Mountain Kitchen Witchery
T here are many valuable skills that have been passed down through the generations, and there are some that are mostly lost or only lightly practiced now. We will look at food ways, family traditions, and witchery, as centered in the kitchen. Let’s begin with food because it is almost suppertime and I’m getting a little hungry.
We eat good here, as we say. Though we have a justifiable reputation for pockets of rural poverty and hunger, the cooking here is simple but filling.
I’m often accused of code-switching: moving from native dialect and word usage to a more conventional speech that is more easily understood by people outside the area and less likely to be mocked. This means I sometimes translate what is said to me. An example is the naming of daily meals. Breakfast is the same word in either usage, but we call the meal in the middle of the day dinner and the one at the end of the day supper. If a friend invites me to dinner, I will first express my delight and gratitude and then ask what time I should arrive and what I should bring. This solves the problem of which meal they mean—the noontime one or the evening one. I am open to invitations to either or both, in case you need to know that.
We will look at the sorts of foods and their preparation that are popular among rural people and working-class urban people (the folks who left the farms and moved into town to work in the mills, for instance). There is not enough room here to do a thorough job, so I have listed some excellent books in the recommended reading section by folks who know their stuff. I will offer you some of the practices I do or have done, as well as the ones with the best stories.
Foodstuffs
My father did not cook, which was a shame because my mother was a dreadful cook. He did have three dishes that he made, and two of them featured cabbage. He sliced potatoes and chopped cabbage and then threw the lot into a cast-iron skillet that had a little water boiling in it. Then he turned down the heat, added salt and pepper and a chunk of butter, and waited. He called it stewed potatoes and it was always filling and delicious. On lucky days, he’d throw in a little fried fatback pork.
His other signature dishes were creamed corn and coleslaw, or (as we called it) cold slaw. Fresh corn—preferably white horse corn, a silage variety that also makes a fine cornmeal—was scraped across a special tool called a corn cutter that separated the kernels from the cob. The kernels were thrown into a hot pan with some butter, salt, pepper, a little flour, and milk. It was stewed until the corn was tender and there was a light gravy.
The only other thing I remember him making was a special coleslaw that was grated cabbage, a chopped-up apple, and mayonnaise.
My family has a tasty and effective cold remedy. You will need a couple of medium-size Irish (white) potatoes, a strong onion, some fresh garlic, a couple of eggs, salt, and pepper. Slice the onion thinly and cook it slowly in a warm pan, in a little fat. Use the stinkiest onion you can find. When the onion starts to look transparent, add in the thickly sliced potato and the garlic. Cook at medium heat until the potatoes are mostly cooked but still very firm in the center. Add in the eggs and stir the whole mess together. Pour it onto a dish and add lots of black pepper and some salt. Eat it as hot as you can. My family swears by this as a cold remedy, and I’ve used it many times to open up my sinuses, clear congestion, and get me on the road to wellness. It has the advantage of being easy to cook and tasty to eat, even if you don’t have a cold.
Cabbage was and is an important ingredient in the southern highlands. In addition to my daddy’s fancy cooking, we had neighbors who regularly made kraut in big stoneware crocks and canned a relish called piccalilli and another called chow-chow. I have our neighbor Mrs. Hilton’s chow-chow recipe, a gift from her granddaughter. The relish was spooned on top of soup beans mostly, giving the well-seasoned and well-cooked dried beans a pleasant, tangy crunch.
Beans are so important in the region that it is impossible to overstate how much and how often we ate them. Soup beans are made with dried beans, the seeds that grow in the green bean pods that are familiar to most of us. They keep almost indefinitely and are cheap and easy to prepare. The cleaned beans are placed in a large pot of water and are left simmering on the cookstove until they are tender and a rich broth has formed. They are traditionally seasoned with pork fat and black pepper. They are full of fiber and nutritious. They are often served with a cake of corn bread, which we will discuss in a moment.
