Fishing for Chickens: A Smokies Food Memoir

INTRODUCTION

These words are being written in December, and decreasing daylight associated with this time of year can be depressing and bring on that miserable malady variously known by mountain folks as cabin fever, the miseries, or mullygrubs. It seems that even on sunny days, deep down in a mountain hollow or on a north-facing slope, brightness never penetrates. Such times somehow seem made for the resurrection of memories and the comfort of filling and fulfilling foodstuffs. Short of dining on sumptuous dishes redolent of Smokies cooking at its finest, I know of no better way to drive away the blues than through food memories. There’s a great deal of delight to be had from indulgence in such daydreaming. While they obviously form an integral part of such excursions into the past, this material isn’t just a collection of traditional family recipes. It’s a history of how my family lived, an exercise in social commentary, and a reflection of time and place. Join me in a loving trip back to a gustatory world we have to some degree lost. It has much to tell us about the Smokies and indeed all of southern Appalachia as they once were.

All the reminiscences touch, in some fashion or other, on traditional foods. As such, they are intended to sharpen memory, whet appetites, and serve as an introduction to a wide-ranging assortment of food memories, food folkways, and recipes, many of them treasured hand-me-downs, from an individual who proudly styles himself a son of the Smokies. I grew up in Bryson City, North Carolina, a small town set squarely in the heart of the Great Smokies, and from the earliest reaches of my memory onward mountain foodways have held immense appeal for me.

Among the clearest of my early recollections, ones that reach back to a time when my growing mind and body were at that point when humans start assembling the mental collectibles that will accompany them all their years, are those directly related to food. My first regular assigned household chore as a small boy involved splitting kindling for the wood stove on which Momma prepared our meals. During the warmer months of the year its use would be limited to preparation of breakfast and dinner (the midday meal), and it would be allowed to die down during the heat of the day. Sometime before I went to bed I would be responsible for laying the next day’s fire. That involved stacking some rich pine kindling atop crumpled newspaper. The bigger sticks of wood were kept in a box beside the stove and Momma or Daddy would add those when they lit the stove to begin breakfast preparations.

I took the job seriously, at least in part because I loved going down in the basement and chopping up kindling with a small hatchet. That didn’t seem like real work, and Daddy’s stern stipulations about exercising due care not to chop off a finger and stressing the importance of the job gave me a case of the big head, which had precisely the end result he intended. I was careful, took pride in my work, and derived quiet satisfaction from being part of the household’s overall approach to food preparation.

The wood-burning stove was replaced when I was still just a splinter of a boy—maybe seven or eight years of age—with the marvel of an electric stove. For a time Momma had decidedly mixed feelings about having gone upscale. She reckoned the oven didn’t bake bread the way her old wood burner had, moaned about not having a warmer in which to keep bread, and no doubt had to make some adjustments in terms of how fast things cooked and heat control. But she liked being able to turn a burner on and be in business immediately, and certainly the comparative absence of heat during the summer months was a blessing.

While the wood-burning stove left our household in my tender youth, it didn’t go far and I didn’t lose touch with it. Daddy gave it to Aunt Mag Williams, a wonderful old Black lady (yes, Aunt was the standard way of describing venerable and particularly honored African Americans in that time and place, and it was in no way meant in disrespect—our entire family loved Aunt Mag) who lived only a couple hundred yards down the road. There, thanks to Aunt Mag’s generosity and the fact that I regularly gave her fish in return for worm-digging privileges in her chicken lot, along with selling her the carcasses of muskrats I had trapped, I had a standing invitation to drop by for a bite to eat.

One bitterly cold winter day I had been out rabbit hunting by myself for a number of hours. For some reason, perhaps suspecting there might be a piece of pie or a batch of cookies just beckoning a greedy-gut lad, I knocked on the door and was, as always, welcomed in the little frame house. Aunt Mag was, as usual, knitting in her living room rocking chair, but my primary impression was that the aroma coming out of the adjacent kitchen was enough to set salivary glands into overflow mode.

