At the same time Por Por and Gung Gung were navigating new life in New York City, Granny (Dad’s mom) was just a little thing, being raised on a farm in Arkansas. Born in 1922 to a mother from Corsica and a father who was 7th generation American. Gran was one of the youngest of 12 and a small child at the time of the Great Depression.

The people of Arkansas experienced the Depression on a much deeper level than many neighboring states. Even before the market crash of 1929 that sent the country into a tailspin, Arkansas was just recovering from the devastating Flood of 1927. The flood destroyed crops and farms in a state that was, essentially, built on agriculture. Families couldn’t pay bills or taxes and, without that funding, roads to and from towns were cut off from nearby communities due to ill repair. Then came the drought of 1930-1931 and the flood of 1937, both leaving families without crops or food to feed their families. By the time Granny was just 10 years old, she had already lived through incredible poverty and devastation and her father was struggling.

Life on the Farm

In her young childhood, farm life was the center of everything. I consider myself lucky to have gotten so much time with my Gran. We spent many years when I was younger transcribing her life stories. It’s how I can say, in her words, “Food was cooked in cast-iron pots and pans on the wood stove. Corn and pigs were everything when we could get them. The farm had geese, ganders, and chickens, and they used to chase me and bite me on the butt!” Herbs were kept and dried and used for cooking. Beans, vegetables, and fruits were canned and preserved. “Whatever was not eaten was smoked or canned. Nothing was wasted.”

The geese would lay huge eggs. Because she had the smallest hands, Gran’s job was to collect the eggs from the chicken coop. She would have to walk along the henhouse and slip her hands in through the holes to gather the eggs. There were often snakes in the henhouse and they would slither over her hands. She grew up having a deep fear of snakes because of this, and her father for making her do it. Gran’s fear of snakes was so paralyzing that she couldn’t even say the word out loud.

The farm had pigs that they would butcher and smoke the hams for winter. They grew sweet potatoes, turnips, strawberries, and watermelon. They’d make pickles with the watermelon rinds and dry the seeds to save them for the next season. In one of my conversations with her, Gran said “We couldn’t afford horses, so Dad bought a plow and made the big brothers pull it. We were so poor!” Her eyes glistened with the laughter when she enacted the story of the boys complaining afterward.

Print Recipe

Pickled Watermelon Rind

Nothing goes to waste on a farm. Gran's family made these with the melons they grew

Prep Time15

Cook Time45

Soaking Time1

Cuisine: American

Keyword: pickled watermelon rind, pickles, watermelon

Servings: 2 pounds

Equipment

1 stainelss steel pot works best for vinegar pickle brines, non-reactive

Ingredients

To Soak The Rinds

1 Rind from Medium Watermelon
1/2 cup Kosher Salt
6 cups Water

To Make The Pickles

1 cup Distilled White Vinegar
1 cup Water
2 cups Sugar
10 Whole Cloves
1 Cinnamon Stick smashed
1 tsp Black Peppercorn
2 Garlic Cloves smashed
3 Bay Leaves
4 Slices Lemon ¼” thick

Instructions

To prepare watermelon rinds, remove the fruit of the melon and the dark green skin. What you will be left with is the pale green rind in between. I find this easiest to do by first cutting the watermelon into wedges. Then I remove the fruit and put it aside to eat. With a peeler then, it is fairly easy to peel off the dark green skin.
Cut the rinds into approximately 1-inch cubes.
Combine the ½ cup salt and the 8 cups of water and stir until the salt dissolves. Pour this mixture over the rinds so that they’re completely submerged in the brine. Let sit overnight.
The next day, rinse the rinds well with cold water and drain.
Place in a pot with fresh water until they are covered and bring just to a boil. This should take between 5-10 minutes and the rinds should be fork-tender by then.
While the rinds are cooking, use a separate pot to start the pickle liquid.
Put the white vinegar, 1 cup of water, sugar, cloves, peppercorn, cinnamon, garlic, and bay leaves in a pot (you will have to add the rinds to this, so make sure it’s big enough to fit them).
Cook the mixture on medium heat for approximately 10 minutes. All the sugar will be melted and the aroma from the spices will come out.
Drain the watermelon rinds and add them to the pickling mixture with the lemon slices. Stir well.
Continue to simmer, without boiling, for about 30 minutes.
Transfer to jars for canning.

