July 2010 Newsletter

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

Forthcoming Rutledge Anthology

The photo seen here is of the book’s dust jacket, and I hope to get a sampling of the contents up on my web site in the next month or so. Meanwhile, I can tell you that the theme of the book revolves around the holiday season and the Hampton Hunt. For all the thirty-three years he was an “exile” teaching at Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania, Rutledge lived for the three weeks or month around Christmas when he and his family could return to South Carolina. In this book you will read moving tributes to the season, to his parents, his black “Huntermen,” his sons, and deeply rooted sporting traditions. There are sections devoted to deer hunting, nature, small game, and more.

The book also includes a concluding chapter focusing on festive foods of the holiday season at Hampton. While Rutledge, to my knowledge, only published two recipes over the course of his long career, he wrote about food with great regularity. As most of you know, my wife and I have a keen interest in culinary matters and have written or edited a number of cookbooks. With that background we have researched old-time Lowcountry recipes and developed a number of our own which give readers of this book a festive sampling of holiday fare as it was enjoyed at Hampton. I’m delighted with the way the book turned out and I think you will be as well.

In The Good Old Summertime

Mine was a blessed and blissful youth, although in the heedless way of the young I didn’t realize it at the time. We didn’t have a lot of money or material possessions, but neither did anyone else, so it never occurred to me that my family might have been considered lower middle class or poor in other areas of the country. Material things, at least beyond the single fly rod, single gun, two pocket knives and a fixed blade knife, and assorted sporting paraphernalia I proudly called “mine,” simply didn’t enter the equation of my boyhood outlook.

Nowhere was that more obvious, as I look back with the longing which is the privilege of growing a bit long in the tooth and sparse in the hackle adorning the head, that during the summertime. We simply used our imaginations and the huge playground which was the Great Smokies for entertainment. With that by way of a prelude, what follows is a lengthy list of aspects of the summer experience which I treasured (and in many cases still do). They are in no particular order of importance, just random recollections of the early portion of what my Dad has sometimes said, in referring to the path I have traveled, has been “a marvelously misspent life.”

• The sheer joy of going barefooted, the earlier in the season the better, and you realized you had achieved a special elite status when you could stamp out a live cigarette butt some adult had carelessly thrown down on the sidewalk.

• Playing war. That would be deemed the height of political incorrectness today, yet as a boy I built forts, spent hours sneaking around as if I was a sniper, used “maypops” (the fruit of the passion flower, also called wild apricots) and pine cones as hand grenades, practiced marksmanship with m rust Red Ryder BB any time I could buy a packet of copper shot, lined up plastic and lead soldiers in all sorts of battle formations, and in general exhibited a decidedly martial air.

• Water sports included skinny dipping, swinging from a rope hung from a leaning tree to cannonball into the river, seeing who could hold their breath the longest, taking sadistic delight I smacking two rocks together underwater when a buddy was submerged, floating down fast-moving streams in inner tubes, skipping rocks, and much more.

• Then there was fishing—for trout, for panfish, and for catfish. The latter involved not only rod and reel (or for me, a sturdy bunch of cane poles equipped with black nylon line) but throw lines, trot lines, jug lines, and limb lines. Occasionally there was even a bit of money to be made from a fine mess of channel cats.

• Most of my angling hours, however, went to trout fishing, and given my paucity of funds I was a master at some aspects of the sport you never see mentioned. I “hunted” for flies with a will. Any sighting of a tell-tale piece of tippet dangling from a limb, no matter how deep the pool below, garnered my full attention. I had no second thoughts about going after the prize, and on a couple of occasions I even brave adjacent hornet nests to get a wayward fly. After all, they cost a quarter, and that was significant money to a boy growing up in the 1950s. Another area where I spent a lot of time was in tying my own leaders. Ready-made, store-bought leaders cost a quarter. Yet you could buy a spool of monofilament for the same amount, and with seven or eight spools a boy had the makings of perhaps 30-35 leaders. The economics of the situation were readily obvious to me, and all that was required was lots of time, lots of blood knots, and a basic understanding of how long to make each section of the leader. I still tie my own today.

