PEA RIDGE — Strolling through an antique event, one of the younger girls remarked at how nice that item would look on her entry-way hall. It was a three-foot long board with a large cole slaw cutter mounted in it. I reached over to see if the blades were sharp. They weren’t. When Dad comes in from the field for dinner he will need to sharpen it. Hello, back to the present! On the morning that there would be a big chore, I would stumble down the stairs after a call was done up the stairs. Out to the kitchen where Mom would have left the kerosene lamp lit so I could see to eat the left over oatmeal and fried eggs, or whatever had been left for me. Then, out to where the activity was already going on. I sit down on a broken chair, no back.
We would be here until afternoon. These chores were started early so it could be finished by noon if possible.
I start pulling the shucks off the sweet corn. Mom and Dad had pulled the twowheeled trailer out to the truck patch last night at dark and there it was waiting to be worked up. After a couple of buckets had been shucked and thrown over into a wash tub, then I change chairs and do the silking with a vegetable brush and throw it over where sister could grab it to run it backwards acrossthe corn cutter. After she’d turned it five times over these sharp blades, she’d lay it where Mom could pick it up and finish scraping the cob with a butcher knife to get that creamy goodness.
It was all going into big dish pans and when Mom got two or three full, she’d quit our assembly line and carry them to the wash house to put them on the wood stove to heat through. Then, it would be put in quart jars that she had scrubbed and washed yesterday and now were sitting back there on the kerosene stove boiling away, being sterilized.
Part of it would go into two conserves and the rest put into freezer bags to take to town where Mom had two drawers rented at the locker plant, one for vegetables and one for meat - pork, of course.
Telling it doesn’t make it possible to realize the heat - no fans, no electricity until 1946 - the sticky silks, flies, worms on top end of corn, paper cuts from the shucks and one mis-slip on the cutter would have been serious. We play musical chairs - Dad and Cliffordhad already gone to the field. We are all splattered with corn milk - clothes, hair, arms, laps and ankles - but, the worst was to get it in your eye lashes. Then you about had to go to the pump and use a bucket of water to throw on your face with your hands. If you didn’t, it would start to dry and stick your eye lids shut. Sorry, I just can’t get excited about hanging a corn cutter on my wall.
While Mom works with tubs of corn, the clean-up is left to us. We carry the wood table and all the tools out into the hollyhock bed, away from the house. Several buckets of water were pumped and all scrubbed until shiny clean. The broom dipped into buckets of soapy water is used to scrub loose the dried-on corn.
Several buckets of water were thrown around under the shade tree where all this took place.
Then, we can take several buckets of water straight out of the pump, carry them around behind the cove where it was private, scrub ourselves up and put on dry, clean clothes. Then wash out our corn clothes in the bucket and throw them over the clothes line, to be put in the Monday washing.
The soap was Fels-Naptha and the shampoo was from the Watkins’ man.
You know, I never thoughtabout Mom. She had to work in the wash house with boiling water and the wood stove going. I know she sat outside where she could hear the Conservo whistles, but it took hours. My sister and I had to fix the noon meal for the men in from the field and we were done for the day.
Saturday, when I go to the store, I will throw a couple of cans of corn in the cart.
That assembly line went on every time there was beans or peas or beets, but corn was the worst. Do you realize it takes a five-gallon bucket of peas to make a pint?
Editors note: A Conservo was a steam canner-cooker made by Swartzbaugh Manufacturing Company. It was made of heavy tin and was designed to fit over one single burner of any type of range, gas, oil, coal or wood. The cooper bottom held several quarts of water to provide steam. It was so well insulated that only the slightest heat escaped into the kitchen, according to an article by Joy Stevens, Grantsville.
Columnist Edith Lammey
Opinion, Pages 4 on 07/25/2012