I commented on the wonderful smell and asked what was cooking. Oh, I made me a stew this morning, she said, and it’s sitting on the stove just keeping warm. Get you a bowl off the shelf over there, you know where they are [that was a certainty—I had plenty of prior experience when it came to eating her fixings], and spoon you out some. There’s some cornbread too if you want a piece.

That was exactly what I had hoped to hear and no second invitation was required. There was in due course, however, a second helping. It was a rich, savory stew, liberally laced with carrots, potatoes, green peas, and gravy, but the key ingredient was chunks of meat I didn’t recognize. Not that it really mattered for the moment. The meat and vegetables had melded in a delightful fashion, and it seemed to me as fine as anything I’d ever eaten. Finally, after two whopping bowls, I belatedly remembered my manners and thanked Aunt Mag while politely inquiring what it was I’d been enjoying.

It was the moment for which she had waited. Cackling with pure delight, she said: You been eating muskrat. Ain’t it fine? Now you see why I been paying you a quarter for every one you bring me. Once again the old wood-burning stove and Aunt Mag’s genius had worked wonders. The pair presumably continued their partnership until her death, not much short of the century mark. By then I was off at college, but the marvels she and that old stove wrought remain entrenched in my mind until this day.

Aunt Mag and that ancient stove belong to a world we have long since lost, but through traditional recipes and methods of preparing them we can at least retain tenuous links to tastes from the past. One such link comes through cookbooks, but therein lies something of a conundrum. Unquestionably the Smokies region is an area with rich and rewarding culinary history. Yet most cookbooks dealing with food from the region treat it as merely being a part of southern Appalachia. They define southern Appalachia as a region encompassing parts of West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama. Some even include Ohio and Mississippi. Unquestionably the hill-and-hollow folks of that wide swath of America share many culinary traditions in common, and you’ll find foodstuffs such as cornbread and streaked meat, wild game and chicken, as bright aspects anywhere you go in the lower reaches and extensions of that ancient spine of time known as the Appalachian chain.

I would staunchly maintain, however, that the Smokies area is distinctive and different in a host of subtle yet ultimately significant ways. Accordingly this book is far more limited in geographical scope than the wide-ranging and somewhat amorphous southern Appalachia. It deals strictly with the Great Smokies of western North Carolina and east Tennessee along with the immediately contiguous chains of mountains—those such as the Blacks, Nantahalas, Alarkas, Snowbirds, and Unakas. The precise geographical boundaries of the Smokies can vary somewhat according to individuals, and interestingly many folks who, strictly speaking, did not grow up within the Great Smokies claim them as their homeland. That’s a testament to the aura of mystique, one that at times approaches reverence, associated with the region. A poet who called Bryson City home for much of his life, Leroy Sossamon, once described the Smokies in the title for one of his books as the Backside of Heaven. That’s about as fine an assessment of the bewitching appeal of these hills and hollows as anyone could desire.

As far as specific geographical boundaries for the Great Smokies, there’s arguably no better qualified authority than an early explorer of the region, Arnold Guyot. In a map of what he labeled the Great Smoky Mounts, the range covers the area from the Little Tennessee River northwards to where it meets the Newfound Mountains at Max Patch, including the peaks to the east of the Pigeon River up to the Newfound Mountains. That embraces portions of today’s counties of Swain and Haywood in North Carolina and Blount, Cocke, and Sevier in Tennessee. The immediately adjacent counties of Cherokee, Graham, Macon, and Jackson in North Carolina sometimes claim to lie within the Smokies, but this is a bit of a stretch. They actually embrace mountain chains linked to the Smokies.

