Biscuits On Sunday

How many of you old-timers can remember sitting down to a meal of corn bread, shuck beans, platters of fried ham and red gravy, big bowls of stewed backbone and spare-ribs, country butter and milk, home-made stackpies, cushaw butter, platters of fried eggs, fresh cane molasses, blackberry cobbler from homecanned berries, hominy, etc, all gathered from the efforts of hard labor on a hillside farm where money was the one thing that seldom made an appearance?

It was done from the time of Daniel Boone down to the entry of the railroad into the mountains. A barrel of flour in wood lasted a family of six to ten people for half a year, with biscuits ONLY on Sunday morning. A few pounds of green coffee, small amount of brown sugar and a little salt, were purchased with the flour. That was the extent of grocery purchases in those days. Everything else came from "The Sweat of the Brow," and brother, if you followed a hard tail mule around one of these mountains all day, you knew what sweat meant.

After this fantastic journey back into the long-forgotten land of a world without government support; a time when nobody would have lined up in the sunshine all day for a little bag of tasteless surplus food, commonly known as "commodities," back to a time when it was no disgrace to work and pray; when some dope by the name of Smith said, "No Work, No Eat;" back to the good mountain custom of loving your neighbor so much that you would go in and do his work, take care of his farm and divide "side-meat" with him from your smoke-house when he was in trouble. Even back to the time you would stop and mourn with his relatives and take time off to help dig his grave when he died. What a Crazy World they had then. 1957