Wayne Boatwright wrote:
> On Wed 25 Jun 2008 05:13:52a, George Shirley told us...
>
>> Wayne Boatwright wrote:
>>> On Tue 24 Jun 2008 09:47:06a, George Shirley told us...
>>>
>>>> l, not -l wrote:
>>>>> On 24-Jun-2008, Nancy2 > wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> According to the NASCAR folks, fried bologna (baloney) is a Virginia
>>>>>> thing. Is that right?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> N.
>>>>> As a child growing up in western Kentucky in the late-40s and
>>>>> throughout the 50s, we often ate fried b'loney. Sometimes as a
>>>>> sandwich (on white bread slathered with mayo), more often as a meal's
>>>>> meat dish when times were lean (my dad was an autoworker and was laid
>>>>> off often until he accrued quite a few years of service). Fried
>>>>> baloney with eggs and toast for breakfast, fried baloney and mush for
>>>>> lunch, pintos and buttered white bread for dinner. Heck, sometimes
>>>>> we even had creamed strips of fried baloney on toast.
>>>>>
>>>> My Dad loved his baloney, had to be the type still in the sausage
>>>> shape with the red cover. He would slice it thick. Favorite sandwich
>>>> was a quarter inch slice of baloney, equal amount of white onion,
>>>> black pepper, and the bread had to have mustard on it. Carried that or
>>>> an olive loaf sandwich in his lunch bucket for 40 years. He also ate
>>>> deviled ham and vienna sausage on a regular basis. the only thing he
>>>> ate that I liked, and still like, was sardines on a cracker with a
>>>> little mustard. Dad ate fried salt pork most mornings for breakfast, I
>>>> could never stomach the stuff myself.
>>>>
>>> As a child growing up in the very late 40s thru the mid 50s, whenever
>>> we would take road trips there were few places to stop for a meal on
>>> the old narrow highways. My mother would always pack a box or basket
>>> with devilled ham, vienna sausages, cheeses (often those little jars of
>>> Kraft), crackers, cut up raw vegetables, and pieces of fruit. We
>>> always had a gallon thermos jug of iced tea. We'd make short stops
>>> along the road for a bite, or even eat while driving.
>>>
>>> If we were gone for a week or two to visit relatives, the night we
>>> arrived home there was little in the house to fix a meal. Mom would
>>> bake biscuits and scramble eggs, sometimes slicing vienna sausages to
>>> be cooked in with the eggs. If we had brought a country ham back with
>>> us, we'd often have fried ham.
>>>
>> Ahh, memories of country ham. In the forties and fifties we used to make
>> the then laborious trip to Central Louisiana to visit my Dad's uncles
>> and aunts, my paternal Grandmother's siblings. They were all still
>> farming on homesteads, pulled their water from a dug well or the spring,
>> had a privy out back and racked their stomps (yards). Not a blade of
>> grass was allowed in the house yard as it could hide snakes, pig or
>> chicken poop and the old aunties didn't want anything tracked into the
>> dogtrot houses they lived in.
>>
>> Out back would be a good sized smokehouse that was in use all year.
>> Generally we would get some home made sausage and at least one ham. One
>> year we got three smoked rabbits, a smoked raccoon, two hams, and about
>> ten lbs of sausage. We all thought we had died and gone to heaven. By
>> the late fifties the eldest of them were all gone, my grandmother in
>> 1983, a year after my Dad went, then her two youngest brothers died up
>> in their nineties just about ten years ago. The young ones that are left
>> all live in town and have real jobs but no real food.
>>
>
> You are describing my paternal grandparents' and great uncles' farms in
> Mississippi to a "T", except that there was only smoked hams, bacon, and
> sausage in the smokehouse. Except for my grandfather who died at 78, all
> the rest lived into their nineties. My grandmother lived to 101.
>
Country folk are about all the same Wayne. Mostly good people who lived
their lives sharing with family and friends. Some of us still cling to
that way of life to the extent we can.