Another way of keeping beans over a long winter was to string perfect green beans and hang them up to dry, pod and all. A mountain kitchen would often have a curtain of these bean strings, ready to be washed and thrown into a pot of boiling water to cook until tender. They are called leather britches, and there is a trick to drying and cooking them. They must have exactly the right amount of time drying to preserve them but not dry them out entirely. There must still be a little vitality in the pods so that they are leathery but not crumbly. Cooking them in a pot with strong seasonings is best. Be generous with both fat and salt. And chop up some fresh onion on them when they’re served up. Dry them out of the sun and pack them away in a canning jar or brown paper bag to store them. They have a different taste and texture than fresh beans. All beans are a good source of protein and are a cheap way to feed a large family that preserved and ate every bit of food that they grew or foraged.
Corn bread is a gift from heaven and you can take that to the bank. There are two schools of thought about corn bread and never the twain shall meet: some people put sugar or honey in the batter, and some do not. Corn bread—with or without the addition of a sweetener—is best cooked in a preheated cast-iron frying pan in a fast oven. I put the pan on the eye of the stove and heat up enough fat (lard is best, but vegetable shortening will do) for the batter and to coat the pan thoroughly. While that is melting, I mix the batter. Mine has cornmeal, a little flour, an egg or two, and buttermilk. I add cracklings on New Year’s Day but rarely at other times. I stir the batter by hand and pour on half the melted fat from the frying pan. I pour the batter into the hot pan and slide it into a hot oven. It bakes until the center comes out clean when tested and the crust is crisp and sizzling. The cake, or pone, is turned out on a plate and served immediately, hot as the devil’s big toe. If there is any left over, it can be reheated and served with butter and something sweet, like honey. My father liked it crumbled into a glass with sweet milk on it, for breakfast or dessert.
Corn bread and biscuits are a source of pride for many mountain cooks. Praise them lavishly if these breads are offered to you and you’ll be sure to get them again.
Canning
Some foods were dried, many meats were smoked in a smokehouse, and many others were canned. There are several good books on these processes in the recommended reading section. I’ll write from my personal experience and leave you to experiment further, if you so choose.
Canning is enjoying a resurgence in popularity these days and I am grateful for that. There are several methods for processing canned food and we’ll review a couple of them here. The water bath method requires no special equipment and consists of placing your freshly canned food products into a hot water bath—a big pot of boiling water—and boiling the water to sterilize the contents. This simple method is appropriate for jams, jellies, and other high sugar content foods. Most everything else will benefit from being canned under pressure, in a special pot called a pressure canner. These are heavy and have a lid that snaps shut, sealing the boiling water into the pot to sterilize your jars of food. The agricultural extension office (sometimes called the cooperative extension) in your community is your friend, and you should have the pressure gauge on your canner checked by them every year.
Mason jars are everywhere these days. There are chain restaurants that use them to serve drinks and collectors who go crazy about the vintage and antique ones. They are more properly called canning jars, Mason being a brand name. I was given a fanciful canning jar chalice that is a Mason jar on a glass stem, like a wineglass.
They are handy for more than canning, of course, and are regularly used for storing all sorts of things, from dried beans to buttons. They are sturdy and don’t break easily, even if they are dropped. You can put refrigerator jelly in them and freeze them. They are versatile and relatively inexpensive, especially if you get them at thrift stores and flea markets. The screw-on top consists of two pieces: the lid and the ring. These are usually available at hardware and grocery stores.
Cast-Iron Stoves and Cookware
My cousin Bosie had a wood cookstove on her side porch. Her primary stove, the one in the kitchen, was electric, which was quick and easy to use. But that old wood cookstove held a place of honor and she would fire it up, usually in the winter and it was always a pleasure to step into her old log house and enjoy the memories that drifted through your head at the smell of that particular combination of wood smoke and pork fat. Her son and his family moved into the house after she died. I wonder if they ever cook on that stove on the porch or if it is even there.
Another neighbor cooked exclusively on a small wood cookstove, and there was always a stack of kindling outside her front door. I sometimes helped her bake cakes in that oven, as well as bread, biscuits, and corn bread. It was always delicious and I was fascinated with her skill in judging the oven’s temperature. She would put in the kindling, light a fire in it using those stout wooden matches and continue feeding in the kindling, along with larger pieces of wood, through the little doorway of the firebox until the temperature felt right for whatever she was baking. She would open the oven door when experience told her it was likely to be the right temperature. She used the ends of her apron to open the heavy oven door then put her bare hand inside for a moment. This way she determined if it was a fast (hot) oven or a slow (cooler) one.
