Food Independence on a 1930s Farm

A young man and his family relished the seasonal bounty of their garden and orchard, especially the green chili chow-chow they made each fall.

By Harold Oliver, as told to Peter Kohler

We braided onions and hung them to dry in the cellar.
ROBERT SHETTERLY

This account was told to me by my former neighbor, Harold Oliver, who has since passed away. He was a young boy during the Depression, and his farming family had food self-sufficiency thanks to their livestock, orchard and extensive garden. — Peter Kohler

I was born in 1929 and raised on a little farm in western Boone County, Mo. I was 16 years old before I ate my first slice of store-bought bread. My mother baked biscuits from scratch every morning in a wood cookstove, before the family got up. On Sundays, she made a second batch for dinner.

There were six of us kids in the family, plus Mom and Dad, and a stray uncle who wandered in and out of the household. We all spent much of our chore time in the garden. We grew sweet corn, cucumbers, potatoes, green beans, onions, peppers, melons and tomatoes. We had a few apple trees and peach trees in a fenced orchard with a wooden gate. Raspberry bushes grew up and “ruined” a corner of the yard. For a couple of weeks every summer, the red-winged blackbirds dive-bombed us kids while we tried to pick those raspberries.

We kept a milk cow, and some hogs in a pen. There were chickens that would raid the garden plot and wreck some tomatoes, but they also kept the hornworms at bay and the ticks out of the yard.

Fried eggs and frog legs was a special breakfast.
ILLUSTRATION: ROBERT SHETTERLY

‘Eggs and Legs!’

Throughout the growing season, we ate whatever was ripe in the garden. In summer, when we dug potatoes and the green beans were coming on strong, we would always have a huge pot of new potatoes and green beans on the stove with a fat hambone and a ladle in it. When the sweet corn was ripe, that’s what we’d eat for supper — six or eight ears of corn on the cob, dripping with fresh butter. There were weeks in summer when we would bust open a watermelon every day. When we boys caught frogs at night, the next morning you’d hear Mom yelling from downstairs, “Eggs and legs!” Also on the breakfast table would be a big platter covered with freshly sliced tomatoes.

We made cucumbers into bread-and-butter pickles. We stored potatoes in piles of oak leaves in the corner of the root cellar. We braided the green tops of onions into plaits and hung them to dry for a couple of weeks before we put them in the cellar. Every fall, we made apple butter in an iron kettle over a slow, smoky fire. We took turns stirring it all day with a wide wooden paddle that had been whittled from barn siding. We also canned peach preserves.

Dad bought a 50-pound bag of red beans for the winter.
ROBERT SHETTERLY

My father never staked his tomatoes. He let them vine out over the pasture grass. We kids picked tomatoes every day and canned them once a week. We picked them when not quite ripe, before the chickens got them, and then we’d lay them out on boards in the summer kitchen to let them finish ripening.

Bringing in the Harvest

In fall, before the first killing frost, everyone spent a day in the field picking every last green tomato, for “chow-chow.” Green chili chow-chow was the most wonderful part of fall — preparing the stuff that made other food taste better all winter. We ground the green tomatoes into rough chunks and hung the mash in white cotton sheets in the yard, like hammocks, to let the water drain. We dug up all the onions that were still in the ground. We picked the last of the peppers, hot and sweet. The exact chow-chow recipe changed from year to year, but it was always sweet with sugar, hot with peppers and horseradish, and sour with apple cider vinegar. The most important ingredient, however, was the green tomatoes, and they tasted lemony and wild — even a little dusty like the soil that grew them. We canned green chili chow-chow until we couldn’t find another jar to fill.

When the shelves of the root cellar had been filled with canned corn, beans, pickles and chow-chow, Dad would buy 50 pounds of red beans and 50 pounds of white beans. It was Mom’s custom to have a pot of beans on the stove all winter long. Anyone who showed up at our back door was always offered a bowl of beans.

Green chili chow-chow was our family’s favorite relish.
ROBERT SHETTERLY

 

When it snowed, Dad would slaughter three hogs. He cured six hams and six “picnics” — country ham with a salt cure. All the rest of the pork went to sausage. We fired the smokehouse for two weeks, and that’s the way we’d start the winter.
I remember that cold kitchen after morning chores: a big bowl of beans, fried ham steak, a couple of biscuits, and that green chili chow-chow over it all.

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