I just happened to tune in to a program called Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern today. This episode is showing how head cheese and liverwurst are made. I just made a mental note never to eat either of those again. When I was a little girl I loved both and I thought I still do----till I watched what goes into them. My grandfather on my mother's side was first generation German and Granny made both of these for him when I was a little girl. And even when I was a not-so-little girl. These two foods will never pass my lips ever again. I've already sworn off hot dogs and hamburger unless I'm in a position where I'm at someone else's house who has nothing else offered. In that case, I suddenly become very full, having "just eaten" right before coming to their house. (Yeah---right!)
I understand that in past eras, people had to frugally make use of every part of an animal. My grandpa used to say "We eat every part on a pig except the squeal." When I was three or four, I came upon a pig's head in a big tub on the living room floor. I asked why it was there. It was so disgusting. My grandpa said, "We're making head cheese". If that was going to mean I had to put any part of that head in my mouth, I was NOT going to ever do that.
Later in the day, after my nap when I'd forgotten the pig's head, I came out to the kitchen and my uncle (who lived with us) stuffed something in my mouth. I thought it was really good and asked for more. He wouldn't tell me what it was till I'd eaten more than a little kid should. THEN he told me it was "head cheese" and when I asked what was in it, he told me.
My family was very poor, but when a child is small, they don't know what "poor" is. It wasn't unusual to sometimes have only a buttered piece of bread with unseasoned pinto bean soup poured on it.
I thought that was a wonderful meal when I was 4 years old. That's why things like a nasty pig's head ended up in the living room. It was given to us by a farmer who kept the rest of the pig, I remember coming to the living room from a nap and finding a calf on a big quilt on the living room floor, cleaned and ready to cut up. Another time it was a bucket of eels. Ewww! And a big fish of some kind another time. Neighbors often gave us their "offal", (which I still think is awful).. One of my favorite foods was pigeon. My uncles still lived at home and somewhere they'd found a flock of pigeons they killed and brought home. I ate two whole pigeons by myself. Granny told me that before I was born, during the Depression, they were given a goat to eat.
As I sit here thinking back to those times, I just don't understand how we survived without food poisoning. The closest we came to refrigeration was an old oak "ice box" my grandparents got somewhere. We never used it because where we lived, there wasn't anywhere to get ice and even if there had been, we couldn't have bought any. There wasn't money for it. For anyone young enough not to know what an "ice box" is, it was an oak cabinet with a shelf in it. On the bottom was a place where a big block of ice would be put and there was a hole in that shelf where the melted water came out and enough space under the cabinet to sit a basin under the hole to catch the melted water. The food was put up on the shelf above the block of ice. The way my grandmother kept anything kind of cool was to set it inside an apple crate nailed up in a kitchen window. The window was on the side of the house that didn't get the sun and it was actually outside the window, where there was air circulation and at night, if it was cold weather, the food would stay cool during the night. And then because there wasn't any sun on it, the cold of the night coolness would last part way through the day. She mostly usually kept an open can of milk in the window box to use in her tea. It might have held butter sometimes, too.
When I was watching something about the 1800's on Youtube the other day, I saw a cream separator like we had when I was little. It was operated by using a hand crank. We got our milk and cream from the neighbors who had a dairy, so the cream separator was just sitting in our storage shed unused. Some mice had made a nest in it. I probably only remembered that because of the mice. Granny just skimmed off the cream from our milk with a big spoon once it had risen. Nothing in the world is better than cream on one's oatmeal. Unless it's sour cream butter. If you make butter with fresh cream, it's called "sweet cream" butter, but there's another kind of butter that can be made with cream that's soured. Granny was throwing some sour cream away once, which upset me till she explained that sour cream is good, but sometimes a bad bacteria would get into the cream and "spoil" the cream so it wasn't good for making sour cream butter.
I'm sure some of these memories were covered in the other blog I tried to start. I've been looking at this blank page all day without any good ideas to write about, though, so I was determined to write something even if it was redundant. I'll try to do better tomorrow.
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