Different things cook at different temperatures and years of experience made her adept with that little stove. It stayed warm most of the time and there was usually a pot of water on the back, ready to wash dishes or a child’s dirty hands and face.
No review of Appalachian cooking, however cursory, is complete without at least a mention of cast-iron cookware. Heavy as sin, durable, magnificent, a cast-iron frying pan, perfectly seasoned, is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Even heat distribution as well as an ability to hold heat makes it a good choice for cooks at any level of experience. We are talking about bare cast-iron, not enameled ware. The key to using cast iron is the layer of acquired seasoning of the utensil and that is why they are never washed in soapy water and never ever put into a dishwasher. Ever. Hot water and plain steel wool on the stuck spots is all that’s needed. My cousin Bosie was visited one day by a traveling pot-and-pan salesman. He scoffed at her cast-iron dutch oven and proclaimed that there was enough built-up food in the pan that he could make a pot of soup by simply boiling water.
Cast-iron cookware is passed down through families, with a daughter sometimes getting the heavier pieces as her mother’s arms get too soft to pick them up. Prized and tended, cast-iron pans are one of the treasures of Appalachian food culture.
And don’t forget—don’t try to help out by putting your sweetie’s pan in the dishwasher to get rid of that greasy coating. Because your sweetie will kill you.
Some projects were too big for a kitchen and were undertaken outside over a fire. Apple butter and sorghum take a long time to process and both act like napalm if you get too close and they splash onto your bare skin. Both are cooked in mighty cauldrons—the same ones that were used on laundry day—over open fires, outside, then bottled up for sale or use. If you ever have the opportunity to watch them being made or to help with that process, you will be astounded with the amount of work and attention they take and how delicious the finished product is.
Stepping Out of the Kitchen: Birth and Death
Ceremonies and superstitions around the beginning and end of life loom large in the folkways of the southern highlands. The yarb women that we speak of so often were and are women who tend a community, filling many important roles in the life of a holler or a township. Sometimes a group of women came together for a particular task. Sometimes a woman worked solo or was accompanied by an informal apprentice, often a child or grandchild, who shadowed her to learn her ways.
I recommend the book A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her D iary, 1785–1812 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. It is a heart-rending account of birth, death, and everything in between. So much of our study of history is concerned with war and colonization that accounts of the work and lives of hardworking women are often lost. But that work is the bedrock of any culture and should be celebrated and the practitioners honored—and remembered.
In the United States, we are coming to terms with our fear and trepidation around end-of-life issues, including death. You can take training now in death midwifery, and there are resources on green burials, at-home care, and the like. I always maintain that in the South, especially here in the mountains, we understand what to do with death. When someone dies here, we are not frozen into inaction, confused by what should or could be done.
We cook.
Then we bring that food, along with some sort of drink, to the house of the deceased, where the family will have gathered.
This seems odd to some people outside of the region whose own culture suggests that the recently bereaved require privacy, instead of making fresh deviled eggs or your mama’s special spice cake. We gather up what we need and head to the house. There is always someone there and we are greeted with handshakes, hugs, tears. We make our way into the kitchen and find a place in the already-full refrigerator for anything we’ve brought that requires that. As we do that, we are told to “eat something” or “fill you up a plate now.” You are expected to drink something too—there will be big Solo cups and a cooler full of ice. Iced tea will always be present. In my part of the mountains, iced tea is always sweet tea, but a quest for better general health has introduced “unsweet” iced tea to our Southern palates. You can tell much about the family if the offerings are various soft drinks (we tend to call all sodas Cokes) but no alcohol.
You then take your food with you as you make your way to the center of the action, to where everyone is gathered. You’ll speak to relatives and family friends. You will finally arrive at the knee of the person in the family who holds the story of the death. You will hug that person and try your best not to drop potato salad from your plate. You will murmur condolences and apologies. And then you will find a place to sit and you will eat your food and listen, quietly and intently. You may interject and nod but your role here is to witness. In this sad land of mist and removals, to stand as witness is sometimes all we can do. Appalachia is a mythic place, a soiled and desperate outpost where the American dream goes to die and to be reborn. Recent arrivals will swear they know the ins and outs of the hills after a few years of distracted residence, while multigenerational natives still marvel at a new thing they never realized.
