What's for Dinner? Favorite meals in the early years of the Pete and Alma Boyer household

From time to time over the years, I would ask my mother Doris if she would write about what it was like when she was a girl. She would usually say no, it was too overwhelming a project, she wouldn’t know where to start. So one time I suggested she write about just one part of her growing up, like for instance the food. Not too long afterwards this is what I received in the mail. Sylvia

You’ve asked me about the foods we ate when I was a child. Hence the following:

First of all I need to explain that my mother did not know how to cook when she and my father were married. My Grandmother Boyer — Mam, as she was known to us — lived with us and it was from her that my mother learned to cook, so our foods are basically Pennsylvania Dutch.

We had no refrigerator. A butcher came twice a week with meat that he sold from his truck. The milkman came every day and the baker every other day. The grocery man, like the butcher, came twice a week. Always Mother gave him an order for the next trip and each time he came he made a delivery.

In season we used fresh vegetables from the garden. What we couldn’t use was canned and kept on shelves in the cellar. Potatoes and apples, which were bought by the bushel, were also kept in the cellar, which had a dirt floor and was dark and cool. Milk and butter were also kept there.

Breakfast

I suppose we ate cereals for breakfast but I don’t remember them because my favorite breakfasts were:

1. Molasses bread dipped in coffee. (The bread was buttered first.)
2. Fried mush also with molasses. The cornmeal was cooked as directed on the package, poured into loaf pans to congeal, then sliced about ¼ inch and fried. I think the Spanish have something similar called polenta.
3. Soft-boiled or “dippy” eggs. The latter were made sunny-side up and both kinds were eaten with butter bread. We had no toaster.
4. French toast
5. Cocoa and butter bread

Lunch

I don’t remember lunch as a sit-down meal with the family, but do remember such things as peanut butter sandwiches made with butter and peanut butter (no jelly), Lebanon bologna sandwiches, toasted cheese sandwiches (Note: Despite the name, these were grilled in the frying pan.), and often just bread and butter with radishes, onions, tomatoes or lettuce directly from the garden. Green peppers also were good with butter bread or with cheese. Mother sometimes ground cheese and green peppers in the food grinder to make a sandwich spread.

Dinner

Dinner was definitely a meal that the family shared. I need to remind you that since we had no refrigerator we could not count much on perishable foods. We did have fresh meat on the days that the butcher came, but a staple in our home was bacon bought in a slab and either fried or used in numerous boiled meals. It was smoke-cured and did not have to be refrigerated. We had our own chickens, so chicken and eggs were always available.

These were our most frequent meals:

1. Green beans boiled with potatoes and thick pieces of bacon. These were boiled a long time until the beans were limp. Sometimes Mother thickened the broth with flour.
2. Cabbage cut into wedges and boiled with potatoes and thick pieces of bacon. These were also boiled long until the cabbage had turned pink.
3. Sauerkraut cooked long and slow with pork spareribs, eaten with mashed potatoes. Shoofly pie made a nice dessert with this meal.
4. A big pot of dried lima beans often seasoned only with butter and eaten with butter bread. So good!
5. Pork potpie served with pepper cabbage or pickled red beets. This was a favorite meal and often a company meal.
6. Salt water potatoes with either dandelion greens or lettuce with a warm dressing. These potatoes were peeled and quartered and boiled and served that way. It was common practice to roll a piece of potato in the bacon drippings that were put on the table in a shallow dish or on a deep platter with the fried bacon. The sweet-sour of the greens offset the heaviness of the meat and drippings.
7. Stewed potatoes. These potatoes were thinly sliced and added to a pot in which a layer of bacon had already been browned. They were especially good if eaten with some diced raw onion added at the table.
8. Potato soup — diced potatoes, chopped celery, crisp bacon bits, milk and hard-boiled eggs.
9. Corn fritters — eggs, corn, cracker crumbs.
10. Salmon cakes — canned salmon, eggs, cracker crumbs.
11. Pot roast, mashed potatoes and gravy.
12. Pig stomach stuffed with diced potatoes and smoked sausage and baked. Served with a sweet-sour relish.
13. Stewed chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy.
14. Big pans of thinly sliced raw potatoes, fried in a skillet, a family favorite.
15. Vegetable soup using vegetables from the garden and a meaty soup bone.

Side dishes and desserts

1. Many relishes were made with the basic sweet-sour dressing — equal parts of water and sugar with either one-half or one-third as much vinegar, depending on your taste. Use with:

a) Thinly sliced cucumbers and onions

b) Large pieces of onions, peppers and tomatoes

c) Pepper cabbage

d) Pickled beets — use red beet juice in lieu of water

2. Stewed tomatoes seasoned with bacon and thickened with flour
3. Baked apples
4. Shoofly, raisin and apple pies, the latter eaten hot with milk, often as supper
5. Home made bread and doughnuts
6. Big fat sugar or molasses cookies — good dipped in coffee or milk
7. Chocolate and vanilla puddings made from cornstarch (This was one of the first things I learned to cook.)
8. Big platters of corn on the cob in season
9. Strawberry shortcake made with a biscuit dough and also sometimes eaten as supper
10. Schnitz and nepp — wedges of sweet apples unpeeled and dried, stewed with bacon or smoked sausage and topped with dumplings
11. Mother’s own crab apple jelly and grape butter made from our own fruit. Apple butter from the farmer’s market

Some common practices

Spring onions, radishes and celery were all dipped in salt as they were eaten. In fact, formal place settings included small individual containers for salt.

Lard was the common shortening used for frying and baking.

We had coffee morning, noon and night and often in between. Every guest was offered a cup of coffee.

When Grandma Blough visited we looked forward to a big pan of her delicious baked lima beans (limas, molasses, brown sugar, mustard and bacon). We also liked her special liver and onions and the big kettle of iced tea that she made with mint growing in our garden.

By Doris Boyer Wilson