On Wed 25 Jun 2008 06:33:55a, George Shirley told us...

> 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.
>

It was never bred out of me, George, even though I myself never lived in
the country. However, I have spent a great deal of time there.

--
Wayne Boatwright
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Wednesday, 06(VI)/25(XXV)/08(MMVIII)
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Half the fun of being alive is not
knowing what tomorrow will bring. The
other half is pretending you don't care.
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