Something that is slipping from common practice is preparing the body, something that is often left to funeral homes or other mortuary services. It is a profound act of love to wash a close family member’s body, comb their hair, and put fresh clothes on the corpse. Not everyone is cut out for that work but it is powerful and humbling. We come face-to-face with our own mortality and the enormity of our loss as we wash those familiar hands and sponge that beloved face. In this age of green burials and home hospice, some people are choosing to reclaim these old practices.
The next part is equally unnerving for some people. When people died at home, sometimes in the bed they were born in or in which they had given birth to their children, the women tended the body as outlined above. The men of the family might have been milling planks for a coffin, constructing the box, or digging the grave in the family’s burial plot. Family would be called in from far and wide and the body of the deceased would be laid on trestles in the front room or parlor so that the rest of the extended family could file through and pay their respects, speaking their final farewells. If weather permitted, flowers and other scented greenery would be heaped around to soften the occasion as well as the smell. The burial itself might take a few days to arrange and the minister would have to be fetched from wherever he (in those days always a “he”) resided. The women would do yeoman’s work keeping up with the meals, and neighbors would help feed the assembled crowd. Someone always sat vigil by the body—sitting up with the dead—especially at night. Many families covered the mirrors in the house and the drapes throughout the downstairs would be drawn tight across the windows. The whole house would be hushed, the feel reverential. Ideally.
I’ve been told the story of one of these vigils by a buddy in South Carolina. He recalls being the youngest in a large extended family and, on the death of the matriarch, everyone gathered in. There were so many people that all the bedrooms were filled and the children were put on pallets on the floor of the parlor. (Pallet is an old-fashioned word that means a soft layer of bedding, a pillow, and a quilt. It is not the wooden transport structure that is a shipping container foundation for heavy objects.) The trouble was Grandma was lying in state in her open wooden casket in the parlor. All the young’uns said their prayers and got tucked under warm quilts. Just as the lights were being turned out, one rascal stage-whispered, “I think I seen her move!” All hell broke loose with children screaming and grown-ups telling them all to shut up. The lights came back on and every child got a whupping, except for my friend, who was the baby of the group. He is still pretty smug about that.
At the other end of life—at birth—there would also be a job of women’s work. There are many superstitions around childbirth, which even today is an activity fraught with potential disaster. The folklore centers on the woman “opening” for childbirth and the tenets of sympathetic magic required that nothing in the birthing room be tied with a hard knot. The laces on women’s garments and the strings of their aprons were loosened. If a woman wore her hair braided, that was let down and undone. A cast-iron pan might be placed under the birthing bed with a sharp knife inside. Stones with naturally occurring holes would be placed in the room and outside under the window. There would be a flat stick or short piece of leather on a table by the bed for the woman to bite down on as she labored. There was and still is a significant amount of infant and mother mortality, especially in rural areas, especially among the poor and working class. In modern-day Appalachia, African-American women are more likely to die in childbirth than their white counterparts.
From birth to death and everything in between, the hardy people of this region made the best of what they were given, which includes these odd and helpful gifts of prophetic dreaming, second sight, and the rest. As we leave this chapter on food and kitchen folkways, know that there are so many other skills that can be learned and that make for a rich and varied life. There are some resources listed at the end of the book for those of you considering learning these things in more depth.
Some Witchery: Candy Spells
In some circles, I am known for the Marshmallow Hex, which is listed on the next page. It came to me after I’d heard a fascinating talk about kolam, a practice from the southern part of India where the woman of the house draws a pretty design in rice flower on the street or stoop in front of the front door. As insects, birds, and little creatures eat and scatter the rice flour, more and more prosperity is accrued by the household. It was a compelling talk and it got me thinking. I pondered how the theory behind kolam could be used to magical effect. The following list of spells featuring readily available (as well as some evocative old-fashioned) candies came from that contemplation of kolam.
I developed the marshmallow spell first, and it was quite successful. While traveling with a friend to a festival in Tennessee, I had a funny thought. What if you used Necco Wafers to commune with the dead and called them “Necro Wafers”? Then the game was on and the following list is the result.
