lecture part 3

The food of the upcountry started with the Native Americans.
Their diets consisted of quantities of fish and game and the “three sisters”: beans, squash and corn. When the first European settlers started moving in, the Native Americans shared their abundance with them and also introduced them to foods that helped them make it through until they got their farms built and their gardens planted. One of the earliest recipes I found was for a dish called cooter in the shell that has originated with the Cherokee in this area and was passed along to settlers here. A cooter as many of you know is a turtle and the Native Americans prized it for its rich and nourishing meat and the fact that the shell itself could also serve as a cooking vessel. The Cherokee also prized wild onions or ramps and thought them to not only be nourishing and flavorful, but to also cleanse and thin the blood after a cold winter. Soon the settlers were raising pigs, hunting fresh game and catching trout and catfish in the many streams and rivers. Jack Winthrop, a fellow docent here at the museum shared a family recipe that has been handed down for many generations for rabbit stew. It starts off with: “first catch a rabbit. Then skin it and take it down to the creek to wash it”.
Wild game was a very important part of both the Native American and the settlers diet.
Often young boys were tasked with the hunting of game like rabbits, squirrel and deer while their father’s worked the land for planting of crops or building up the farm and it’s outbuildings, including smokehouses, springhouses for keeping items cool, and cribs for storing corn.

The planting of gardens often began before the cabin was built as a necessary way of providing food for the family. These gardens consisted of the three sisters, but corn became a staple item to both man and livestock. Corn grows fairly quickly, doesn’t require as much land as wheat for yield and is not as susceptible to the diseases that wheat is. Corn also didn’t require as much processing as wheat did to become edible. Actually it required none as it could be picked and eaten almost immediately. Gradually as more settlers came in and trade was becoming easier with the coast, particularly Charleston, more types of seed and food became available.

However, game and pork were the source of almost all meat consumed in the rural upcountry. Game was plentiful and so was pork. Cows were expensive to maintain, required a lot of land for grazing and only produce one calf a year. Pigs on the other hand were not only wild by this time (thanks to the Spanish in the 16th century), but could easily be domesticated, didn’t require much land to keep them on and could be let out to forage in the woods and rounded up once a year to be fattened up on corn and they produced large litters of piglets each year that could be traded or sold.

Due to the natural predators that lived here (wolves, panthers, wildcats, etc.), chickens were not considered worth the expense, so eggs were scarce. Only when the population of predators was depleted through hunting, were chickens brought in to supplement the diets of the population.

But getting back to pigs or hawgs. The pigs of our ancestors were almost a different breed than the pork we now eat today. The early pigs were of course wild because the Spanish had brought them over and many had escaped to breed in the woods. But settlers also brought domesticated pigs with them when they made the upcountry their home.
Up until the 1960’s the pig was an animal that was probably smaller in statue than the ones that we raise today. The animal itself was prone to be fatty and the flavor was much stronger. These pigs were actually called lard pigs. The 1960’s saw the beginnings of more health consciousness among the general population and more and more people were turning to chicken. The pig farmers began to breed their livestock to be leaner with less fat and produce an animal that could grow quickly and produce more meat, but the flavor suffered as did the moisture in the meat. It tasted more like chicken (and was almost as dry as breast meat)! Hence the advertising campaign “Pork the OTHER white meat”. Today wild hogs probably taste more like the animals our ancestors raised than the pork we buy today packaged neatly in plastic wrap at Bi-Lo.

Hog killing time was usually a jubilant time for a farmer and his family. It happened on the first truly cold day of the fall when the meat wouldn’t spoil and those first few days of hog killing meant the family would gorge themselves on meat that had probably become scarce since the last fall. The brains and liver were eaten first because there was no real means of preserving these. The rest of the pig could be butchered and cured, and hung in the smokehouse to keep. This meat sustained the farmer and his family throughout the winter when game can be scarce and the garden has stopped producing. Most farmers in the upcountry and throughout the South were scraping to get by. They were land rich, but cash poor or they were sharecroppers with no land and little money after settling up their crops with the landlord for the season.. That meant having enough pork put up could be the difference between a hungry winter and one that saw them through with bacon, hams, fatback and side meat. Rick Bagwell, Upcountry native and one of our docents here in the museum told me that his grandparents ate everything on the pig but the squeal and they didn’t eat that because they couldn’t catch it. Only the very affluent ate “high off the hog” meaning they ate the hams and shoulders and left the parts to their slaves and later servants and tenant farmers.

Everyone even the children helped at a hog killing. The men would kill the pig and a big pot was put under the carcass that hand been strung up in a tree. The blood was collected by the women and later turned into blood sausage that could be cured along with the hams and bacon. The hog was then skinned and butchered by the men and the women dropped the skin in a kettle that had been set to boil. Once boiled, the children were given the task of scrapping the hair off. The fat was rendered for lard and the skin was then fried and is what we now know and love as, well, fried pork rinds. Cracklins were skinned out of the large kettle and were used for addition to cornbread. As I mentioned, the brains and liver were likely cooked that day and the chitterlings or “chitlins’” were boiled and reboiled and boiled some more to make them palatable. These intestines could also be used for sausage casings, but still are today prized as “good eatin’” on their own
Hog killing time was a very labor intensive process that could take up to several days depending on the number of hogs butchered. But even if it was only one pig, it was still an all day process.

Rice and seafood were scarce in the upcountry due to the amount of time it took to bring these items from the coast. Seafood would naturally spoil as there was no refrigeration process. However, the diet of the upcountry settler soon expanded with the influx of slaves into this country. The Africans brought peas, peanuts, okra, watermelons and sweet potatoes and soon these non-native foods began to be featured in the recipes or “receipts” as they were called then of the inhabitants of the South.

Greens, particularly turnips and collards, were also prized as they were more impervious to the cold than other vegetables and could be planted and harvested much later in the fall and early winter. They provided a valuable source of nutrients in a diet that was often lacking in iron and other vitamins.

Corn, the great sustainer, was first grown by the Native Americans, but soon came to be a staple in the settler’s diet. As I mentioned earlier, it was fairly easy to grow, had a fairly short growing season and could be eaten by human and animal alike. Richard Pearis, established the first grist mill in 1768 along the Reedy River in what is now Greenville to grind corn.
This ground corn was made into meal and many recipes for cornbread, corn pone, hoecakes and corn dodgers followed. Corn kernels could be soaked in lye, the hull removed and the result was something called big hominy. The hominy was also dried and ground into what we all know now as grits or hominy grits. One Southerner told me that grits were something you went to buy at the store, but once cooked they were called hominy grits or just plain hominy.

I have had many people from outside the South tell me that they just cannot get over our fascination with grits and why would we eat such a thing. What I find absolutely hilarious is that these same people that wouldn’t be caught dead eating grits will eat polenta. Polenta is basically Italian grits. It’s the same thing and it’s cooked similarly and it is served with tomato sauce poured over it. You know, Italian gravy. We’ve been eating grits with gravy from almost our first footfall in the new world.