Today as I was busy with various things, a memory popped into my mind, how as a very small boy I got confused by our English language and its regional pronunciations in talking about sandwiches. For a time, I didn’t quite get the difference between sandwich spread and sandwich bread. Actually I understood the difference between the bread and the stuff you spread on it, but I didn’t realize that they were different words. If I recall rightly, there was a stuff a little like mayonnaise that was sold as “sandwich spread.” It had other things in it, like pickles and stuff like relish, but I learned it as sandwich spread.
Sometimes I sympathize with kids learning to talk, and with kids learning English as a second language, because English has bunches of words which sound alike, but have different meanings, like sell and cell, or sale and sail, or bear and bare.
But, I have in mind talking about food here, not about words in general. Do we eat better these days than we used to? Did we eat better “back then”? I’m not sure there is a consistent answer to give to those questions. The regrowth of farmer’s markets in the last few years has pushed the issue of food freshness to the front again. It is a reminder that much of thefood which we buy from the grocery store has to be shipped in from a distance, vegetables from California, fruit from Florida, meats from all over. It is basically good food, but it isn’t really fresh; not like fresh from the garden, or fresh from the cow, or fresh from the tree.
In many ways we used to eat much more fresh produce that we produced ourselves, in our own gardens, or shared from the neighbors’ gardens. But on the other hand, we used to eat lots of meats preserved with salt, especially pork, and today’s nutritionists would probably give that a thumbs down regarding its impact on heart health. I really like the idea of locally produced food, and the related idea of getting away from having to ship in our foods from long distances.
We probably wouldn’t get very far with trying to produce bananas locally, but there are lots of foods that grow very well locally.
I, for one, want to support our farmers’ markets, in Pea Ridge, Rogers and Bentonville. I still really like going to local orchards for peaches and other fruit - orchards like Vansandt’s innorth Springdale or Renali Farms at Tontitown.
Do others remember when, in speaking of good, solid, basic foods, we said things like “that’s our bread ’n butter!”? I guess some of the artificial spreads that came to be marketed as “butter” were invented back before I was born, but they never showed up at our house until after the war (World War II). We called that stuff oleo or oleo-margarine. We never called it butter; butter came from our cows and our Dazey Churn. Oleo came from the store as a white bar of goop. It looked more like lard than like butter. With it were these little tubes of yellow coloring which you mixed together with the white goop so it would look more like butter. It didn’t taste much like butter. I thought it was awful. We almost never used it aftertrying out in about 1946.
Speaking of lard, what a rough treatment that once-prized shortning has received during my 70 some years of life. I well remember when lard was considered one of life’s necessities. When your family killed hogs in the fall, you bragged to your friends and neighbors when you were able to render out a good supply of lard. At the grocery store, lard came in several sizes of cans, usually gallon pails, or more especially in five-galloncans. Back in the 1940s, when you talked about a lard bucket, you weren’t talking about a fat person, you were talking about the bucket which lard was sold in. Then this new stuff called Crisco showed up in the grocery stores. Would any of us today know how to cook with lard? Would we dare?
Back before plastics started showing up in the stores, lots of things came in metal buckets. We used to get Karo Syrup in a gallon pail. Those syrup buckets and lard buckets were handy to use for other things. I learned to milk a cow by milking into a syrup bucket or a lard bucket. They made good play things as well, much sturdier than today’s little plastic toy pails.
I have really fond memories of roasting ears fresh from the garden; we called them “ros’en ears.” I used to love sweet potatoes sliced raw, or baked and topped with butter and sugary syrup. I used to love cornbread and milk mush for breakfast. We did eat well, back then.
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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 11/02/2011