immediately. In short, they grow it fast, and make it last....

MORE at http://eatocracy.cnn.com/2014/05/21/appalachian-soup-beans/?hpt=ea_r2