Now, none of these candy spells are traditional. The old-time mountain folks didn’t have many sweets. Baked goods were sweetened with honey and sorghum, white sugar being expensive. At Christmas a child might get one stick of peppermint candy and an orange in the toe of a sock. But the spells are good-natured fun and mountain folks are always in a mood for that.
I started with the idea of the candy based on its name or flavor and then considered whether to eat it or bury it, put it in a sachet, throw it in the freezer, toss it in swiftly running water, burn it, stick it with a stabbitty, or hex it and hand it over to someone else to be eaten.
Marshmallow Hex: The One That Started It All
It’s designed to cut an arrogant person down to size, and to feed some critters, as kolam does. Take a plain marshmallow and write the person’s name upon it. Soft pencil is best for this. Once the writing is done, pierce the marshmallow with small sticks, thorns, or toothpicks. Place it out in nature where the ants can nibble it away, bit by bit. Please place it high in the crotch of a tree limb so that rambling dogs don’t choke on it. Squirrels seem to nibble around the toothpicks and insects won’t be affected by them.
Necco Wafers: Necro Wafers
Are you looking to revitalize your career or your love life or to bring your latent creativity “back from the dead”? Write your intention in pencil on as many candies as feels right. Wrap them in a paper sachet and then bury it in a place you love and tend, like your flower garden.
Jelly Beans: Magic Beanstalks
Remember the old story of “Jack and the Beanstalk”? Taking that as a guide, set your intention to achieve—to climb up to—your heart’s desire. Bury the jelly beans in the ground three at a time in a hill, like you’d plant corn.
Chuckles: Cheer Up!
These are rubbery jelly candies in bright colors. You can create a simple working, either for you or someone else by using them. Help your sad friend to see the light side of life by writing their name on one and burying it in fertile soil.
Chocolate Coins: Gold Ones for Sympathetic Magic
At the beginning of December every year, I start to gather chocolate coins. I give them away at the winter solstice as a wish that the young agricultural year include sweetness, brightness, and prosperity. Throughout the year, you can find gold- and silver-colored plastic coins, especially at those stores where everything costs a dollar. I have some with four-leaf clovers on them for St. Patrick’s Day and others that show up for Mardi Gras. I use these in money-drawing and resource-gathering workings.
Bonbons: Sit on the Couch and Eat Some Bonbons
These fat coconut balls are covered in a firm candy coating and come in many pastel colors. They are symbolic of leisure and decadence, as though you have no work at all. When asked if I am busy, I will sometimes remark, sarcastically, naw, I’ve been spending all time my sitting on the couch, eating bonbons from a cut crystal bowl. But that gave me the idea for another sort of calling-in working. If you are too busy, doing way too much, too many plates spinning (or whatever symbol you use), first you should identify what you can reasonably remove from your plate of busyness and consider how you can be better about your personal boundaries. Then support your intentions with a little job of work. Take a few of those pretty little bonbons and set them out on your working area (whether desk or dining room table) on a reflective surface like a small mirror. As the moon is waxing to full, set the intention to call some leisure time your way. For extra fun, put those candies on a little crystal plate and add a doily too.
Circus Peanuts: Sometimes It Is Your Circus
and Those Are Your Monkeys
Social media memes keep reminding us that we are not responsible for every little thing by blithely announcing that “this” isn’t your circus or your monkeys. But sometimes it is your circus and you need to manage the mess. Use these orange puffy candies to gather in your monkeys and organize your circus. Use them in a summoning spell to bring your circus to heel and get the darn thing on the road again.
Swedish Fish: For Catching What You Need
These are the candy I most often recommend to people for connecting with the land spirits. They are easy to find and everyone knows what they look like. They come in colors other than red, but we think of them as red. What do you want to catch? A new job, a new place to live? Let each of these fish be the catch that you’ve reeled in, making your life a little sweeter.
Candy Pumpkins: Think of It as a Bag of Time
Pumpkins get carved up at Halloween to be jolly jack-o’-lanterns on fall-decorated front porches. If you are like most people in the modern world, one of the things you could probably use is the chance to carve out some time for what you need to do or be. Use those candy pumpkins one by one to buy yourself some time. Eat them and claim your time or bury them and do likewise.