Notes

If not canning, the pickles will last in the refrigerator for a few weeks

Slower Times, Blackberry Pie, Chicken and Dumplings

In the summertime, she used to go to the creek with her mom and sit in the shallow part and watch the minnows swim by. Afterward, she and her mom would go and pick blackberries. They baked blackberry pies and made their own bread. Her mom would compare it to the hard chestnut bread she grew up with back in Corsica. Chicken and Dumplings was a ritual. The brothers would have to kill the chicken. They’d clean and cut the chicken and put it in the pot with what vegetables they had. After the chicken was stewed, they’d make a tight batter and scoop it into the simmering broth and cover until the dough turned into light, fluffy dumplings. Once a week they’d go to town and buy flour, cornmeal, and a few staples. Everything else they grew themselves.

Chicken and Dumplings was one of the few dishes my grandmother continued to cook into her old age. Eventually, Bisquick replaced the homemade batter and that’s how I was taught to make it. There is a family-famous incident of an argument that my Mom once had with Gran. Mom had pulled all the bones out of the chicken to make it easier to eat. Gran threw a fit and claimed she was ruining the recipe. My mother argued in exasperation. “I even cooked the chicken with the bones, but I just thought I would pull them out afterwards, to make it easier to eat. Granny was impossible that day!”

My mother, being Chinese, had never had many of the dishes that my Dad grew up with or that my Grandmother cooked. There was no written recipe, so Mom tells it like this:

“Gran’s chicken and dumpling was very simple. Gran used a whole chicken. It was cut up with the bones intact and seasoned with salt and pepper. She used only chicken, no veggies. Now that I think about it, I’m not even so sure she cut the chicken up! She may have just thrown the whole thing in as one big bird and cooked it to death. That’s why the broth tasted so good.” My mom would remember better, but I seemed to remember Gran cutting the chicken, dusting in flour, and searing before pouring a chicken broth over the top. Mom continues, “She used Bisquick and milk to make the dumpling batter. Using a tablespoon, the dumpling mix was put directly into the hot broth with the chicken, one spoon at a time. The pot was covered to allow the dough to cook for about 5 minutes until it puffed up. Gran taught me her technique of leaving the tablespoon in the broth while releasing the dough. This kept the spoon hot so the next scoop of dough wouldn’t stick to the spoon.” In Mom’s rendition of the dish, there are veggies like carrots and peas because we always ate chicken and dumplings as a one-pot meal. I think of the time Gran learned this dish though. They would have been cooking and eating their vegetables separately. Essentially, this would have been the ‘meat and gravy’ of the meal.

Siblings

Gran was always close with all her siblings, but especially the four nearest in age. When she first moved to Chicago it was because she went to visit her sister and fell in love with the city. Her dad was a traveling contractor and so they moved wherever there was work. They were living in Dearborn Michigan, outside of Detroit. She was 17 or 18 years old and she and her sister Louie talked their dad into letting them go to Chicago to live with their sister Nora and get jobs. It was 1939 and in another 2 years the country would be at war. The brothers joined the military and the sisters went to work.

The Midwest was the land of savings stamps, war bonds, cigarette lines, and meat lines. Times were tight. In a found letter from the time, one woman writes to her brother at war that Chicago was “where women go stockingless and every other day is meatless. Where people pawn their jewels for a box of soap flakes.” Talking about it later, Dad’s only memory of food from childhood was oatmeal.

