All Eggs Are Not Created Equal

The Upland Ranch, Dodge City, KS, reports that their birds are stepping up production! Chicken eggs are $5 a dozen and duck eggs are $4 a half-dozen (Prices are subject to change from the time of my report).

They are a first-generation SW Kansas family farm offering meat, produce, dairy, seasonal gifts, and apparel. Find them on FB at UplandRanchLLC or 

620-255-5954, or uplandranch2019@gmail.com

Support our Family Farms 

and let's see some duck egg recipes!

Ad Astra Eating--and Drinking

As we prepare to celebrate Kansas Day tomorrow, let us pause to remember Carry Nation. Ron Lopez-Reese of Topeka has quite the Carry Collection which will be donated to the new saloon that will be a part of the Old Prairie Town collection of buildings. (http://parks.snco.us/facilities/facility/details/28)

He added some decorations to this cabinet card he owns to brighten Carry's demeanor and perhaps soften the edge of that hatchet she is wielding. 

God bless you, Carry. A toast!

Snow

Snow men (and women), snow angels, snowballs, snow forts, snow cream.

With a bowl of snow, a little milk, sugar, and vanilla, the fluffy white stuff is transformed into a treat -- it falls from the skies, after all. Magic.

Snow is transformative. It softens and quiets, outlines and highlights. Lowly weeds and magnificent trees become fixtures in a surreal landscape.

 

In the absence of wheat. . . .

Martha White self-rising flour made legendary by Flatt and Scruggs, "with Hot-Rize plus!" 

Jesus declared, "I am the bread of life. . . ." Though I cannot be certain, I'm pretty sure he was referring to wheat bread and not cornbread. 

Corn and wheat are not used interchangeably in the biblical texts, but they are both used symbolically in the nurturing of the body and soul. Wheat gets the crown, however. In studying pioneering America, I came across a reference to struggles to survive and a review question that asked, "In the absence of wheat," what did the pioneers plant? The inference is that corn is okay if you do not have wheat, but why would you want cornbread if you can have wheatbread? 

In my Blue Ridge Mountain childhood, at least at Granny's house, there were biscuits in the morning, cornbread at dinner (the noon meal), and leftovers of both at supper. Daddy did not like cornbread because it reminded him of being poor and not being able to afford flour for biscuits (corn was raised, taken down to the mill to be ground, and taken home perhaps just for the cost of sharing a portion of the meal). I was blessed to have no such negative association and butter in the middle of a slice of hot cornbread was sinfully delicious to me.

Crumbled cornbread in a glass of milk was the only way I would consume milk. Fried cornbread with honey, well, that was the most special of events.

But flour does have its ritual. Until I was six years old, I slept between Granny and Grandpa when I stayed with them--Granny next to the wall, then me, then Grandpa, facing the darkness, his back to us. He was this great shield protecting us. It was the safest I have ever felt. Around 4 a.m., Grandpa would get up and build a fire in the wood cookstove, then come back to bed. Around 5 a.m., Granny would get out of bed, still in her nightgown, get out her doughboard and make biscuits. I often got up with her because I could not stand to sleep and miss something. She wore her long, silver hair in a braid which she wound into a bun during the day, but in the early morning, it still hung down her back like a school girl. She kneaded the dough and shaped out the biscuits, taking little scraps and shaping them into "dough babies" for me. When all was in the oven and the kitchen was warm, she got dressed, and when the biscuits were done, Grandpa awoke for the second time. Perhaps this is the difference between wheat and corn and the reason corn is the food of survival while wheat carries, if not wealth, the connotation of plenty, of abundance, and is so suited to biblical purposes. There is no ritual in making cornbread. Any fool can stir up cornmeal and water or milk (doesn't mean any fool can make good cornbread, but it will be edible). But to make biscuits requires patience and understanding. It takes the touch. There is an intimacy in baking bread from flour. 

Praise the Lord and pass the biscuits.

