25 Appalachian Food Secrets That Kept Families Alive

Appalachian food preservation without electricity — twenty-five ways my grandmother kept a pantry through a mountain winter with no refrigerator, none of which she ever wrote down. My grandfather built this house in 1931 and left one room in it without a light bulb. He did it on purpose, and it took me forty years to understand why. That room is the reason my grandmother could feed nine people through a winter on a mountain where the road went out in January. There has not been a deep freezer in this house since 1987. Not because I am against them. Because the one we had quit in the middle of a July storm with a hog in it, and I decided I was not going to hang a year of food on a machine and a power line again. WHAT IS IN THIS VIDEO Potatoes, apples, onions, squash, cabbage and root vegetables Beans, cornmeal, flour and sugar, and what gets into them Lard, bacon grease, butter kept in brine Sauerkraut, pickled beets, dried apples, leather britches Salt pork, the smokehouse shoulder, and the country ham And eggs kept close to a year with no cold at all THE ONE ALMOST EVERYBODY GETS BACKWARDS: apples and potatoes in the same room. The apples give off a gas that wakes the potatoes up, and by February you have a bin of sprouts. Keep them apart and both of them keep. A WORD ON THE EGGS: it works, and it works for close to a year, but only with fresh eggs that have never been washed. A washed egg has lost the coating it was laid with and it will rot. Store eggs are washed. Do not use them for this. AND A WORD ON THE HAM: curing meat with salt is the one on this list where I will not guess for you. Get the proportion and the temperature right or do not do it at all. Tell me in the comments what your grandmother kept in hers, and what county she kept it in. I read every single one of these. Burl Sizemore — fifth generation on this mountain in eastern Kentucky. #Appalachian #Pantry #FoodPreservation