Down Home Cookin'

My Dad’s family is from the hills of Kentucky, specifically an area knows as W-Hollow. They count famous author Jesse Stuart as one of many cousins, although as generations have passed our family hasn't kept in contact with any of the Stuart family. Jesse Stuart's mother was my great grandmother's sister. His books offer a window into what life was like for my kin folk back in the day as he mostly wrote stories set in the W-Hollow area.

The Jesse Stuart Foundation published a collection of recipes from the family in 1989. Most of the recipes sound normal and quite yummy but then there are some unusual entries that are too interesting not to share.

There’s the recipe for “Homebrew”. I can only guess the end result of this recipe is a type of beer but it’s this item on the list of ingredients that makes it interesting: 1 potato, raw and quartered, placed inside old sock (clean).

There’s “Stir Fried Pokeshoots and Fiddleheads” which are apparently some type of greens. There are recipes that use morels (a type of mushroom that grow in your yard), dandelions and Jerusalem artichokes (the root of a plant in the sunflower family that grow wild in North America). Those are probably pretty good actually.

You can learn how to fix a souse or a grouse, which are apparently types of birds. You can make “Country Style Squirrel” with just a couple of squirrels, flour, bacon grease and water. Maybe you’d prefer “Baked Coon”, “Rabbit Stew”, “Fried Turtle”, “Groundhog and Kraut” or “Possum and Sweet Potatoes”. It just depends what you have on hand. There are directions for skinning a groundhog just in case you‘re rusty. Oh and I can’t forget frog legs. The recipe says, “These are real good. Only the hind legs are eaten.” So now you know.

For dessert you can have some “Snow Ice Cream”, as long as you have 3 gallons of fresh light snow on hand. It sounds delicious.

So, just let me know if you’d like any of these recipes and I’ll get it to you faster than you can shoot your dinner.