The Feedsack Dress

Popping corn in an iron skillet

Nothing warms a winter evening like hot popcorn, especially when it’s popped in an iron skillet with bacon grease.

My father rarely cooked anything, but he usually took over the popcorn. He liked it as much as we kids did, and making enough for our family in the 1940s took much more time and muscle than putting a package in the microwave. 

He started by spooning leftover bacon grease into the big iron skillet my mother used to fry chicken. He put the skillet on a burner of the wood stove. When the grease was really hot, he shook in just the right amount of grain and put on a lid. Soon came the hard part—holding the lid on with one hand and with the other moving the skillet back and forth on the burner so rapidly that the popping corn wouldn’t burn and the unpopped grains would shake down to the bottom. 

The irregular rhythm of the individual grains expanding was beautiful music When the percussion faded, he dumped the popped corn into our biggest container and put bacon grease in the skillet for the next batch.

I’ve tried microwaved popcorn. It smells pretty good, but it sadly lacks the flavor yielded by leftover bacon grease or even lard. I have an iron skillet but no bacon grease, and I wouldn’t dare drive that skillet back and forth on my glass-top stove. Still, on a cold December night I think how good popcorn used to taste.

Occasionally technology sends us a step back.

 

—Carolyn Mulford

Making doughnuts

During the Christmas season in the 1940s, my mother made many specials treats, including doughnuts. 

Her doughnuts weren’t the airy, super-sweet ones with frosting or glazes that you buy in dedicated doughnut shops or grocery stores today. She made a cake doughnut, a dense, delicious pastry that warmed the coldest winter day.

Using the recipe in a 1930s  Rumford Complete Cook Book, she mixed three cups of flour, a dash of salt, three teaspoons of baking powder, 2/3 of a cup of sugar, two eggs gathered the previous afternoon, and a cup of milk from the morning milking. The mixture formed a soft dough that she rolled out with the wood rolling pin. 

My sisters and I took turns cutting out the doughnuts with a round tin cutter and putting them on one plate and the holes on another. My mother would smoosh together the fragments left and roll out the dough again. We’d repeat the operation until nothing bigger than the holes remained.

By then my mother would have heated lard from the latest hog butchering in a deep pot. When the fat boiled, she dropped in the doughnuts one at a time. The pot would hold only about half a dozen, and we waited impatiently until she lifted out one batch and dropped in another. 

When the doughnuts had drained and cooled enough for us to handle them with our fingers, we put them, one at a time, in a bowl of sugar, turning the doughnut until the grains lightly covered both sides. We did the holes last, rolling them around in the sugar. Many went into our mouths rather than onto the platter. 

The doughnuts tasted great warm or cold, but few lasted long enough to grow cold.

—Carolyn Mulford