Jim Casada Outdoors



December 2007 Newsletter

Jim Casada                                                                                                    Web site: www.jimcasadaoutdoors.com
1250 Yorkdale Drive                                                                                           E-mail: jc@jimcasadaoutdoors.com
Rock Hill, SC 29730-7638
803-329-4354


Things I Remember . . . From Many A December

The Christmas season brings warm feelings, closeness to family and friends, good cheer, and most of all, at least for me, a flood of fond memories. Accordingly, rather than launch into one of my typical essays of loosely connected thoughts on some specific topic, I thought it fitting to share some of the many memories the season has given me. Most, although by no means all, revolve around outdoor themes, and we will conclude with a few recipes which evoke some of my strongest recollections—the wonderful fare provided by Mom, Grandma Minnie, and a whole host of aunts.

  • We always cut our own tree, and it wasn’t one of those perfectly shaped, tree farm products. Instead, we found a naturally growing Virginia pine, one Dad and I had been scouting for since the opening day of rabbit season, and on a Sunday afternoon the entire family would make an outing to collect the pine. It cost nothing, brought an abundance of excitement and good cheer, and provided the sort of simple, meaningful pleasure you won’t find in a big box store or at a corner lot where trees are being sold.

  • Much of our decorative material came from nature as well, and on the same cost-free basis as the tree. We gathered berry-laden limbs of holly from “she” holly trees (like the persimmon, the holly tree has male and female forms); cut hemlock limbs for wreathes and the like; took limbs from honey locust trees and adorned every thorn with gum drops, collected nuts, shells, pine cones, and other items which were worked into wreathes and centerpieces; and always had some mistletoe. I particularly enjoyed the process involved in obtaining the mistletoe, since it was done by plinking with a .22 rifle. Incidentally, as a quirky aside, it has always seemed strange to me that a parasite (which mistletoe is) is associated with kissing.

  • The carefree days off from school—we always got a full two weeks of vacation at Christmas—were special throughout my boyhood. Every day, except Sundays, would be devoted to hunting. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays found rabbits the main focal point of the quest, while Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays (set aside to give the beagles a break) would involved squirrel hunting or an old-fashioned mixed bag outing. Since I’ve always been something on a misanthrope (that’s one of the $10 words which means “loner”), these mixed bag days were ones I cherished. I’d hunt from dawn to dusk, fortified at noon by three sandwiches and some type of sweet, and snacking in the afternoon on Red or Golden Delicious apples from our little orchard on the hillside below the house. On one of my most memorable days of this sort, and you need to realize that all my mixed bag hunting was done within walking distance of home, I killed two squirrels, a rabbit, a bobwhite, and a woodcock. I also had a “go” at ground swatting a grouse, but somehow, in a development which perplexes me to this day, I missed.

  • One Christmas Eve I’ll always treasure involved a morning bird hunt with my father-in-law. Ann and I had only been married a year and a half, and I think it fair to say that I was held in something less than esteem by my in-laws. That changed, at least in the eyes of my father-in-law, with just a few hours of hunting. This was the late 1960s, the final years of the golden age of bobwhites, and we hunted with a borrowed pointer on the farm of a good friend of my father-in-law. The pointer wasn’t anything special to look at, and he wasn’t particularly stylish on point. But he epitomized the description “meat dog,” and there was meat aplenty to be found. The dog located one covey after another, and my father-in-law produced flying feathers aplenty.

    I was severely handicapped thanks to being equipped with the only shotgun I owned at the time, a single-shot 20 gauge choked tighter than a miser’s purse, so most of the birds we took fell to his scarred old semi-auto which had not so much as a hint ob bluing left. He would give me the first shot then proceed to kill two or even three birds from the covey with impressive regularity. After a few hours of this we were far closer than we had been before, and a feast of quail sealed the deal right up until his death only a few years afterwards. It was the only time we ever hunted together, but it remains my most memorable bird hunt.

  • As those of you who have been receiving these scribblings for some time no doubt realize, my paternal grandfather was, to use the mountain term, “quair.” That had nothing to do with sexual orientation but rather is the quaint high country way of describing someone whose approach to life is a bit eccentric, or to revert to Smoky mountain English, someone who is a bit sigogglin’ or catawampus. Grandpa Joe dearly loved Christmas, and if you could get him off by himself in a storytelling mode, he would reminisce about Old Christmas, which was celebrated in early January instead of on December 25, recall Yule logs, smack his lips in savory memories of syllabub, and generally do verbally what I am presently doing in print; namely, call back yesteryear.

