They Were Trendy
But They Didn't Know It
Farm-to-table is now a pricey, high-end dining trend for people who want fresh and healthy organic food. For Leland and Ruth, it was just the way things were. "We grew all of our food, and were completely self-sufficient except for buying flour, salt and sugar," Leland says. One thing is for sure: since money and resources were scarce, nothing went to waste.
Above: The Johnathan W. Duncan Family, approximately 1909. The boy in the back row second from left is Enoch, Leland's dad.
Farm Livin' is the Life For Me
While cotton was the cash crop that farmers in the area grew to sell for income, the rest of the farm space and effort was dedicated to feeding the family and meeting daily living needs. A few things that every farm had:
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Vegetable Patch
Where they would grow beans, cucumbers, carrots, potatoes, okra, squash, corn, sorghum, even peanuts. In the summer, the vegetables were eaten fresh using many of the recipes in this book. See Vegetables. The summer was also time for canning vegetables so they could be eaten through the winter. The sorghum was cut and taken to a local mill where it was pressed and boiled down into molasses. Corn was eaten fresh, but also dried, taken off the cob, and then ground into meal for cornbread. The leftover cobs were used for something else!
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Farm Animals
Chickens, pigs, cows, horses and mules were mainstays of farm life. The horses and mules were used to pull plows through the fields and also to pull wagons. The other animals contributed to the food chain: hens laid eggs; roosters often wound up in the frying pan. Cows gave milk which was drunk fresh and also churned into butter. (Ruth says she "learned how to count" by churning butter and keeping track of how many times she had to push the plunger up and down.) Pigs wound up almost everywhere. Their meat was eaten (see below), and their fat was rendered to make lard for cooking and also for homemade soap!
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Smokehouse
When it started getting cold, around November, it was time to say goodbye to the pigs that had been fattening all year long. They were butchered and completely recycled (in modern terms). The meat -- hams, shoulders, ribs, sides/bellies -- was rubbed down with "sugar cure" and hung up in the smokehouse. As the name implies, there was a small fire built in the house and smoke rose up to cure the meat. Once cured, the meat could be stored in the smokehouse until eaten. The bellies were sliced off as needed for bacon, and the other parts made delicious dinners for special occasions. The leftover fat was boiled -- rendered -- to produce lard and also "cracklins," part of the skin and fat that fried in the rendering process and could be removed for other use (see recipe Cracklin' Cornbread). "We ate every part of the pig except the intestines," Leland remembers. They even made their own sausage, but the Arkansas style was to cook and can the sausage meat, not turn it into links.
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Storm Cellar
Before Dorothy gets bonked on the head and starts dreaming of Oz, she tries to escape the oncoming twister by getting into the storm cellar. This was a fixture of houses in Arkansas (and Kansas) in those days, and was typically built bunker-like half below ground, and covered with earth on top. Leland's parents, Enoch and Julie, had a storm cellar even after they left the farm, and would head into it -- day or night -- if the weather got rough. Besides protecting from tornados, strong winds and falling trees, the storm cellars provided the perfect environment for storing the food that had been canned in the summer (see above), as well as food like potatoes and apples that could keep a long time in the right conditions. Inside, the storm cellars were pitch black, cool, and only used in emergencies or visits to Munchkinland.
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