It’s where I grew up, where the roots of not only my food knowledge but the essence of my being belong. This book offers one individual’s perspective on what might be called a subculture or subregion of Appalachia as a whole. It involves dishes I’ve cooked and eaten, recipes handed down through family or close friends, food memories of an intensely personal nature, and an abiding love for a fast-fading way of life. Fancy-dancy food magazines and self-ordained cuisine cognoscenti regularly rave about gustatory delights reflecting the Appalachian cooking tradition. Yet they focus on restaurants in regional cities such as Asheville and Nashville, Chattanooga and Cleveland, or even the bustling metropolis of Atlanta. Simply put, they are missing the boat, at least in my eyes.

Real mountain cooking involves instinct as much as it does precise ingredients, experience rather than the expertise of formal training. I’ll give one specific example to make my point. In recent years ramps have been all the rage in high-dollar restaurants in the region and beyond. More than once I’ve had waitstaff mention during menu discussions some item or the other garnished with ramps or featuring ramps as a side dish. I simply ask whether they have been cooked, and without exception, the answer is yes. That’s understandable, because the aftereffects of raw ramps redefine halitosis and make garlic seem a pantywaist poseur. When I was a youngster, anyone coming to school after having eaten a bait of ramps earned an automatic three-day pass. You simply couldn’t stand to be in the same room with the offender.

Yet raw ramps as part of a salad of branch lettuce kilt with grease from hot bacon or fried streaked meat, dosed with a few drops of vinegar, and dusted with salt and black pepper will, to use an old mountain description, make you slap your granny. So will finely chopped ramps atop a dish of scrambled eggs cooked with real butter and partnered with a cathead biscuit or two slathered in butter. It’s just that everyone present or who will be around those dining on this delicacy need to partake of the dish. Doing so means no worry about odiferous matters. That won’t work for a public eatery. But this book is about home cooking, not an excursion into the higher realms of culinary wonders as defined through restaurant fare and all too many contemporary eyes.

I now realize that my family was, if you looked at matters from a national perspective rather than that of the Smokies in the 1940s and 1950s, comparatively poor. We weren’t impoverished by any means, and the word a good friend and high school classmate uses to describe her family’s circumstances at the time, destitute, was not applicable. We always had plenty of food on the table, never worried about where the next meal was coming from, and my siblings and I got some new clothing at the beginning of each school year. It was only when I went off to college and saw others who had folding money in their pockets and didn’t give a second thought to eating out or spending several dollars on a date that reality dawned about the true nature of our circumstances.

Maybe the best way to describe the situation is through a story my father, who lived to the age of 101 and was keen as a properly sharpened Case knife right to the end, loved to tell. I was in the first grade, and as was frequently the case over the course of the school year, the class was asked to contribute money for some project or the other. Most students volunteered a few cents or maybe even a nickel or dime. Not me. In a classic example of a little shaver getting a bad case of the big britches, I spoke up and said: My daddy will give five dollars!

When I got home and told Mom and Dad what I had promised, the world seemed to cave in. That amount of money represented a good start toward the monthly payment on their mortgage (they had bought the house and land for $2,500 on a long-term note) and would have taken care of most of our store-bought food needs for a week. Daddy honored my commitment but only after the kind of parental input that left no doubt whatsoever that there would be no future pledges, no matter how small, from his oldest child. He did, however, garner some long-term benefit. Over the years he must have told that tale fifty times, always doing so when I was present, for a renewed round of well-deserved humiliation.

I now know that my family, and to an even greater extent many of the families of my contemporaries, lived an existence that in some ways was not all that distant from pioneer times. That was particularly true when it came to self-sufficiency. Virtually everyone was poor, at least if you measured personal wealth on the basis of money in the bank, but we were rich in knowing how to grow, raise, catch, kill, trap, or find in nature essentials for life. We had a keen sense of community, an even stronger one of family ties, and most of all a deeply embedded love of place. It was a way of life, and of all the familial ties binding us together, food was the strongest. Our life may have been simple and our sustenance marked by cornbread, not crêpes suzette, but it was a good one. We not only had an adequate amount to eat. We ate wonderfully well.

