Kitchen

[Tigriss]

On 10/20/2014 Still Raining said:

I wonder if these kind of things are left over from the depression. My mom was a teenager during the depression and she used to give us toast in hot milk in a bowl with sugar. Seems to me she used to say that is what they had for dinner sometimes.

I have seen those pics of just milk and toast. That too is similar to a bread pudding on the cheap during hard times.

[Tigriss]

On 10/21/2014 Zhills said:

Old Timey Butter Roll Dessert

Prep Time: 15 minutes Cook Time: 40 minutes

Ingredients

For the Butter Rolls

• 2 Cups Self Rising Flour
• 1/2 Cup Shortening
• 1/2 Cup Milk
• 1 stick (1/2 Cup) Butter, softened (course you can use margarine, don’t make no special trips to the store!)
• 1/4 Cup Sugar
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon

For the Milk Sauce

• 2 Cups milk
• 2/3 Cups Sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla

Instructions

1. Cut shortening into flour really well with a fork. Stir in milk.

2. On a floured surface, dump out dough and press together with your hands to form a ball.

3. Roll out into a rectangle (about 7×10 in size). Spread softened butter over dough and then sprinkle 1/4 cup sugar and cinnamon over top. Roll it up like a jelly roll and press it together lightly.

4. Cut into nine slices about one inch thick each. Place into a lightly greased 8×8 baking dish.

5. In medium sauce pot, combine all milk sauce ingredients. Heat over medium heat, stirring constantly, until mixture begins to bubble lightly. Pour over rolls in pan.

6. Bake at 350 for 30-40 minutes, or until rolls are lightly browned on top.

7. Allow to sit for a few minutes once it is done for the rolls to soak up more sauce. After you put each roll on a plate, spoon more sauce over it.

This is it. I googled it and saw the pics. It is IT! She did work very hard all day in the fields, was the youngest with a large 12 year gap between her and the next to youngest. She was raised more like a grandchild than a child. She remembers sleeping on the porch for a bedroom. She is younger than my grandmother, 65 this year, while my grandmother is 78 this year. I thought it might be a regional dessert since my grandmother didn't hear of it. They were really poor sharecroppers, but most of us in the deep south were, so when the depression did hit, nothing really changed for us because we were already dirt poor. My grandmother remembers her mother sweeping the yard to keep the grass out, when they got their first gas stove and electricity. She had owned her own home when she finally got a bathroom on the back porch, let alone inside the house in 1968. Things move much slower down here since living is hard and change is often feared. My father's mother is 90 and lived a hard, hard life, so she doesn't talk about it. Her mother died after baby 12, but the first 4 were boys, so she was the one that got the pleasure of quitting school at 9 to take care of the younger ones. She finally got a reprieve when she left to marry at 16, only then did her father remarry to have someone to take care of the kids. They had 7 more kids, so 16 in all. It was not a childhood she wanted to remember.

[Tigriss]

Here is a short cut Butter Roll recipe that really does sound like a great version for today! http://www.southernplate.com/2013/05/shortcut-butter-roll-dessert.html

It uses crescent rolls! Super easy and delicious sounding and looking!

It is almost a fresh bread, bread pudding.

This recipe shows you making the rolls http://www.southernplate.com/2010/04/old-timey-butter-roll-dessert.html I imagine you can get many flavored versions of it. I think I will try the short method this week and see what I think. I love bread and pastries!!! My weakness and so many others too!

[Zhills]

Hope this find brings you and your co-worker much joy and good memories!

[Sabatini2]

tigriss, how wonderful that Zhills found the recipe! An excellent ending to such an interesting recipe from a long time ago.

Thanks for sharing some details from the past. You've really got to hand it to people who lived through such hard times, and managed to make the best with what little they had.

[Tigriss]

Thanks! We talked about those days since I also grew up in a rural farming family and have memories of gathering cotton for quilts not for market, tobacco, acres of family veggie gardens, milking cows, collecting eggs, HOGS...oh the hog smell.... acres of corn, shelling peas, tons of peas and pecans and everything from scratch. We are 31 years apart in age, but times change very slowly in rural Georgia. We still grow cane and make cane syrup every fall, cook with a wood burning stove in the syrup barn and smoke a half hog and make deer sausage for it. We still do things much the same. I can't help but feel guilty for making semi-homemade foods and didn't even know what canned pumpkin was for until I was in my late 20s and naively asked a lady in the checkout line what she used it for. She replied pumpkin pie of course. What do you make yours from? I told her a real pumpkin from the garden. I didn't buy meat in the store until I was 8 hours away in college and had to call dad to find out what cut was what. We always did our own and packaged it with general terms like roast, hamburger, and various steaks, but usually just steak or cubed steak. They had all these different kinds of hamburger meat...wow! Sausage is still a bit of hit or miss because of the different seasonings and fat content. We made our own so we had mild and spicy and less fat than the commercial kind. I still prefer ours but a local butcher makes some very similar. WalMart is not a place where I buy meat if I need to buy it. The butcher knows best!

We are all different generations but have very similar memories of our rural lands!

