If you know me, you know that eating is one of my favorite pastimes. One of our favorite pastimes during our winter stay in South Texas each year is a discussion of where we are gonna have our next meal.
The other day, my friend, Carvell, posted something on Facebook about picking plums. Well, if you are from around here you know that that means sand plums, not those great big plums you buy in the grocery store. These are about the size of grapes and you have to pick them a bit early, before all the critters get them. I can't tell you how many pints of plum jelly Mom made from those plums. Because my siblings and I weren't really crazy about the taste of slightly unripe sand plums, Mom didn't have to worry about us eating most of what we picked.
Not true with blackberries, however. My motto was always "One for the bucket, one for my mouth"! In the early 1960's, we had a blackberry patch staked out that was amazing. Dad said that these were tame berries and that a house had once stood right by where the patch was. At any rate, the berries were huge and sweet, and we picked a lot of berries from that patch. It was located on the south side of old Highway 51 west of Mannford; I've tried to find it a couple of times in the past few years with no success. Maybe blackberry plants don't live 52 years.
There were a few hazards that came along with picking blackberries, however, including snakes and chiggers. The snakes didn't really bother Gary or me but they did bother our sister and mother, a great deal! The chiggers were worse; they ate on everyone. And it always seemed that the hatching of chiggers coincided exactly with when the blackberries were ripe. I can't remember for sure but it seems that Mom doctored our chigger bites with kerosene. Whatever it was, it was one of those treatments where the cure is almost as bad as the disease.
In addition to the sand plums and blackberries, there was always a good supply of pears and apples. Dad planted a small orchard right after we moved to Mannford, so our crop was close at hand. However, there were enough trees in the area located next to abandoned home sites to feed anyone as many pears and apples as they wanted.
Because Mom and Dad had all the fruit they wanted or needed, a lot of it wound up on the ground. Early one morning, Dad was looking out the window and called, "Sue, Come here and look at this!" Out in the orchard, under a pear tree, was a drunk coyote. He had happened along in the night, discovered the ground covered with fermenting pears, and proceeded to eat them till he could hardly walk!
Another way to get your belly full back then was to pick a mess of greens. In the early spring, Poke was probably the favored vegetable. Poke, or Poke weed, is most commonly found in late spring growing in wooded areas, preferably in rotted out tree trunks. When prepared properly, it has a taste somewhat like spinach but with a little bit more bite. We would take a burlap feed sack into the woods and load it up with tender poke leaves. Mom would then par boil it, pour the water off, and then cook it with piece of ham hock or other pork in it. That was mighty tasty! We were always told that you had to par boil the poke and pour off the first juice or it would be poisonous. I don't know today whether that's true or not but the last poke I fixed got the treatment.
The other popular vegetable dish we had when I was growing up was a salad made from all kinds of weeds. I can't remember most of them but a couple were dandelions and lamb's quarter. Grandmother Alexander could walk out into the weeds and pick a tasty salad! It's interesting that dandelion has become a significant green in prepared salads you buy in the store today.
Even though we don't eat a lot of this stuff today, it was pretty good eating when I was a kid.
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