One-Pot Appalachian Suppers That Feed an Old Man All Week (I Still Cook Five)

This past winter my wife spent nine weeks in Ohio, and I found out I had never once in my life cooked for one man. Her sister fell on the ice in Dayton and broke her hip, and somebody had to be in that house. So I stayed here with the stove. The first week I cooked the way I have cooked for fifty years, enough for six, and threw most of it out. The second week I stood at the sink and ate crackers and called it supper. And somewhere in the third week I thought about Coy Fields. Coy lived by himself at the foot of our hollow in Letcher County, Kentucky, in a two room house with a tin roof, right where the creek turns. In all the years I knew him there was one black iron pot on the back of his stove, and I never once saw that pot empty and I never once saw it cold. The first night I ate out of it I was nine years old, and he told me something about that pot I did not understand until this past January. This is that pot, and the suppers that went in it. Fifteen one pot suppers that fed a man alone, or a family of eleven, all week, off one fire. Chicken and dumplings from the old hen. Soup out of the jars. The pot that was never washed, and why I would not do it today. Green beans and new potatoes. Potato soup. Salmon stew, which is going to sound wrong if you are not from here. Kraut and backbone at hog killing time. Rabbit stew from a rabbit gum on the creek bank. Pot roast on the coals. Turnip greens and pot likker. Venison stew. Corn chowder from the last of the corn. Cabbage and the ham bone. Ramps and potatoes, and the day the teacher sent us home. And the soup bone Coy asked for every Saturday, for the dog. Coy did not have a dog. Five of them I still cook, every week, and I will tell you which five as we come to them. And at the end I will tell you what my wife said when she came home and saw the pot on the back of my stove. If you are cooking for one now, the way I was this winter, this one is for you. There is nothing to buy in this video and there never was.