[Sabatini2]

On 10/21/2014 tigriss said:

Thanks! We talked about those days since I also grew up in a rural farming family and have memories of gathering cotton for quilts not for market, tobacco, acres of family veggie gardens, milking cows, collecting eggs, HOGS...oh the hog smell.... acres of corn, shelling peas, tons of peas and pecans and everything from scratch. We are 31 years apart in age, but times change very slowly in rural Georgia. We still grow cane and make cane syrup every fall, cook with a wood burning stove in the syrup barn and smoke a half hog and make deer sausage for it. We still do things much the same. I can't help but feel guilty for making semi-homemade foods and didn't even know what canned pumpkin was for until I was in my late 20s and naively asked a lady in the checkout line what she used it for. She replied pumpkin pie of course. What do you make yours from? I told her a real pumpkin from the garden. I didn't buy meat in the store until I was 8 hours away in college and had to call dad to find out what cut was what. We always did our own and packaged it with general terms like roast, hamburger, and various steaks, but usually just steak or cubed steak. They had all these different kinds of hamburger meat...wow! Sausage is still a bit of hit or miss because of the different seasonings and fat content. We made our own so we had mild and spicy and less fat than the commercial kind. I still prefer ours but a local butcher makes some very similar. WalMart is not a place where I buy meat if I need to buy it. The butcher knows best!

We are all different generations but have very similar memories of our rural lands!

WOW! Thanks SO much for telling us about your rural life! That's the best thing about these BBs - meeting people from such different backgrounds. Yours is fascinating. I'm sure that you all worked darn hard, and I'm probably romanticizing a bit, but it sounds wonderful to me!

tigriss, what do you do with cane syrup?

[Tigriss]

We bake biscuits so we can have hot biscuits and hot syrup when we get it poured up, but the rest we keep among family and friends as it is a small operation that makes enough for us all for all year. We eat it on biscuits, waffles, and pancakes much like maple syrup is done up north. You can use it in cake and cookie recipes as well instead of molasses for a lighter flavor. During the making you get to a stage of the boiling where what my grandmother calls dog candy forms around the ring just after the impurities boil out. It forms a toffee/caramel like texture. It is very sweet and if you eat too much, you get a through cleaning later that night. You can also drink the cane juice and it too can cause that if you drink too much. Cane juice can be used as a natural sweetener in tea or lemonade or just drunk straight or with liquor. It ranges from light amber to dark amber in color depending upon the variety of cane you grow. We grow a few different kinds that harvest a bit apart from each other, so we do several family gatherings during the early frosts/hard freezes we get. Instead of smoking a hog we do a few turkeys and still eat at the barn. We have done it for Thanksgiving since our weather can be quite warm right through to January. If you listen to the Farmer's Almanac, we are all in for a hard winter that hits early this year. I've heard that before, but we don't usually get it down here. Even with those Polar Vortices came through, we didn't have any ice or anything like that even on the bridges. The land stays so warm that it usually isn't a problem. We have had snow in 2010 and 2011, but it was more like a dusting, just enough to make a small snowman and last a few hours in the morning. It lasts longer in the northern part of the state like when those fronts hit Atlanta and things got all discombobulated. If they had only listened to the weather report like we did. My cousin lives in Birmingham and was stuck in her car for 18 hours before she was clear to drive home. My co-workers and I used it as an excuse to take the day off since we never know the state of the bridges over our rivers and creeks we have so many of. I cross 16 just to get to work, so that was a bit of a risk. Oh, and the gates at work were frozen shut and we had to go through the back, but other than that, we were all OK.

[goodstuff]

My parents grew up in the rural South during the depression. A real treat for them was eating torn chunks of white bread or cornbread put into a glass with cold milk or buttermilk poured over. You ate it with a long-handled teaspoon, and it's especially nice if you pour cold buttermilk over warm cornbread. My parents introduced us to this, and I really like it. Once in a while I buy buttermilk and make cornbread just so I can enjoy this!

My grandmother drank a poor man's concoction called Postum instead of coffee. Postum was made from dark-toasted grains brewed with water like coffee. She sometimes poured sweetened Postum over bread chunks and ate that as a sweet treat. I've seen my parents do the same with sweetened coffee.

My mother's mother had 12 children (my mom was the youngest), and she always saved scraps, string, paper bags -- everything. Nothing went to waste. She kept her children fed and clothed by sewing and using meat and vegetables grown on their farm. I have quilts she made from scraps from dresses and shirts her children wore......clothes sometimes sewn from the fabric in flour sacks!

[Tigriss]

Same thing here on the quilts. I grew up quilting and still do, but great-granny would take scraps and stitch them ever so delicately to newspaper until she had enough to make a block and keep the blocks until she had enough to make a quilt. Most of our quilts were flower sacks, as were our clothes and undies. She used tons of flower sacks! They were even curtains, that turned into clothes, that turned into quilts over the years. My family made their wedding dresses, prom dresses and tuxedos right through until the 90s until ready made clothes were cheaper than making them yourself. I still do alterations on ready-made so that they fit much better, but home goods and quilting are my main sewing projects. I also knit and crochet. We just always seemed to have productive hobbies instead of frivolous things. We had to make the most of what we had. Summers were always exciting making clothes for the new school year, costumes for Halloween, and weekends/holidays were also used for making more clothes as we grew. This all might explain why I feel so ADD with not always being busy due to conveniences of technology speeding things up. I'm left with more time on my hands than I once was. Right now I'm knitting a blanket for my niece for traveling in the car. Once the cure for ADD was work, now we use pills. I prefer work! I always get to enjoy the results.