SEGMENT: FOOD & MEALS, FARMING METHODS, & FAMILY BACKGROUND
Jeanette Sayre>UIS Collection S>UIS Collection S, Segment 10
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- FAMILY BACKGROUND
- Her great-grandmother Mary Watkins came as a pioneer. She told a story of why she hated the wind.
- FARMING METHODS
- The men drive the horses and plowed. Boys chopped the clods with hoes. Girls dropped the seed. Wind so hard that their dress fabric ripped at their skin.
- FOOD & MEALS
- Thickened milk is fresh warm milk from cows that is slowly cooked with a little flour until as thick as chowder. Three generations of hominy cooking methods. Great-grandmother boiled corn in an iron pot over an open fire outside with lye water she made from wood ash. Her daughter, Nettie Watkins Thompson, cooked it over a coal stove. Technology changes from farm to town living. Jeanette made it on an electric stove in a granite cooking pan. Important parts are the repeated rinsing off of the lye and disposing of it safely. If you freeze hominy, either in the snow or the freezer, the kernels get fluffier. Mush was a mainstay. It was water and corn meal cooked slowly and molded, then sliced. Served with butter or brown sugar. Lye is made by filtering water through wood ashes repeatedly. It is ready when it can float an egg.
