On Wed, 25 Jun 2008 07:13:52 -0500, George Shirley
> wrote:

>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.


I had a couple of uncles who were still farming when I was growing up.
You never left their homes without something to eat, either fresh,
canned or frozen. I sometimes wonder how my aunts felt about all of
their hard work walking out the door.