Gramma's Stuff

Gramma’s Stuff
By Mark Crider

Gramma's Cow

I remember my widowed grandmother and one of her widowed friends shared ownership of a cow. They would make butter and buttermilk for cooking. They kept the products in a shaded window covered with a cloth they kept damp for cooling them.

They shared fresh milk daily with neighbors. One was a poor family that the man wasn't home much as he was a truck driver. Their small children would come over
to watch them milk and squirt milk in the cats faces who were eagerly waiting for their turn and then would lick each other to glean the last moisture of it from their cheeks. Sometimes they would squirt the milk in the kid’s mouths; they loved this trick.

One time the man came over and told them their milk would be much better if their cow had alfalfa hay to eat instead of the wild grass she grazed on. This upset them, as they weren't used to having anyone talk to them that way.

Those two spinsters probably didn't have enough money between them to buy one bale since they lived on what they could grow and their small pensions.

Come to find out he was so appreciative of the fact that they shared freely with his family, asking nothing in return, that he started bringing alfalfa hay bales from up north on all his return trips to keep their cow fattened and happy.

Everyone noticed the great improvement in its flavor and she gave much more milk to be shared.

Gramma's Chickens

Far back as I can remember, Gramma always had plenty of chickens -- hens for the eggs and roosters for the pot or skillet. We always had fresh chicken, fried or with dumplings, depending on their stage in life when we visited them which was nearly every weekend. There was always so much work to be done on the farm and all the uncles and cousins went to help my elderly grandparents get things done.

Sometime in the early fifties, seems everyone got deep freezers and my gramma got the idea to order a hundred or more baby chickens every spring. When they got to frying size, the hens were safe and, you guessed it, the young roosters and old hens met their maker and were put in the freezers of all my uncles, aunts and parents, divided up equally. However, the work was not divvied up equally.

Gramma and my aunts would build the fire around the scalding pot, catch and chop heads and all of us kids were required to scald, pick and draw the birds. My aunts did clean the livers and gizzards while closely supervising us kids and chatting about things only old folks think about.

If you've ever experienced pickin' and cleaning fifty to eighty chickens in one weekend, you know full well the smell and mess that accompanies it. It took more than fifty years for me to be able to eat a chicken thigh because of the smell that it emitted when hot and opened up. To me it smelled like you had just drawn it.

Gramma's Turkeys

Gramma raised quite a few turkeys, most of which she sold in town for the holidays. She also traded them to the Watkins salesman at that time of year. He came by about once a month, his wagon pulled along by his team of horses. He not only had every imaginable spice, but pots, pans, medicine, you name it, on board.

In November and December he had large cages and would put the turkeys in them he got from her to peddle and trade all over the area southeast of San Antonio.

My gramma would stock up on black pepper, salt, spices, flour, medicines and a host of other things she would need during the year that the old man carried in exchange for the turkeys.

Gramma's Hogs

My grandparents never butchered calves; they were sold to buy things that couldn't be raised on the farm like coffee, oil, gasoline, ammunition and things like that. However, the hogs were another story. They let them run in the oak forests surrounding the farm to fatten up on acorns and the remnants in the sweet potato patch for several months in the fall. Every evening they were called home with the shrill call of "SUEEEEEE HOG" several times by my grandmother. You could probably hear her to San Antonio. They would come running for their evening treat and spend the night in their pen. In December when cold weather was going to settle in for awhile we would go to the pen and drive the ones to be killed to a small pen where they were washed clean and then fed small amounts of food to keep their minds off the boiling water in the old bathtub nearby.

As they were calmly eating, my grandfather would slip a very thin double-edged knife into their heart. It was virtually painless, as they would keep eating for a few minutes before falling down, calmly dying. They were then dragged into the tub to scald the bristles then to a tabletop where they were scraped clean of all their hair. Regardless of their color before dying, they all came out bright white. Nothing was wasted.

The whole head went to make souse or headcheese as some call it. The blood was saved and went to blutwurst (blood sausage). The liver was the first eaten. UGHHHH! Us kids were all sick at supper this night. Later we always saved extra things from lunch to tide us over that night to keep from having to eat the liver.

The sides were sliced off for bacon, the loins were filleted out and the hams were removed and hocked. These were placed in curing salt, molasses and brown sugar mixture being turned and rubbed daily for several weeks 'til they were ready to smoke and dry in the smokehouse where they were hung 'til ready to be used. There were many hickory trees and they were used for the smoke.

All the trimmings and shoulder meat went to link blutwurst sausage and was smoked. This cured meat hung there for months growing a strange hairy looking beard of different colors. When it was needed it was taken down, scrubbed clean with hot water and cooked. The ribs and bones were boiled, the meat removed, mixed and served with homemade sauerkraut. There is no comparable taste than those sweet, tender hams or bacon with gravy and biscuits with a side of what my grandmother called cackle berries (eggs) from the yard hens.

Gramma's Bees

Gramma had several hives of bees -- maybe a couple dozen or so.

Her bees never bothered her because when she took a souper (where they store the honey) to rob she always had her long Dutch bonnet on which extended a foot in front of her face and she was very gentle. She wore light colored clothes when working them, mostly white or a very faded light blue or pink and soft white leather gloves to her elbows.

The taxman came. You can't tax livestock, gardens or crops. Bees? Maybe. Honey? Maybe? He wanted to see the bees after looking at the old shack, the old barn and the smokehouse.

They walked up to the very busy beehives. He wanted to see how much honey they had so she kicked one over. He had on a dark suit and hat. Bees hate anything dark
colored. Instinct tells them it may be a bear going to destroy their home and eat their honey.

Poor tax man. He swatted some with his hat, which really got them going. He never came back. They had to take his truck to him down near the gate, nearly a mile, where he had ran. The bees ate him alive. He could hardly see through his swollen eyes. Bees teach a lesson the first time; we should learn from them.

Gramma's Kraut

Sauerkraut is a staple in German immigrants diet, so is beer. Gramma always made kraut in the early spring from the winter cabbage, layering the hand shredded cabbage and salt in the big crocks and putting the porcelain weights on top to gently press it down as it cured. The resulting liquid that came to the top is just what Grampa needed to make his springtime light beer to ease the heaviness of the winter bock that had helped everyone make it through the winter.

A better beer has never been made or a stronger laxative and better tasting one than kraut beer. We kids loved the light saltiness of it. Grampa would take the liquid off the top of the kraut crocks and bottle it with a little sugar, malt and yeast to add fizz. 'Bout ten days later it was ready. Think this is where the term "spring cleaning" came from?

Story ID:	4745
Written by:	Mark Crider (bio, link, contact, other stories)
Organization:	Corpus Christi Coating & Machine Inc.
Story type:	Family History
Location:	Stockdale Texas & Ariz. U.S.A.
Year:	1940
Person:	Both Grammas