Willow and Hearth

“I can set a full supper on this table right now out of about nothing. A little flour, a little grease, a cup of water. That’s gravy.” That is how the narrator at @backroadsamerica opens a long countdown of 25 forgotten Depression-era meals from the Appalachian hills, and it sets the tone for everything that follows: hard times, quiet skill and a grandmother who could make a handful of ingredients feel like enough.

The narrator speaks as someone raised by people who “came up hard and then the whole country came down to meet them.” Here is a look at the meals described, the surprising health lesson hiding in one of them, and a few ideas for bringing some of that thrifty wisdom into your own kitchen today.

@backroadsamerica

Hard times in the hollers

The narrator sets the scene with the year 1929. By the time the Depression was over, the narrator says, a quarter of the men in the country had no work. Up in the hollers, there was not much work to lose in the first place. What families did have was a garden, a hog if they were lucky, a creek, and a grandmother who knew how to make five people believe they had eaten.

The narrator also teases three of the meals to come: one that kept a family from a disease that was killing thousands a year, one that could hurt you if it was cooked wrong, and one where a single old hen fed nine people without anyone leaving the table hungry. The countdown begins at number 25.

The everyday suppers

The early items on the list are humble, and the narrator makes a point of saying so. Here is a quick tour of what is described:

• Fried potatoes and onions. The dish the narrator says everybody’s grandmother made. The trick is patience: thin-sliced potatoes in a skillet of hot grease, left alone so they crisp instead of steaming. If there was one egg in the house, it went on top and got cut five ways.
• Tomato gravy over biscuits. In winter, when fresh tomatoes were long gone, a spoon of grease and a spoon of browned flour met a quart of home-canned tomatoes, juice and all. It thickened into a red gravy served over a split biscuit. The flour has to brown long enough to lose its raw taste.
• Milk toast. What you ate when you were sick or when there was truly nothing else. The narrator says it was made with the heel of the loaf and the cream off the top of the milk, and for a child it “tasted like being taken care of.”
• The poor man’s sandwich. Two slices of bread with a raw onion, salt and a scrape of grease, or a cold biscuit rubbed with bacon grease and a little sugar. The narrator notes it was also called a “wish” sandwich, because you wished something was in the middle, and says plainly that it was hunger, not something noble.
• Boiled cabbage and cornbread. Cabbage kept in the cellar for months and filled a pot. Cooked soft with a bit of fat back, it was served with cornbread crumbled into the pot liquor, which the narrator says should never be thrown out.
• Hoover stew. A stew of boiled macaroni, sliced hot dogs, canned tomatoes and whatever beans or corn there was, passed around at soup kitchens. The narrator says it was not really a mountain dish.
• Sorghum sop and a cold biscuit. A split biscuit with dark syrup, which the narrator says was breakfast and supper for many children. The narrator adds having carried it in a dinner bucket during 31 years underground.
• Egg gravy, cracklin’ bread and sweet potato pie. Each was a way to stretch a little: a couple of eggs beaten into milk gravy, cracklings from hog-killing time folded into cornbread, and sweet potatoes, which the narrator calls the mountain’s insurance, baked into a pie.
• Fried creek fish and scalloped tomatoes. A boy with a hook and a can of worms brought home free protein, while stale bread layered with home-canned tomatoes became a dish somewhere between a bread pudding and a stew.

The thread running through all of them is the line that says it best: “That’s the skill, not the food, making the food feel like enough.”

The salmon patty that kept a family well

The meal that carries the narrator’s health story is salmon patties. The narrator says a can of salmon in those years cost about a nickel, and that a mother would mash the whole can, bones and all, add crushed crackers or a spoon of meal and one egg, and fry the patties in grease. Served about once a week beside cornbread, the narrator says, it carried enough of something to keep a family of four from pellagra, which the narrator describes as the disease that comes from eating almost nothing but corn.

The history behind that is real. According to a review published by the National Library of Medicine, pellagra was eventually traced to a deficiency of the B vitamin niacin. The body makes niacin from an amino acid called tryptophan, which is found in foods such as milk, cheese, fish, meat and eggs. The same review notes that South Carolina alone reported 30,000 cases by 1912, and that in 1914 the U.S. Surgeon General sent Dr. Joseph Goldberger to investigate. His 1923 report concluded that pellagra could be completely prevented by diet.

So the narrator’s point holds up: families who simply noticed that people who ate a little fish stayed well, and kept doing it, were onto something even without a laboratory. As the narrator puts it, “They weren’t chemists.” Of course, a varied diet is the real lesson here, and anyone with questions about nutrition should talk with their own doctor.

A safety note about eating off the land

Meal number 12 is the one the narrator warns about. When the smokehouse was empty, the narrator says, families ate what the woods offered: squirrel and gravy, squirrel and dumplings, rabbit, and sometimes groundhog or possum. The narrator then stops to say the old way could hurt you. Wild rabbits and groundhogs, the warning goes, can carry a sickness called tularemia, which you can catch just from cleaning an animal with a cut on your hand. The modern advice is to wear gloves when cleaning wild game, bury any animal whose liver shows white spots, and cook every bit of it all the way through to 165 degrees.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention backs up the basics. In its guidance on preventing tularemia, the agency tells people to wear gloves when handling wild rabbits and rodents, to cook game meat well before eating, and to avoid sick or dead animals. If you hunt or are given wild game, follow the guidance of your state wildlife agency and use a food thermometer instead of guessing.

Lessons for today’s kitchen

You do not need to give up modern conveniences to learn from these grandmothers. A few of their habits are as useful now as they were then:

• Do not waste the liquid. Pot liquor, pan drippings and canning juice all carry flavor. Use them for gravies, soups and cooking grains.
• Stretch protein with starch. A little meat or egg goes much further with biscuits, potatoes or cornbread beside it.
• Use up stale bread. Toast it, crumb it, or bake it into a layered dish.
• Brown your flour. A gravy made with properly toasted flour tastes rich even with very little fat.
• Do not crowd the skillet. Crisp potatoes need room and patience.
• Keep canned fish in the pantry. Salmon patties are still a cheap, filling supper.

The narrator is careful not to romanticize those years, and that is probably why the stories land so well. They were lean times, and these meals were a response to real hunger. Still, there is something moving about the care that went into them. A grandmother with a skillet, a spoon of flour and a pot of water made sure a table full of children went to bed warm and full.