With that in mind, it seems fitting to start with a sort of preliminary quiz—mental food prep if you will. Here, in the form of a lengthy list of culinary experiences, is your opportunity to take this little examination on mountain cuisine. If you can honestly answer yes to a goodly number of the questions, then it is probable this line of discourse has found your salivary glands kicking into involuntary overdrive and that you are already familiar with the joy provided by traveling in the fast lane to the loftier southern regions of culinary paradise. Conversely, if most of what for me are winsome food memories seem strange to you, let not your pea-picking heart be troubled. A brave new world of tastes and treats lies ahead. In other words, this is a quiz where no one fails and where everyone has the opportunity to open the door to what my Grandpa Joe would have described as some mighty fine fixings. With each point below I am simply asking: HAVE YOU EVER?

• Eaten a supper consisting of nothing but cornbread and milk (either sweet or buttermilk). Those who haven’t enjoyed this culinary pleasure might think it constitutes slim pickings. In truth, a big chunk of cornbread made from stone-ground meal and crumbled in a glass of cold milk is a taste treat of great delight.

• Enjoyed home-churned butter, nicely salted and pressed in an old-time wooden mold.

• Eaten fried pies with filling made from dried apples or peaches folded into a round piece of dough folded like a half moon to hold the fruit. Slathered with butter, such fare is fit for a king or any son or daughter of the Smokies.

• Dined on baked chicken when the featured dish came from a free-range flock. The beautifully browned hen will have lots of little eggs in the making inside the body cavity, and those are a real delicacy.

• Poured molasses over soft butter and mashed it all up before applying the resultant mix to a cathead biscuit. The trick is to get just the right amount of molasses and butter for the biscuit, although missing your measurement isn’t a tragedy. It’s just an excuse to eat another biscuit.

• Enjoyed the cane syrup known as Dixie Dew. I’m not at all sure Dixie Dew even exists anymore, but it was a staple on our family table. While it was undeniably tasty, I liked both molasses and honey better than it. Nonetheless, this sweetening from the 1950s had an absolutely irresistible advertising slogan. It read: Covers Dixie like the dew and gives a biscuit a college education. Some public relations genius had to be behind that piece of wordsmithing.

• Eaten fresh-made pork sausage for breakfast. If you have partaken of fresh sausage, chances are pretty good that you’ve also had the even greater pleasure of eating tenderloin from a recently butchered hog.

• Been part of the rendering process that produces cracklings or, better still, chomped down on a big chunk of crackling cornbread. It’s a treat that will make you shed worries about cholesterol simply because of the pure pleasure it produces.

• Had hamburger or sausage made into milk gravy, and with cornbread, served as a main dish. That was one of Mom’s favorite ways of making a relatively small amount of meat go a long way.

• Eaten old-fashioned stick candy in flavors such as horehound.

• Taken a hefty dose of sulfur and molasses, or maybe a cup of sassafras tea, as a spring tonic.

• Gathered poke sallet and eaten it as a welcome fresh vegetable after a long run of those that kept well—such as cabbage, turnips, carrots, and potatoes—but lacked the spring taste of earth’s rebirth.

• Drunk syllabub at Christmastime.

• Prepared chicken for the family table the old-fashioned way—catching the live chicken, either wringing its neck or chopping off its head, removing the entrails while being careful to save the giblets, plunging the fowl into scalding water, then plucking the feathers. To go through this arduous background work, which was standard stuff for our forebears, will give you a fuller appreciation of just how they worked as they went about their daily lives.

• Slopped hogs.

• Fed scratch feed to chickens.

• Shelled corn you had raised to feed fattening hogs you would eventually eat.

• Plugged a watermelon to check its ripeness. I never really understood this process; once the melon was plugged it had to be used.

• Eaten sauce or pies made from some of the winter squash that were widely grown, along with pumpkins, in the mountains. Among them were candy roasters and cushaws.

• Feasted on country ham your family had cured, with the obligatory side dishes of redeye gravy and biscuits.

• Eaten sawmill gravy (a milk and cornmeal gravy, usually made with drippings from sausage or bacon with plenty of meat bits left in for good measure).

