Corn Meal

Today we tend to think of food more as a pleasure than something to keep you alive. A lot of times, while growing up we ate the same things as the animals on the farm.

We nearly always had oatmeal for breakfast and if some was left over we took it to school for our noon day meal. Oatmeal was also baby chick feed, so we bought it by measures of 100 lb. It cost five dollars per hundred pounds.

Pancakes were another breakfast food that also made it to school lunches if there was anything left over. Nothing was ever wasted. Many times we had corn meal that came from the hog feed, of course corn meal was also used for the cows and horses. Corn meal usually simmered on the back of the stove all afternoon.

We had milk most of the winter. One or two cows would give milk in the winter, around 1 or 2 quarts a day. The cows today are taken better care of in the worst conditions—than in the best conditions back then.

In the winter the hens never laid eggs. They started in the spring when things had warmed up.

 Down in the cellar we had a barrel of salt pork for winter. They soaked it in water to get the salt out. Many times you ate it like candy, as the fat tasted so good. It was also used with the beans. And we grew lots of beans.

A couple of cured hams and bacon hung in the smoke house that we used. We seldom ate beef, for that was a rich mans food. Poor farm people always ate hogs or wild game.

We had much food in the cellar: potatoes, turnips, carrots, beets, squash, apple greenings, Rusetts, Northern spies, Talman sweets, pound sweets, snow apples and Maiden flush.

When it got 20 or 30 below, we would put a tub of burning charcoal down in the cellar to keep it from freezing. They would shovel coals from the stove and carry the down the cellar. Fred could never make the fire that would burn all through the night, so when morning came you would have to hurry to get the fire going and check the cellar.

Another thing we did was to set buckets of water around the cellar as they were supposed to draw frost and protect the vegetables. I thought that it was a myth, but everyone did it.