Appalachian Breakfasts From the 1950s Nobody Makes Anymore (My Father Ate One Every Day of His Life)

My father ate the same breakfast every single morning for sixty three years, and I did not understand why until the week he died. I was born in nineteen fifty three, the fourth of six children, in a four room house at the head of a hollow in Letcher County, Kentucky. My father worked in the mine. Eleven people sat down to that table every morning before daylight, by the light of a kerosene lamp, and by five in the morning there was food on it. Every day. No exceptions. For twenty years. Sixteen breakfasts came off my mother's wood range. Almost none of them get made anymore, in any kitchen, anywhere. Biscuits and sawmill gravy, and why it was never a recipe, only what was left in the pan. Fried apples from rings dried on a tin roof in September. Salt side meat from the smokehouse, which I do not miss one bit. Fried mush. Buckwheat cakes from a starter that lived on the back of the stove. Country ham and red eye gravy on Sunday. Fried hominy. Tomato gravy in August. Squirrel and gravy. Tenderloin and biscuits on hog killing morning. Oatmeal out of the round box, the first food in our house that did not come off our own land. Gritted bread from green corn. Coffee boiled in the pot. And a cold biscuit in your coat pocket. And eggs. Eggs were not breakfast in our house. Eggs were money. They went down the road to the company store and came back as coffee, sugar and salt, and we got one each on Sunday. I will be honest with you about all of them. Some were wonderful. Some were only what poor people ate because there was nothing else, and I would not go back to them for anything. Four of them I still make, in my own kitchen, on my own wood range, and I will tell you which four as we come to them. And one of the sixteen is the one my father ate. The same bowl, every morning, from nineteen thirty until nineteen ninety three. I did not ask him why for forty years. When I finally did, he was in a hospital bed in Whitesburg, and the answer was not about food at all. There is a fifth one I make, one day a year, before daylight, standing at the stove. So pull a chair up to the table. It is dark outside, the lamp is lit, and the stove is already hot. There is nothing to buy in this video and there never was.