• Savored a properly made stack cake, with at least seven thin layers of cake, each one separated by spiced sauce made from dried apples or maybe blackberry jam.

• Attended an all-day singing with dinner on the grounds.

• Participated in an old-fashioned homecoming or family reunion with dishes such as cold fried chicken, ham biscuits, deviled eggs, and potato salad.

• Saved the rinds from a feast of watermelon to be put up as watermelon pickles.

• Prepared homemade peach pickles.

• Drunk water straight from a mountain spring that was so icy cold it set your teeth on edge.

• Participated in a watermelon seed-spitting contest.

• Picked up ripe honey locust pods from the ground and eaten the meat that surrounds the seeds.

• Found a prime patch of hazelnut bushes and gathered the delicious nuts.

• Gathered fox grapes to make jelly.

• Dined on small game—squirrel, rabbit, quail, or grouse—you had killed and cleaned.

• Enjoyed freshly caught trout wearing dinner jackets of stone-ground cornmeal fried to a golden turn and served with fried taters and onions.

• Located a hollow filled with pawpaw bushes (they never quite attain tree status) laden with ripe fruit and enjoyed a woodland feast.

• Eaten the sweet-sour flesh surrounding the seeds of yellowed maypop fruit.

• Sampled liver mush, liver pudding, scrapple, headcheese, or other foods made from the parts of pigs that frugal waste not, want not mountain folks put to good and tasty use.

• Eaten a cobbler made from berries you picked.

If you haven’t done any of these things, you have lived what I genuinely consider a life of culinary deprivation and almost certainly don’t have deep mountain roots. Fortunately, there’s no time like the present to change the deprivation part of the equation. On the other hand, if you share many of these food memories, consider yourself blessed as well as being someone pretty well immersed in mountain culinary traditions. Even so, however, I think you’ll find the wide-ranging sampling of food memories and recipes that follows worthy of your attention and a resource for recollection.

Two young boys dig into a meal at a mountain table set with the standard condiments.

Courtesy of Hunter Library, Western Carolina University.

Plowing ground in preparation for spring planting.

Courtesy of the National Park Service.

PART I

STAPLES OF LIFE

Come stroll with me down memory lane

To happenings in days of yore

When we lived a good life in the Smokies

In spite of our being pore.

GLADYS TRENTHAM RUSSELL,

It Happened in the Smokies

Until fairly modern times (post – World War II) mountain diet involved, to a considerable degree, living off the land. Rural folks raised their own livestock, grew their own fruits and vegetables, and supplemented these with game, fish, berries, fruits, nuts, and greens from nature’s abundant larder. Only a few necessities, such as salt, spices, and perhaps sugar, came from stores. The primary form of sweetening was often provided by molasses from cane the family grew, sometimes supplemented by honey, or less frequently, maple syrup. Through drying, canning, pickling, smoking, storage in root cellars or canneries, use of spring houses for perseveration, and other means, hardy high-country residents were self-sufficient. Even when it came to things like flour and cornmeal, they either had a small tub mill of their own, or more frequently, took grain—corn, wheat, and even rye, along with buckwheat (which is technically not a grain)—to the local mill to be ground. The miller was usually paid in a barter system, keeping a portion of what he ground.

Virtually every family had chickens, hogs, and a milk cow. Sometimes turkeys or guineas figured in the mix of domestic fowl. Until the sad demise of the American chestnut, hogs ranged wild for a portion of the year, with distinctive ear markings enabling owners to identify what pigs belonged to them. Beef rarely figured in mountain diet, but milk, buttermilk, and butter were staples. A country family without a milk cow was in effect destitute.

