It is something of a mystery to me that eating healthy food is all the rage these days, and yet we have more obese folks than ever. Thinking back, in my younger days we ate lots of fatty foods, and yet many people back then were slim to the point of being gaunt. I remember that before World War II, a fat hog was considered to be a good hog. If you had a few fat hogs on your farm you could be assured that your family would eat well through the winter. As we used to say, we ate “high on the hog.” I guess that meant that the shoulder cuts were finer than the hams, but the hams were pretty good, too.
As I remember it, we didn’t eat very much beef in the 1940s. Beef was considered too expensive. It wasn’t that there weren’t animals on the farm to provide the beef, but they were too valuable to eat.
They were more valuable if they were producing milk to sell or if they were being sold on the market. At our house, we ate chicken for Sunday dinner, and pork for everyday meals.
For breakfast every morning, we almost always had bacon or sausage, with biscuits and gravy. The grease in the skillet as they were fried was just considered an assurance that we were eating well.
I mentioned Sunday dinner. It is sometimes neccessary to point out, that in the Ozarks of years ago, dinner was served at noon, and in the evening you had supper. Lunch was something you carried in a pail to school or on a picnic. A lunch was a substitute for a real dinner.
A lunch was like a slab of bologna on a slice of bread.
A real dinner was a good, hot, home-cooked meal, with fried chicken, fried ’taters, cornbread dressing, green beans and corn on the cob, topped off with fresh apple pie.
In the 1960s, our family lived in Iowa for about three years. One day, one of our church families invited us to come out to their farm for dinner. So, when the day came, we drove out to the farm, arriving about 11:45 a.m. When they saw us, they had puzzled looks on their faces. The lady of the house said, “Oh we were looking for you this evening for dinner!” That was when it really came home to us that in Iowa they have lunch at noon, and they call supper, dinner! Actually though, when we offered to come back in the evening, they invited us to stay, and they got in and fixed dinner right thereat noon, and made us feel right at home!
I remember that when the hogs were processed, and the lard rendered, the amount of lard produced was a measure of how good the hog had turned out.
The more lard the better. I think almost everybody in the 1940s must have relied on lard as shortening for cooking. It was about 1950 that Crisco started showing up at our house. Even then, the grocery stores sold lard in large tin cans, the size can in which Christmas popcorn comes today. If you had plenty of lard, your kitchen was considered to be well stocked. As I think about it now, it has been years and years since we bought any lard. We usually use cooking oil.
By the mid-1950s, fat hogs were going out of style. People wanted leaner meats, so the breeders and growers began developing longer, leaner hogs, instead of the rolley polley fat hogs of years gone by.
When my wife and I married in 1961, she introduced me to a delicacy that her family had relished over the years. It was called wilted lettuce. You took regular crisp lettuce and poured hot grease over it to wilt it. You could also make it with homegrown greens, mustard greens from the garden, poke salad and dock from the fields. Pour the hot grease over it andserve it with cornbread.
Even in the old days, sugary desserts in excess were frowned on. Wise fathers would urge the kids to eat real food that would stick to their ribs, like some good ham or pork roast and ’taters and gravy! I guess people walked much more then than they do now.
There were no tractors or four-wheelers to ride over the farm.
The men spent lots of time following the plow behind the horses, and the kids spent lots of time walking to the back side of the farm to bring in the cows, or to drive them back to pasture. We walked everywhere; well, almost.
I guess much of the cholesterol in our foods got burned up as energy before it had a chance to clog the arteries.
Since arteries do clog, we try now to eat healthy food, less fried stuff, more green stuff, less pork, more fish.
Do the stores even sell lard any more? Or real cow butter? It is weird when what were signs of good eating turn out to be signs of bad eating!
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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history.
He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Community, Pages 5 on 02/23/2011