I proudly wore scratches to near my elbows in July and August from picking wild blackberries. Fall was for wild muscadines and scuppernongs, which made, in addition to great cobbler, wonderful jelly and wine (we didn't make wine; a mostly tee-totaling household when I was a child). We'd carefully pick honeysuckle blooms, bite off a tiny bit of the stem end, and suck out the nectar. I used to pester Mama to make jelly with them; I was certain you could.
Grandmama made tea out of sumac berries, and sassafras root. The first wild green onions of the year always got chopped up to add to wilted lettuce salads. Crabapples and persimmons both made jelly. Pears made preserves. Peaches and apples were peeled, cored, sliced and dried for wintertime fried pies; we dried them on white sheets on the roof of the wellhouse, which faced south, taking them in every evening.
Produce from an acre's worth of garden was canned or frozen. Purple hulled peas, lima beans, butter peas, and the like were shelled, piled into a pillowcase that was tied with a string, and put in the freezer; all winter, you dipped out what you wanted to cook. Corn was frozen, but green beans were always canned. Peppers were hung and dried. Onions and potatoes were kept in a box in the basement, bedded in straw between layers. A couple of the last watermelons of the year picked before frost usually lasted until close to Thanksgiving. Bushels of cucumbers were pickled. Gallons of tomatoes were canned, some as chow-chow, some just tomatoes, some in "soup mix," with odds and ends of vegetables that weren't enough to put up a batch by themselves.
Hogs were killed and butchered on the farm; sausage and souse meat made, tenderloins, chops, roasts and ribs all portioned out and frozen. Hams and bacon were cured and smoked. Later, calves were taken to the slaughterhouse and brought back as big cardboard boxes full of hamburger, roasts and steaks wrapped in white butcher paper and frozen rock-hard. We also ate quail, squirrel, rabbit, and striped bass and catfish -- and bream in the spring and early summer.
We bought staples (flour, sugar, corn meal, coffee), dairy (don't know why we never had milk cows) and things like cereal and "light bread" from the grocery. Mama was not a breadbaker, and Daddy took sandwiches to work for lunch every day.
I don't know that they were the "good old days," but we ate well.
