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Memories of Mama’s Cooking

And other pleasant reflections on the food we used to eat.
By Bill Sharpe (Publisher, The State, 1951-1966)

First published: The State, December 1985

I can’t recall many bad cooks in my boyhood. I was way up in years before eating at a cafe. The only good ones were in hotels, and of course common people didn’t patronize such places. But after a woman had married and raised a large family, she became adept at cookery, because she spent most of her life in the kitchen. I am talking about the lower middle-class families.

For one thing, it was one of the few ways in which a woman could win recognition, praise and pleasure. And it was an unbeatable way to hold her family together in contentment and tranquility. But she was terribly handicapped. Her stove was fired with wood or coal, which required a delicate, almost magical, sense of how hot she should have it. Refrigeration was primitive. Our first ice-box was so small that it scarcely would hold 15 pounds of ice, and Mama had to squeeze in her butter, milk, etc. It was in the “safe” that she stored most left-overs, which had to be used quickly. The safe was a big cabinet with tin-fronted doors, perforated to permit circulation of air.

People used to hang hams, and we dried fruit for winter use. We would spread out sheets on top of the house, even on the out-house, and the fruit — peaches and apples mostly — which Mama cut up into slices (after peeling) was spread evenly over these sheets in the sun. If a rain came up, there was a great scurrying around to get the fruit down, so it wouldn’t spoil. Mama’s great half-moon apple pies were made from this dried fruit. She also put up jars of food — especially blackberries, canned in their own juice. We picked the blackberries from the hedgerows all around us. She put up watermelon preserves, jellies and other goodies, for these were not on sale at the store. Or it they were, we could not afford them.

Papa brought home whole bags of peanuts, chestnuts, walnuts, etc., which we spread in the attic against the winter. Mama made sauerkraut in huge stone barrels or crocks. I cannot now recall all the home manufacture of food, but the fact is that we ate a lot of home-processed food, either because it was too expensive to buy, or not even available. Mama made most of our candy, too, our cookies, doughnuts, and bread. About once a week was baking day, and on this day she baked not only loaf bread, but also cakes and pies. She got her oven just right, and she baked all day. My favorite was the hot loaf bread, which smelled so good. I would come in, hungry as a wolf, and she would slice off an end, and I would eat it with butter while it was hot. I don’t think anything else ever had that blissful taste.

For breakfast we usually had molasses with butter and biscuit. A great feast. You stirred the butter in the molasses and made a kind of paste, which — with your knife — you spread on your biscuit. My favorite was the breakfast of canned blackberries in their juice, which with butter, we spread on biscuits. In those days, middle-class people rarely had bacon and eggs for breakfast. In the first place, home-processed pork didn’t yield bacon — the farmers just didn’t cut their meat this way. When we were in school, our big meal was at supper. For my school lunch, Mama would give me a hard-fried egg in a biscuit. Or maybe a salmon croquette or sausage in a biscuit; or left-over chicken leg. Along with cookies, piece of cake, or a half-dozen pieces of candy, it always tasted good — and familiar.

It is natural that I would think that Mama was the best cook I ever knew. Her rolls were superb. I could make a full meal of her rolls with butter, nothing else. She had a master chef’s touch with them, and I have never eaten their equal. All of Mama’s children will tell you the same thing. This might be laid down to nostalgia, but Mama’s rolls won prizes at the fair regularly. And she made a lot of money cooking them for special dinners. The rich folks up on Spring and Fifth and Fourth Streets would order them, and would send their chauffeurs or carriage drivers to pick them up, and she would admonish him to hurry and get them to the table hot. And she would make us sit down to the table before putting them in the stove. Then she would take them up and bring them in so hot you could hardly touch one. You would break open the pocket-book roll and insert butter and it would quickly melt. Her secret was exquisite care in making the dough, letting it rise to exactly the right proportions, then serving them HOT.

Our diet was monotonous according to modern standards, but what we had was good. We had fried chicken, roasts, and once in a great while round steak. Fish was not common, and usually it was “corned” or salt fish, which came to the grocer in a keg. We had ham, but rarely. We had lots of sausage, for it could be bought cheap from farmers’ wagons passing the door. And lots of vegetables — potatoes, corn, peas, beans and such. One of my favorite meals was salmon croquettes which Mama made better than anyone. Another thing we had was roasting ears really roasted. Put into the oven and parched so that the kernels were hard and eaten just like that without butter or salt. It was like a confection to me — the parching to a light brown gave it a different taste.

The things we have now and which I rarely saw then are cheese, chocolate, turkeys, pork chops, steak and other beef, citrus fruit, spaghetti (never heard of it), coconut. When I go through the supermarkets today, I see so many things that were not available then — juices, mixes, bananas and oranges (except maybe at Christmas time), meats, potato chips, syrups, etc. Faced with this situation a cook had to use ingenuity and of course this was not unusual.

But when “company” came, or holidays for the extended family, the housewife knocked herself out to provide tremendous meals of wide variety. It was a disgrace for a housewife to be haphazard about meals for guests — the best cooks, and the most abundant tables, these were standards by which a family was judged, or at least this seemed to be the notion. In their ordinary meals, they ate like everyone else, but on the few occasions when kin or friends dropped in, they touched the button of opulence.

Throughout North Carolina (and I presume other areas) few middle-class homes were prepared to serve large groups at once. The pecking order for eating was like this: If all the adults could not be seated, then the men were served first. Next the adult women, and finally, starved and driven mad by the good smells, the children. We used to sneak by the dining room door and groan when we saw the adults eating up all the good pieces of chicken, or ham, or beef, knowing we would get the scraps. Usually, though, I got to the second table, and whether second or third, the hostess always held back enough good food that we never suffered as much as we anticipated. Worst of it was the time — they’d eat and then TALK, and I thought I would die before they got through the talking and moved out! Meantime, the hostess and some of her women guests had to wash the dishes between feedings, for few families could muster enough plates and tableware for such large meals without re-use. And, with all this work, amusingly enough, it was standard procedure for the housewife to apologize for the “scant vittles” even though she knew very well that she had outdone herself!

Editor’s Note: Last year Mrs. Polly Jenkins, of Winston-Salem, and Mrs. Betty Lou Bruton, of Candor, daughters of the late Bill Sharpe, gathered stories he had written for his family in the 1960s, left to them purely as a way of telling his children and grandchildren about how life was in his youth, growing up in Winston-Salem in the early 1900’s.

The ladies selected several of the stories believed to be of interest to STATE readers and made them available to the magazine. Others were published in the March and April 1984 editions.