Food for Life by Jodi Lea Stewart

No running water, no inside plumbing, no way to run to the store for bread, meat, or butter.
The name of the game was survival.  

In our current world, it’s hard to conceive of what it’s like to feed a lot of mouths when you have empty pockets and no promise of help. In 1934, welfare was non-existent, but my long-ago farmer relatives would have died before taking government handouts anyway. Without education, opportunity, and with no way to move up a corporate ladder or go to college to better one’s self, life was lived by prayer, hope, and the sweat of the brow.

Food meant the difference between living or dying for the farmers and sharecroppers of 1930s Oklahoma. I highlight that struggle and life lived close to the earth in my latest novel, Blackberry Road. 

No Crops ~ No Life

Coaxing the stubborn ground to give up its stumps and boulders by using a small team of horses, mules, or even one of each was the only way to prepare the dirt for growing crops. After that back-breaking task came the planting, weeding, and harvesting of the fields and gardens. Is it any wonder those men and women became experts at preserving and stretching their bounty?

My grandmother was one of those women. The wife of a sharecropper, she gave birth to eleven children, all at home and all delivered by her own husband. Coming from a family of eleven children herself, she was equipped with the knowledge of keeping a horde of hungry kids alive and fed. 

If it grew in the dirt or came off a tree, she knew how to preserve it in a jar.

She cooked on an old wood stove, and mealtime was greatly anticipated three times a day. Everyone gathered at the table with a sense of excitement. Family courtesy dictated each person look around and calculate how many mouths were waiting to be fed at the table. The answer determined the serving size each one could take on his/her plate. 

Dividing a bowl of milk gravy or fried “taters” by thirteen, or adding up the buttermilk biscuits in the crockery bowl to see how many each could have, made the kids early mathematicians!

No Animals ~ No Life

The family kept cows for fresh milk and made butter from the cream. Buttermilk was considered a special treat, as well as cottage cheese made by letting milk clabber, hanging it on a clothesline in a bag, and then letting it drip dry until it curdled.  

Chickens provided eggs and protein. My granddad raised hogs and butchered them when the weather turned cold. This provided bacon, sausage, headcheese, the boiled backbone for seasoning potatoes, beans, and more. Nothing was wasted. Granddad made real pork skins (cracklings)—not the kind you buy today—from the hide.

My seven uncles added to the survival table by killing rabbits and squirrels with slingshots. Like it or not by our delicate standards of today, that was another way to keep empty bellies from hurting.

Because Granddad grew up in Indian Territory, Oklahoma, he knew about boiling sassafras root in the spring to make a tea that boosted one’s health. He knew the herbs, roots, and weeds that were fine to eat, which ones to use in herbal medicines, and which ones to avoid at all costs.

As the issues are hotly argued in the twenty-first century about genetically engineered foods, depleted soils, chemical preservatives, and mass production of food commodities that barely resemble the original foods of yesterday, the simplicity of those earlier times often pulls at our hearts—a time when soil was rich and yielded the best food for our lives. 

Survival Recipes

Fried Okra

Pick a good mess of fresh okra

Wash and rinse

Cut into ¼” slices

Roll in cornmeal, salt, and pepper

Fry in bacon grease until slightly crispy

Pinto Beans and Salt Pork

Dried pinto beans

Large onion, thick sliced or chopped

A two-inch piece of salt pork, cubed

1 Tbls. chili powder

2 cloves garlic, mashed

Salt and ground pepper to taste

Go through beans and pick out rocks and sticks. Rinse and drain. Dump beans in a heavy pan and add water to cover plus 5-6 more inches. Add cubed salt pork, onion, chili powder, garlic, salt, and pepper. Bring water to a boil. Cover pan, but not tight. Stir and add more seasonings as beans cook.

Hot Bean Dumplings

Left-over cooked pinto beans made juicier by adding more water

Red or green peppers to make beans hot, optional

Biscuit dough rolled out thin and cut into one-half-inch by three-inch strips (dumplings)

Bring beans and juice to a rolling boil. Drop biscuit dumplings into pot and heat through. It doesn’t take long. Serve immediately.

Johnny Cakes

2 cups cornmeal

¼ cup flour

½ tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. salt

 1 Tbls. sugar or honey

1-1/2 to 2 cups boiling water

2 Tbls. bacon drippings

Measure and sift dry ingredients in a bowl. Heat water to boiling. Pour water and bacon drippings over dry ingredients. Drop by tablespoons into deep fat and fry. If you prefer to bake the Johnny cakes, shape in your greased palm and place on a greased baking sheet. Bake 30 min. at 450°.

For many more down-home survival food recipes, see the Appendix in Blackberry Road, 

Blackberry Road is a panorama of dirt-poor but honest Oklahoma life as told through the eyes of a sharecropper's teenage daughter. The murder of a beloved teacher stretches into mysterious sounds coming from the woods to beyond the hidden caves of Coody's Bluff. Before it's over, truth brushes shoulders with some of 1934's most notorious criminals. 

Blackberry Road is available on Amazon.

Jodi Lea Stewart was born in Texas to an "Okie" mom and a Texan dad. Her younger years were spent in Texas and Oklahoma; hence, she knows all about biscuits and gravy, blackberry picking, chiggers, and snipe hunting. At the age of eight, she moved to a large cattle ranch in the White Mountains of Arizona. Later, she left her studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson to move to San Francisco, where she learned about peace, love, and exactly what she DIDN'T want to do with her life. Since then, Jodi graduated summa cum laude with a BS in Business Management, raised three children, worked as an electro-mechanical drafter, penned humor columns for a college periodical, wrote regional Western articles, and served as managing editor of a Fortune 500 corporate newsletter. She currently resides in Arizona with her husband, two Standard poodles, two rescue cats, and numerous gigantic, bossy houseplants. Blackberry Road is Jodi's fourth novel.