    Grandpa never had much “cash money,” but what little he did have was willingly and delightfully spent to get some small gift for each of his many grandchildren. It might be nothing more than a pair of socks, but the spirit behind it would have trumped the riches of Donald Trump. In addition, he always had the capacious pockets of his jacket filled with stick candy—peppermint, horehound (which I didn’t like), wintergreen, and other flavors—and he made a point of buying several pounds of the big red California grapes we saw only at that season.

    No adult, with the possible exception of Mom, took greater delight in opening gifts. He would smile his quiet smile, one which spread laughter lines across his face in much the same way lines of blue will delineate the drainage of a mountain stream on a topo map, and dutifully open and put aside various presents of practical clothing. There would likely be a suit of long johns, maybe some Sunday-go-to-meeting wear, a pair of overalls, and the like. But the highlight of every Christmas, for him, came when he got to a big, rectangular box holding is favorite chewing tobacco, Apple Twist. A good chew was his one vice (he despised alcoholic spirits and wouldn’t even touch a “dope,” which is what he called soft drinks).

  • My favorite Christmas story, and it is one I did not experience personally, traced back to my father’s boyhood. As I’ve already hinted, Grandpa Joe and Grandma Minnie were mighty poor, at least in terms of worldly goods, throughout their lives. That was doubly the case when Dad was a small boy and they lived on a hardscrabble farm on Juneywhank Branch, back of beyond in what is now the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Dad wanted a pocket knife in the worst sort of way, but the simple truth of the matter was that his parents couldn’t afford it. They did the best they could and in his stocking was a piece of hard candy in the shape of a folding knife.

    It was a bitter disappointment to Dad, and that’s no doubt why he always saw to it that my brother and me, and later his grandsons, got knives for Christmas. He cherished what many would vote for as the ultimate tool, and even today, in the fullness of his years at the age of 98, you won’t catch him without a razor-sharp pocket knife in his pants.

  • Finally, there are the culinary memories, and those take me straight back to thoughts of Mom and Grandma Minnie. They were wizards in the kitchen, and at Christmas you could count on delicacies which we didn’t savor at any other time of the year. As those who know me personally can readily vouch, my profile isn’t exactly that of a fellow who could hide behind a three-quarter-inch water pipe. I’ve always had a keen sweet tooth, and my, oh my, was it satisfied at Christmas.

    Mom’s specialty in the dessert line was an applesauce cake. She baked them before Thanksgiving, blending applesauce into the batter along with raisins, black walnut kernels, and sometimes (though not always) candied cherries. This would age and mellow, kept moist with periodic infusions of wine or apple cider, until it was pure perfection by late December. She also baked lots of oatmeal cookies, liberally lacing them with raisins and black walnuts. They were ready at hand any time you felt peckish and formed standard fare in a hidey hole in by Duxbak jacket whenever I set out hunting.

    Grandma Minnie likewise made good use of apples in her baking. Her piece de resistance, at least to my way of thinking, was an apple stack cake. Six layers of wonderful cake, with each one separated by spiced applesauce which mixed, mingled, and eventually married the cake in a melt-in-you-mouth form of perfection, awaited those who dined at her holiday table. But her use of apples (our most commonly used and plentiful fruit) didn’t stop there. The family had always dried a portion of the harvest and she could make fried apple pies using those reconstituted dried apples which were a joy to behold and a pure pleasure to eat. Hot off the griddle and anointed with a slab of real butter, they were absolutely irresistible.

Of course there was plenty of fine fare leading up to the desserts, and a fair amount of what we ate involved foodstuffs you don’t encounter much anymore. To my way of thinking, we are poorer for not dining on cracklin’ cornbread made with stone-ground meal, ham and hominy; home-cured country ham accompanied by redeye gravy with cathead biscuits; candy roasters (a winter squash); leather britches (dried green beans); peach and pumpkin leather; biscuit bread (biscuit dough cooked in a pan rather than cut into individual biscuits); a regiment of pickles made from things like watermelon rinds, peaches, Jerusalem artichokes, and okra; and backbones and ribs. As this suggests, our meat dishes ran heavily towards pork, something which I now know was a long-standing situation in the mountains. But we would have turkey, or more likely, two or three hens, during the holidays as well.

I remember chocolate-covered cherries; those huge, sticky raisins which came in clusters and were called seeded Muscats; branches of kumquats, which to my knowledge have no culinary use, mixed in with the citrus; barrels of mixed nuts where the Brazil nuts went by a distinctly racist name I’ll forbear to use here; and enough hard candy to provide a world class belly ache. There were far more of the “cooking” apples around then than seems to be the case today—Limbertwigs, Jonathans, Winesaps, Staymans, and others—and the citrus was so special that the women folk even utilized the peel. Orange peel went into a cranberry-based preparation, lemon rind found its way into lemon chess pies, and sometimes even a bit of grapefruit zest was used.

