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I go back to what is called the great depression that remembers me back to being six years old, hungry sometimes, buthappy most of the time.I was the richest kid in the state of Mississippi.
Listening to the folks on television who call todays bad news a depression makes me remember my childhood and a real depression.This is no depression. I know, for I lived through one. I write about it in Elizabeth's Choice, one of my books, but I am not unhappy. I was rich for I had cabbage and cornbread. Mother said that it was a meal fit for any king, but I replied that he couldn't have mine, because hunger makes a good cook. Dessert in a baked sweet potatoe wwith a dollop of butter was a tasty end to that wonderful meal.
Picking out the print on the flour, meal, and sugar sacks was my job. Why? because that is where we got our school dresses. These sacks were saved for the year and mother made the cutest childs dress you ever saw. I was proud to wear mine.I was a rich kid. I had a new dress. I may have had holes in my shoes, but I had a new dress.
we also had taffy pulls in the back yard when we had the neighborhood to dance to the fiddle and guitar picking folks that came to the Hominy boils. A hominy boil is shelled corn boiled in a big pot with a roaring fire under it. I believe that it had lye added to it, because it was called lye hominy.all of the folks brought their corn to be boiled, if they had none, everyone made up a good bowl full and they didn't do without.
I still enjoy a good old mess of cabbage and cornbread, with a sweet potato on the side,with a side dish of golden hominy.
Of course there were many nights that we went to bed hungry. sometimes I would dream that I was eating food to wake and search my bed to find it because the food in my dream was so real.
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Lye was an ingredient in making hominy. Mom made it by putting it in a an earthstone churn with the corn and leaving it to eat away the hard skins from the grains. Then several water baths would wash the lye (caustic sodium hydroxide) away so we could cook and eat the swollen grains that were hominy.
Was the depression only in Mississippi? LOL I grew up there too.
Best regards,
Leland