30 FORGOTTEN After School Snacks Every Appalachian Mother Made in the 1970s

My wife kept the grocery list in pencil on the inside of the cabinet door, and she kept it there for eight years. She would rub a line out with her thumb and write the new one over top of it, so by the end that door was grey with everything we had ever eaten. The top of that list in nineteen seventy one was eight words long. Flour. Lard. Sugar. Cornmeal. Oats. Peanut butter. Bananas. Coffee. Every single thing on it was a raw ingredient. Not one of them was a finished food. You could not open a thing on that list and eat it. Everything in this video came out of those eight words. This is not a list of recipes from a book. This is what my wife Ada put on the table at three fifteen in the afternoon, five days a week, for eight years, while two children walked up a road toward this house knowing exactly what they were walking toward. She was standing at that counter at three in the afternoon every day, and I was working a double shift, and I did not understand what she was doing until it was gone. So here are thirty of them, in the order we went to them. Cinnamon toast under the flame, and not the kind you are thinking of. Cornbread crumbled into a glass of cold buttermilk. A biscuit with butter and sorghum worked pale together with the back of a fork. Peanut butter on saltine crackers, which is the plainest thing in this whole video and which I count for a reason. A fried bologna sandwich. The butter and sugar sandwich. Apple slices with peanut butter. Popcorn on the stove in bacon grease. A cold baked sweet potato with butter. Hoop cheese and crackers. Tea cakes, and how they are not cookies. Molasses cookies. Fried pies made from dried apples. Chocolate gravy on a biscuit. Peach preserves. Applesauce cake. Popsicles frozen in the metal ice tray. Lemon icebox pie. Snow cream. Parched corn, which does not pop. Boiled peanuts and roasted peanuts, which are the two halves of the same bag. Blackberry jam on a square of cold cornbread. A green apple with salt. Pimento cheese made at the table. A banana sandwich with mayonnaise. Fried cornbread cakes. Milk toast. An egg in a hole. And whatever was left of the stack cake. I am going to be straight with you about the three or four that were not good, because some of them were not good. The fried bologna is a salty piece of meat on white bread and I ate probably four hundred of them. Some of what we miss is just being eleven years old. And I am going to tell you about the ones that were never ours to begin with. Two of the best loved things in this video were born on the back of a can and in a five cent packet, and they came out of a factory, and my children thought we had invented them. Then I am going to tell you the part I have had fifty years to think about. Nobody took those thirty things away from us. We set them down. One Tuesday at a time, for eight years, and every single time it was for a good reason. In the fall of nineteen seventy four I came home at nine at night off a double shift and I stopped at the store in town and I bought a box of something a child could open himself, and I put it in that cabinet, above the list. I meant it as a kindness. And it was. But the next week there were two boxes, and by nineteen seventy seven that pencil list had six brand names on it, and by nineteen seventy nine it had more brands than it had flour. What went was not the food. The food is easy and the recipes are all right here. What went was the hour. Three fifteen in the afternoon used to be something a person did. At the end I answer the question I put off the whole video: how many of these thirty are still made in this kitchen in a normal month. The number is not thirty and it is not zero. In nineteen eighty one we painted that kitchen. I took the doors off the upper cabinets and laid them across two sawhorses in the yard, and I sanded them, and I painted them white, and I hung them back up. Eight years of her handwriting went under that first coat, and I never once thought about it until it was dry. You only find out a thing was the record when it is gone. There is nothing to buy in this video and there never was.