The coverage in this section focuses on the dietary items that formed the heart of what sons and daughters of the Smokies ate on a daily basis. Almost all the recipes belong to what might be described as traditional foodstuffs. That means you won’t find Italian, Tex-Mex, Asian, or French fare. Dishes from the British Isles, on the other hand, do appear. This recognizes the Scots-Irish roots of most of those who resided in southern Appalachia in general and the Smokies in particular. With relatively few exceptions, the recipes come from my family or that of my wife, and in every instance, they involve dishes that have actually been prepared in Casada kitchens. Taken in their entirety, what you will find in these opening nine chapters represents a solid cross-section of both daily fare and delicacies from mountain life in yesteryear.

CHAPTER 1

CORN

Long before the first white settlers made their way down the ancient spine of the Appalachians into the highlands, corn was a staple of mountain life. As part of the three sisters approach to agriculture practiced by the Cherokees, corn, beans, and pumpkins and other winter squash figured prominently in American Indian diet. Pioneering Europeans learned of its uses and methods of cultivation from Indians, for the grain was foreign to their experience. Originally known as turkey wheat, corn was consumed in an amazing variety of ways.

These included standard Indian approaches such as samp (ground corn soaked in milk until it reached a porridgelike consistency), bread made from grains that had been pounded with homemade mortars carved from especially dense woods such as dogwood or persimmon, and hominy. Soon settlers expanded the uses of corn in dramatic fashion. It was used not only as a human foodstuff but as fodder for farm animals: corn shocks dotted farm fields and were fed to cattle as needed during the lean months of winter; the grain finished fattening hogs after they had been browsing on chestnut mast; and cracked grain and inferior ears called nubbins became scratch feed for chickens. Crude mattresses were sometimes stuffed with husks, and cobs soaked in kerosene furnished a sure, swift way to get a fire started in cook stoves or hearths. Husks became works of primitive art when fashioned into dolls. Even cobs had uses. Corncob jelly and corncob dumplings were considered delicacies. Cobs could be shaped into bowls for homemade pipes used to smoke homegrown burley tobacco. Insertion of a slender peg of hickory, dogwood, or other dense wood turned a portion of a cob into a striker for slate turkey calls. While the use of cobs as a substitute for toilet paper is likely more myth than reality, rough humor often attributed this use to cobs.

An elderly man grits corn using a homemade device. This was a common way of readying corn for cooking at the point when it was just past the milk or roasting ear stage and beginning to harden and become starchy.

Courtesy of Hunter Library, Western Carolina University.

A section of corncob, whittled to shape, made a fine stopper for a jug, and that brings us to the most notorious and controversial use of corn—for production of moonshine. This is unquestionably a notorious and infamous aspect of corn’s role in mountain life. Variously described with terms such as white lightning, squeezings, golden moonbeam, stump water, tanglefoot, mountain dew, peartning juice, and snakebite medicine, liquid corn became a standard if illicit adjunct to life on many homesteads in the Smokies.

Call liquid corn what you will, and duly recognizing it was less prevalent than many would have you believe, the making of it was a widespread cottage industry in the mountains, although it was not practiced to anywhere near the degree reading of books such as Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders would lead one to believe. Kephart was given to sensational stereotyping, and the book suffers considerably from that fact (a full 40 percent of it is devoted to various aspects of moonshining). He was also a noted consumer of squeezings, and he died in an automobile wreck after a visit to a local moonshiner.

The corn of choice for production of moonshine was Hickory Cane. It contains higher sugar content than a rival type of field corn, Hickory King, and that extra sweetness meant a bit less store-bought sugar was required in the distillation process. The late Popcorn Sutton, a legend among modern moonshiners who lived over Maggie Valley way, once told me that there was no finer corn for making a run of likker than Hickory Cane grown in mountain soil. I’ll leave it to others to judge the accuracy of Popcorn’s statement, but you have to give some credence to a noted practitioner of the moonshiner’s art who was also the author of a book on the subject, Me and My Likker (almost certainly ghostwritten), and who achieved cult status in his later years and following his death by suicide.

Carefully constructed corn shocks were a standard feature in winter fields of yesteryear. In addition to furnishing food for livestock, those shocks often did double duty as protection for