Sixty years in one mountain kitchen. The grease can and the pot liquor, the biscuit-feel and the bean pot, the putting-up and the making-do that fed whole families on next to nothing. Nobody ever wrote it down — so I finally did, every bit of it, before it goes the way the old knowing goes.
My people fed big families like kings out of a garden, a hog, and what most folks throw away. That make-do knowing is the real inheritance in this book. That it also happens to be the cheapest good eating there is — well, that is just the way the old ways were.
A pot of soup beans and a skillet of cornbread feeds you the better part of a week for right around a dollar a bowl. Cook your suppers from this book instead of buying them out and you keep about $200 a month — your real number depends on how often you eat out now. Typical, not guaranteed, honey. But the dollars are the least of it. What you are really keeping is the knowing itself — and that does not come back once it is gone.
Each chapter tells the method plain, gives you the why of it, and ends with what to do tonight. Written the way I talk, with an ink-and-watercolor plate for every one.
The plainest good supper there is. Feeds six for a few dollars, with the liquor saved for tomorrow.
Cut with a jar, read by the hands. Three Saturdays and yours will know it for life.
Whatever the icebox holds, crusted gold in iron. My grandbabies asked for it by name.
Green beans dried whole on a string, cooked back slow with seasoning meat come winter.
I was eleven years old when my mother sent me down to the cellar for taters in February and I found half the barrel gone soft. She did not scold me. She spread every tater on the porch boards in the cold and made me sort them by hand until I could tell a sound one from a turning one by feel. I have never lost a winter's store since.
That is how all of it got into my hands: standing at somebody's elbow, given a job. Sixty years I have cooked in the same mountain kitchen in Eastern Kentucky. I raised my family out of that kitchen through lean years and good ones, and near about everything I know came down from women who never wrote a word of it down. I am about the last one on my creek who still holds the old ways. So I set them down here, on purpose, every one, before they go in the ground with me.
— Ruby
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