I now realize that we weren’t exactly well off, and periodically Dad reminds me of the terrible spot I put him in when I “volunteered” him for a five dollar donation for some cause or other connected with school. At that point in time, in our family, five dollars was an appreciable amount of money. After all, the house I grew up in, four bedrooms and perhaps 2500 square feet with a basement, with an acre of land thrown in for good measure, cost my parents all of $2500. However, we had more than some, and since precious few in the mountains had much, I was blissfully unaware of the truth of our family financial situation. All I knew was that we ate well and lived well, and at Christmas we lived wonderfully well. Truth be told, and putting money matters aside, we were rich!

My memories are rich ones as well, and they soothe and sustain me at this season even as I hope my granddaughter will someday have memories of her own to cherish. No doubt she will, but they won’t have the same closeness to the land or anything like the same degree of simplicity. Still, we somehow got along without a television, made do with a wood-burning cook stove for my early years of life, raised a fair amount of what we ate and shot or caught a good bit more of it, and lived a good life. It was never better than at Christmas, and I hope you have some memories of the same sort to call back at this season, and here’s hoping that each and every one of you who are readers have a joyous holiday season. If I can help out with a book or two for someone’s gift list, by all means let me know.

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SMOKY MOUNTAIN STACK CAKE

4 cups plain flour
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon soda
2 teaspoons baking powder
¾ cup lard or shortening
1 cup sugar
1 cup molasses
1 cup milk
3 eggs

Sift flour, salt, soda, and baking powder. Cream the shortening, then add sugar, a bit at a time, blending thoroughly. Add molasses and mix. Add milk and eggs, one at a time, beating until smooth. Pour 1/3-inch deep in greased 9-inch pans (keeping the layers of cake thin is important) and bake until golden brown. When cool, slather apple filling between each layer. The filling can be plain applesauce, but dried apples cooked into a sauce and slightly spiced are better.

FRIED APPLE PIES

No dessert more truly reflects mountain days and high country ways that fried apple pies. Cooked in an iron skillet, they were made from stewed dried apples, although occasionally some other fruit or perhaps jam would be used as filling. The apples would usually be slow stewed with some brown sugar used to sweeten them. The dough was just simple biscuit dough, rolled thin into a circular shape. Stewed apples would be added and the dough folded over to make a half moon shape, then crimped with a fork before being introduced to a hot iron spider. Eaten hot with butter or cold (they were one of my favorite after school snacks), fried pies were an index to pure pleasure.

SQUIRREL AND SWEET TATERS

This was a staple on our family table throughout the fall and winter, holiday season or not. We all loved the meat, I took great delight in providing the squirrels, and Mom could work wonders. She had several ways of preparing bushytails, but my favorite was when she parboiled the squirrels in water to which she had added a bit of soda, removed them and washed off the soda residue, and then baked them. She would dot the baking squirrels with a pat or two of butter shortly before taking them from the oven. With a side dish of baked sweet potatoes, cut open and swimming in the middle with more butter, it was a feast fit for a country king.

A variation on this, commonly done with young, tender squirrels, was to fry them and use the leavings to make milk gravy. Sometimes Mom would tear the meat from an especially tender squirrel, chop it fine, and add it to the gravy. The result, poured across a big sweet potato and with a couple of back legs and a back or two from another squirrel, made a might filling and fulfilling meal.

APPLE QUAIL

Sticking to the varied uses of apples, here’s an unusual and to my taste, wonderful way to prepare the petit prince of game birds. Incidentally, to my wife’s way of thinking, and I find it difficult to argue with her opinion on this, quail is nature’s bounty at its best.

¼ cup flour
½ teaspoon salt or to taste
1/8 teaspoon paprika
6 whole quail
2 tablespoons butter
¼ cup chopped sweet onion
1 teaspoon chopped fresh parsley
¼ teaspoon dried thyme (or ½ teaspoon fresh thyme)
1 cup apple juice

Mix flour, salt and paprika; lightly flour quail pieces. Melt butter in heavy frying pan and brown quail. Push quail to one side of pan. Add onion and sauté until tender. Add parsley, thyme and apple juice. Stir to mix well and spoon juice over quail while bringing all to a boil. Reduce heat, cover and simmer until quail are tender (about an hour). Serve quail atop a bed of rice with sautéed or stewed apples on the side.

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