Ethyl Remembers: Farmhouse Food.

There are two things that every old Southern woman knows how to cook and cook well.  One is homemade biscuits and the other is banana pudding.  Not the kind that comes from a jello box.  The type with the sweet creamy custard that is made from scratch and cooked up on top of the stove in a double boiler.  At our house when we were growing up there were homemade biscuits on the table every morning and just about every Sunday for dinner there was a bowl of homemade banana pudding.
By the majority of people's standards we were poor.  And by that I mean there was never a lot of money for clothes or luxuries or to spend at the grocery store.  We used to long for bologna and hot dogs and lunch meat.  Instead we were forced to eat county ham, hand cured and smoked in our smoke house by my daddy.  The fried chicken we had often on Sunday at dinner was running around in the chicken coop earlier that morning.  The beef roast and pork chops came from our freezer, which was so large it covered the majority of one wall in the kitchen.  In summer there was always an abundance of fruit.  Blackberries grew in the pasture, grapes hung on the garden fence, peach and apple trees grew in the orchard and also in various places around the home place where my mother had stuck out tiny seedlings that had become mature trees.  Our summers were busy canning and freezing and drying the ingredients that would go into fried pies and cobblers to be made and eaten at a later date. 
There was always an abundance of fresh eggs, gathered every day from the hen house.  It was my job to take a basket, which happened to be hand made from willow twigs, by my grandfather, and gather the eggs.  Sometimes I would enter just as the old hen jumped off the nest and the egg she left behind would still be warm to your touch.  They were usually brown and the yokes were always a deep yellow.
Some years my daddy planted sorghum cane and had it made into molasses.  Not the kind you buy in little jars in the store which is a poor imitation of the real thing, but rich and thick and a dark shade of golden brown that when you held it up on your spoon in winter it would stay there.  It would be clear enough you could see your spoon and the cold from winter made it thick and slow running.  There really is truth to the statement that something is as 'slow as molasses in January'.
On recent trips to Wild Oats Natural Foods or Fresh Market food stores, I am stunned by some of the prices.  My folks were rich when it came to the foods we ate.  It was all organic.  The fruit sometimes had bad spots but the trees were never sprayed with chemicals.  The same was true of the vegetables that grew in the various 'truck patches' or the garden.  The eggs were free range and the tomatoes, which grew by the acre in among the watermelon vines, were all pesticide free.  There was an abundance of fresh butter and milk, and Mama could turn the simplest ingredients like flour and sugar and fresh butter and nutmeg into the most delicious butter roll you ever put in your mouth.  I have tried numerous times to duplicate her masterpiece and can never get it right.
This has brought me to one conclusion.  When you are young, you very seldom appreciate the true value of what you have.  You always wish for what seems to be the thing that the majority of people deem valuable, when so often the value of what you have far surpasses anything you can buy or anything others may possess.  You often take those who really love you and have your best interest at heart for granted, and spend countless energy, hours, and money trying to win the approval of those who could care less about you.
Aah!  Such is the folly of youth.  Maturity comes with a high price sometimes.  But when it does come, it's value is priceless.  And as Forrest Gump would say, 'and that is all I have to say about that'.