LOL, over 50 years ago, when my husbands ship would pull out to sea, I would rush home and start cooking for a party.
A pot of beans w/salt pork, cornbread, turnip greens, fried potatoes, using bacon grease, Ice tea and buttermilk. Chopped green onions.
When it was ready, 3 other wives who liked my kind of food, came to dinner...........and we ate till we couldn’t eat another bite.
If a person was not from the south, then they did not have the taste for my kind of home cooking.
I had not the faintest idea of how to cook a thick steak ‘rare’.
I only knew tough cows that had to be made into “Chicken Fried” steaks, by pounding them with a thick saucer edge.
There was a bacon grease saver...hld about 3 cups and had a lid, with a strainer in the top..
There is a product sold for many years, called Liquid Smoke, that can be used in several dishes, as in beans, chuck roast and tastes like smoke, you use it by the drop and it is in a 4 ounce approx. square brown bottle.
We ate stewed tomatoes over bread, add a pinch of sugar and they were good.
We had gravy with every meal, but I almost got expelled in the 7th grade, the teacher attempted to teach me how to make “White Sauce”, using a double boiler..........LOL, she would not listen to me, when I told her that was not the way to make gravy.
I never did master white sauce, to me it was paste.
A friend introduced me to the perfect mess of greens, he picks a few leaves from what ever he has growing, chops them to med. bite sized pieces and uses them for salads, sandwiches, or even steamed with butter.
The first time he gave me a mess of them, I was not sure I would use them, LOL, I did and started planting for the same purpose.
We pinch the leaves off, leaving the plant to grow more, turnip, mustard, lettuce, swiss chard, and all the oriental greens, even a few weeds, purslane and amaranth go in the mix, with a few leaves off the onion plants, talk about good.
I would make them a gallon at a time and in less than a week, they would be gone.
I had not tried fried potatoes with the biscuits added in, should be good, my first thought was to add cornbread.
We also ate cornbread in a bowl with milk on it.
A friend grew up eating popcorn in a bowl with milk and sugar on it, said that was the first dry cereal.
You are correct about ‘adjusting the old recipes’, that we do, some that I see today, have only the name of the original recipe left.
I always made my potato salad with mashed potatoes, one day my mother was at the house and asked me why I mashed them.
I told her that she did, when I was a kid.........when she got over her laughter, she said “yes, I did make it with mashed potatoes, if they were leftovers, not from scratch”.
LOL, I hate biting into a hunk of cold tater, still like mine mashed.
You can hide a lot in mashed potatoes, I mix in summer squash, with pots and onion, or cabbage.
Thanks for the ideas, LOL, you never know when they will float through my brain again.
People never understood, why I read cookbooks like a novel, but I knew that i wanted the info in my brain, even if I was not going to make the recipe as written.
Have you done any root cellaring? I’ve messed with it a bit but not mastered it.
I think in a survival situation getting nutrition along with calories will be crucial. Root cellaring and winter/indoor gardening will be as important as canning/freezing/drying and dry storage of grains etc. If you can avoid starvation and also be healthy enough to work you will come thru alot better than living off MRE’s and survival food.
I have come close to mastering growing greens in small hoop tunnels. I harvested some excellent greens on the above freezing days this winter.
I make the hoops out of common field fencing and leave the wires poking out both sides to stick in the ground. They are about 6ft long and hooped over about 3ft. high.
I take the plastic for the hoop tunnels and reinforce the areas where I’m going stake it down with pieces cut from plastic slipsheets I get at work. Then I drill holes in the center of the pieces where the stakes go through and reinforce those with tarp grommets.
I place them at intervals that match pre-drilled 1X4’s. I put the boards over the top of the plastic on the ground at each side of the hoop and stake them down and the ends. The greens withstand down to -20F and the hoop can stand up to 70MPH winds.
My great grandmother was Cherokee. Her maiden was Adcock and she was from south central Tennessee.
Granny, I grew up on that sort of cooking. My Dad was Georgia born and a great Southern cook. So we always had the things you mentioned, plus some very good stuff from my Mom’s Pennsylvania Dutch side of the family, like pork and sauerkraut and dumplings — yum!
Dad would also make Southern fried pies sometimes, from fruit we picked. So tasty. I need to make some soon.
He browned pork neckbones and then added white rice and the right amount of water, salt, lots of pepper, and then simmered until the rice was done. Loved that dish and still make it. So simple, but so good.