Creamed Corn

There are many recipes for creamed corn. The Brookville Hotel, Brookville then Abilene, KS, was famous for its recipe made with real heavy cream. There is creamed corn made with cream cheese and other cheeses, cooked on the stove top or made in the crock pot. Having southern roots myself, there is rarely a recipe in the South that a pig did not have to die for, so anything that starts with frying bacon is automatically enhanced. 

In a large skillet, fry four or five slices of bacon until crispy. Remove the bacon and crumble it. Leave drippings in the pan and add five cups of corn (fresh or frozen). Sprinkle in a couple of tablespoons of flour for thickening, add a cup of heavy cream and two or three tablespoons of sour cream (if you like sour cream). Cook, stirring constantly, until tender, seasoning with salt and pepper. Top with crumbled bacon. You can make this with butter instead of bacon, but the bacon flavor transforms the dish. For simpler flavor, just use the butter.

Rarely, is creamed corn left from one meal to another.

Photo--Paula Deen's Creamed Corn

Corn and Annuities

Mark Brooks, site director at the Kaw Mission and Last Chance Store Museums in Council Grove, KS, shares historic tidbits regularly on social media. Since we're on the topic of corn, I found this one particularly interesting:

By Indian department contracts of April 22, 1843, J.M. Hunter was to deliver eight yoke of Oxen and yokes ( for $324.48 ), and J.C. Berryman was to supply 30 bushels of potatoes and 30 bushel of seed corn ( for $68.75 ), at the "Kanzas Village," before May 1. Agent R.W. Cummins subsequently reported, in September, that the Kansa had been "almost in a state of starvation" in the spring and had "subsisted a part of the year on roots"; that "at their pressing request" he had "employed about 18 hands and cultivated about 200 acres of corn & planted 30 bushels of Irish potatoes for them" after they agreed to "turn in and plant & tend as much corn as they could"; and to his surprise "they raised themselves more than they had done for many years" and would probably " have corn plenty to do them" over the winter. Cummins also mentioned that their horse mill was in contract, and would be soon completed.

Food Has A Past, Too

Walking through the  aisles in the Topeka grocery store, I surveyed the shelves for cornmeal. Lord knows I had seen cornfields aplenty, far larger than the ones back home in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Surely, there was some decent cornmeal to be had. But alas, my efforts were futile.

Weeks later, I was in the local doughnut shop when I spied a group of farmers in the corner. I knew they were farmers from their Co-op caps and their conversations about diesel prices and yield.

Never shy, I confronted them. "Y'all raise a lot of corn, don't ya? Then how come you can can't find good cornmeal around here?"

They looked at me like I was a pea-green alien with three eyes and lobster claws for hands. They did not hesitate, and replied in unison, "Corn's for animals."

Aha, I got the unspoken part of the message--"and poor people."

I was well-acquainted with the role of corn in the lives of poor people. My people had converted corn to liquor for decades because it was more profitable and easier to transport a gallon of liquid than bushels of corn. Corn was the staff of life. There was cornbread for dinner (the noon meal) every day.

EVERY day.

If you were walking down the road at the right time, you saw Mama's cousin, Farley, driving to town in his 1950-something pickup with a load of white corn he had picked that morning. He was headed to the mill owned by another cousin, Clayton, who ground meal and sold it to the local grocery stores. If you got to the mill at just the right time, there would be a cast-iron skillet coming out of the wood cookstove oven with a perfectly brown pone of cornbread. 

Clayton explained that mass produced cornmeal meant taking the heart of the kernel away. It was the only way to insure shelf life because the moisture and nutrients and flavor are in the heart--things that do not keep indefinitely. So most commercial cornmeal is just the dry kernel with no heart. No further explanation needed for why there is no life in all those other corn meals.

When the relatives back home remember, they send me home-grown, stone-ground meal. Sometimes, I share it with my friends and family. Sometimes, I lock the door and eat it all myself, and pity the folks who pity the poor.