The Feedsack Dress

The last of the fried chicken

My mother stopped frying chicken about this time of year. The chickens we’d raised over the summer were becoming too tough to fry. 

Every spring my parents bought about 150 newly hatched chickens and put them in a brooder house roughly 15x15. Chickens peak on the cuteness scale in their first week or two of life, and their fuzz feels soft as a teddy bear. 

My sisters and I eagerly awaited the chicks, but they require a lot of work. You have to keep them really warm. We used kerosene heaters in our electricity-free brooder house. They required very shallow, narrow water containers so they wouldn’t fall in and drown, and those and the food containers had to cleaned and refilled frequently. 

Chickens have tiny brains even when they grow up. Baby chicks tend to stampede right over each other when alarmed, and our opening the door of the brooder house for the third or fourth time a day would stampede them. Sometimes chicks got smothered. One of our unpleasant jobs on each visit was looking for dead chicks. 

Chicks become less cute and less vulnerable as feathers sprout. That’s fortunate. We raised some to replace our aging laying hens, but many ended up on the table. By mid summer my mother would point out the meal of the day scratching in the dirt by the brooder house or in the barnyard and one of us would catch it. In those days people still talked about chicken every Sunday, but we had fried chicken most July and August days. 

My mother killed the condemned chicken by holding it down on an old stump with one hand and chopping off the head with a hatchet with the other. She’d fling the headless animal away to keep it from throwing blood on her as it thrashed around—the proverbial chicken with its head off. She would have hot water in a big bucket at hand, and when the chicken stopped moving, she would grab it by the legs and dunk it until it was soaked. That made it easier to pluck the feathers, a smelly and tedious job we all hated. 

By fall the survivors lived in the hen house. During the winter an older hen who didn’t lay regularly came to our table about twice a month as roasted or boiled chicken. 

We named most of our other animals and gave them a bit of the affection you give to pets, but we never named the baby chicks. You keep an emotional distance from your dinner. 

 —Carolyn Mulford

Eating watermelon

Few things taste better than cold watermelon on a hot August day, even if you chill it only by placing it in a tin tub and pumping cold well water over it. 

When I was growing up, we rarely ate watermelon indoors. Instead we’d sit on the steps of the back porch and my mother or father would cut a slice the length of a giant melon for each of us. Then we’d assume the position: legs spread wide, elbows on knees, and both hands gripping the rind. That way the juice and the seeds dropped onto the steps rather than onto us. If the juice dribbled on our bare feet, it didn’t matter. We’d clean off at the well. 

One steaming hot day when I was working in the hayfield with my father, my uncle, and my great-uncle, my father sent me to a nearby watermelon patch to fetch a ripe one. I didn’t know how to thump to test, but a melon that had come off the vine was ready. The only one I found weighed more than my eight-year-old arms could manage, but I staggered out of the patch and across the stubble toward the haystack we were building. As I neared the haystack, the watermelon slipped through my fingers and burst open on the ground. I was humiliated, but the men laughed and assured me it didn’t matter as we had only our pocketknives to cut it with anyway. 

That warm watermelon was delicious. 

 —Carolyn Mulford

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