During the Great Depression, the people of Chicago needed assistance due to joblessness and poverty. The YMCA stepped up to help thousands of Chicagoans. In the 1940s, during wartime, the Chicago Y supported US soldiers by granting them free membership. As soldiers returned home, wounded and in need of help, the Chicago Y provided aid to prisoners of war, cots for servicemen, and counseling bureaus for veterans. Additionally, during the 1930s and 1940s, the Chicago Y started offering services for women and kids.

Gran went to work at the Chicago YMCA after flopping at her first job making little paper “favors” to decorate candies. Gran met my biological grandfather, Gordon R, while they were both working at the Y. He was an elevator operator and she was a waitress. One night, Gran’s sister Nora and her husband Gene came in to eat. Gene left a bunch of pennies on the table as tip after Gran had worked so hard all night. She was terribly upset and Gordon was the one to comfort her.

It was the heart of WWII. They dated and eventually married and had 3 kids, my dad being one of them. In their happier days, they would go to his parent’s home in Waterloo, Iowa to visit. Being of German descent in Iowa, they would eat modest meals of roast meat and vegetables…. but never stew. This is because, back in the homeland, the Nazis were pushing Eintopf, a one-pot meal of potatoes and vegetables boiled in broth and thickened with flour. The Nazis believed that the Eintopfsonntag (one-pot meal campaign) would unite the country by donating the money saved from the thrifty meals to charity. Already World War I had brought with it a lot of anti-German sentiment in America. German-language newspapers were shut down and many German Americans assimilated to avoid seeming sympathetic to the homeland and prove loyalty to the US. By the time of the Second World War, German food, which had been absorbed by the American culture, was suddenly out of style again. Nevertheless, Americans had a hard time giving up the food they loved. Suddenly, food patriotism turned frankfurters into “Liberty Sausage” and hamburgers became “Liberty Steak”.

Dark Times

As time went by, things got worse. Every family has dark spots. Bad things that happen and bad people who don’t love and hurt the ones around them. But to leave them out of the story is to not honor the good that has come from the ashes of their fires. With them, all of our stories are allowed to continue and we can celebrate who we have become without them. My biological grandfather (who was never our grandfather) went back to a job as a CPA in order to try and make more money, but couldn’t keep any of his jobs because he drank too much. Gran told it to me like this: “A quart of whiskey sat on the table instead of the quart of milk”. He was physically and mentally abusive. I hesitated to even add his photo here, but I do love that it captures a time when my grandmother looked happy, and things hadn’t quite gone bad yet. One of Dad’s few memories of his father was being locked in a closet and climbing up to look through the window to see his father holding a knife to his mother’s throat. My grandfather’s parents wrote to Gran one day “We are so sick after visiting you. We can’t believe how our son lets his kids live like that. He never grew up that way!” Eventually, when Gran left him, she thinks they understood and never fought to find her because of that.

One of the meals that changed my grandmother’s life was a picnic basket of fried chicken and other foods that the neighbor secretly packed for her so she could run away. This was more than just food, in any sense of the word. Gran always stashed away a little money each time she went shopping. She called this her “getaway fund”. When it was finally the right day to run and go, they didn’t have enough money to get far enough away, so Tilly ‘loaned’ Gran the rest of the money to buy the train tickets. She took the kids, got on the train to California, and never looked back. The conductor was kind and let the kids lie down on the seats to sleep. She ate cold fried chicken and didn’t cry. She always would speak about that neighbor, Tilly. And she always equated her kindness with that picnic lunch.

Print Recipe

In Honor Of Tilly’s Fried Chicken

Nobody knows what recipe her neighbor Tilly used to make the fried chicken that helped Gran escape that day. I have taken the liberty here of a simple buttermilk fried chicken recipe that I imagine it to have been

Prep Time15

Cook Time30

Soaking Time1

Course: Main Course

Cuisine: American

Keyword: american food history, americana, food history, fried chicken

Servings: 8 pieces