Fast Food Got Too Expensive — What Appalachian Mothers Fed Nine People Instead (Ready Before Dark)

On a Friday in October of nineteen sixty two, the mine where my daddy worked shut its doors. My mother had nine people to feed, and one dollar bill in her apron pocket. She fed all nine of us before dark that night, and every night that whole winter, and not one bite of it came from a store. Last month my grandson paid more for one sack of drive through supper than my daddy made in two days of loading coal, and he was hungry again before he got it home. So sit down with me, and I will give you every supper my mother made that winter. Potato cakes out of last night's potatoes. Bean cakes my daddy called mountain hamburgers. Egg gravy, fried squash and onions, corn fritters, chicken and rice from one old hen, tomato dumplings, white beans and ham hock, a chicken pie with a biscuit lid, liver and onions done right, rice and gravy, fried rabbit, pickled corn and beans out of the crock, succotash, tuna and noodles, Saturday pork chops, and fried bread with sorghum. And at first dark that Friday, a man knocked on our door that my mother had every reason in the world to turn away. Women like my mother carried ninety seven kitchen secrets like these in their heads, and almost none of them were ever written down. So I put every one of them on paper, with the story behind it and a recipe that proves it. Before you go to that window tonight, look in your own cupboard first. There is a supper in it.