Weird Facts About the Old Appalachian Country Store Nobody Today Would Believe (I Swept Its Floor)

🔗 97 secrets every Appalachian grandmother kept in her kitchen. How many still live in yours? https://burlsizemore.com/her-kitchen The summer I was eleven years old, I swept the floor of Wash Holbrook's store, a mile and a half down the road from our house in Letcher County, Kentucky. And every Saturday evening when I put the broom away, that old man paid me in a way I did not understand for almost sixty years. Everything we did not raise ourselves came from behind his counter, and the things that went on inside that little store would be hard for anybody under sixty to believe. So sit down with me and I will walk you through it. The red sawdust on the floor. The cracker tin and the crumbs he sold for a nickel. The salt fish that came all the way from the ocean to a holler two hundred miles from salt water. The banana stalk on the ceiling hook, and what crawled out of it one Saturday in July. The pickle brine that was never thrown out, the beans that came with rocks in them, the sorghum barrel in January, the dishes hidden in the oatmeal, the spice drawers, the salt pork box, the hens out back, the cans with no labels, and hog killing week. And I will tell you about the man who walked four miles every Saturday to buy one lemon, the one dollar can of fruit nobody would buy, and what Wash Holbrook really paid me. Women like my grandmother took what came out of that store and turned it into ninety seven kitchen secrets, and almost none of it was ever written down. So I put every one of them on paper, with the story behind it and a recipe that proves it. I am Burl Sizemore. Tell me the name of the little store where you grew up, and the name of the man or the woman behind the counter. https://burlsizemore.com/her-kitchen