• Making things with nothing more than a pocket knife for a tool—popguns from elder shoots, flutter mills, sling shots whimmydiddles, corn stalk rock throwers, and more.

• Absorbing wisdom, listening to colorful language, and just enjoying being around old men. I love to watch the play checkers and swamp knifes, and a boy who was willing to listen (as I was) could here a world of wonderful tales from the local characters who hung out beneath the shade trees on the town square. The spot had two local names, with the more proper or acceptable one being “Loafer’s Glory.” The other one, while a bit earthy, was apt and wonderfully expressive. It was known as “Dead Pecker Corner” and the old-timers were referred to as members of the “Dead Pecker Society.”

• Listening to “Bible thumpers” preach to anyone who would listen. Interestingly, they spread the word on Saturday afternoons, perhaps because that was when there were the most people in town. A good thumper was enthralling to watch and hear. He could evoke visions of Hell which were indeed hellish, all the while using repetitive phrases such as “Let me tell you brother” and “Hah,” vigorously beating the Bible he held for punctuation.

• Waiting for the annual arrival of the “Goat Man.” He was an eccentric individual who traveled all over the Southeast with a ramshackle wagon, piled high with junk and pulled by 15 or 20 goats. He smelled terrible, as did the goats, but for a boy he drew attention like a magnet. Incidentally, there as been a book and a song written about this individual, whose real name was Chaz MacCartney.

• Sitting in the back row at tent revivals, not for religious edification but for entertainment. It was a toss-up between some of the local religions which were out of the mainstream and the annual revival of the small black community where I grew up as to which provided wider eyes. On balance I think I’d have to give it to the backs, partly because I knew many of the faithful such as Aunt Mag and her daughter, Emma, as well as the flamboyantly unfaithful such as Big George.

• Playing rolly-bat with four or five friends for hours on end, with occasional breaks to play catch or work on the semblance of a curve ball or a knuckler. Baseball also involved collecting the cards which came with a stick of gum, although my brother got into that in much bigger way than I did.

• Caddying, hunting golf balls, and in my teen years, driving a tractor pulling gang mowers on the local 9-hole course.

• Collecting all sorts of fish bait—night crawlers, seining for minnows, catching spring lizards (the name we gave salamanders), robbing wasp and hornet nests, catching grasshoppers in the cool dew of dawn, creating hides for crickets with stacks of weed with a few potato peels beneath them, and of course, digging red worms. Selling bait to a local shop (which happily is still in business today) was one of my earliest ways of making money.

• Another money producer was pickin’—wild strawberries, raspberries, dewberries, and especially blackberries. The latter brought two bits a gallon. That seems like slave labor by today’s standards, but I welcomed every quarter. There were lots of them and even today I enjoy picking berries.

• Reading the Westerns of Zane Grey and mysteries by the likes of Sax Rohmer (creator of the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu), John Dickson Carr, Agatha Christie, and John Buchan. Mixed in with such fare was every outdoor book the local library owned along with the monthly issues of Field & Steam and Outdoor Life.

• Listening to radio programs such as Gunsmoke and Amos and Andy. My radio entertainment also included big doses of country music on WSM and WCKY. I can still hear the featured disk jockey or host on the latter station introducing himself and his program with: “This is your old friend Wayne Rainey coming to you over 50,000 watts of pure power out of Cincinnati, Ohio.” Of course WSM offered the Grand Ole Opry, and I could get the Louisiana Hayride on a station out of New Orleans (I think it was WWL, but as Grandpa Joe used to say, “I disremember”).

• Reading and trading comic books, spending the night at the home of a friend once or twice a week, and doing a lot of camping out. The camping trips ranged from backyard forays to real outings deep in the Smokies.

• Riding pine saplings. For those who have never experience this pleasant activity, it involved scrambling up a slender pine until one was high enough to make it bend and let your “ride” to the ground.

• Swinging on wild grape vines.

• Enjoying the incomparable deliciousness of an icy, red-ripe watermelon and doubling the pleasure by competing in spirited seed-spitting contests.

• Having fried chicken every Sunday. Some country singer, Bobby Bare I believe, had a song about “Chicken Every Sunday Lord, Chicken Every Sunday.” We had it, fried in Mom’s special way (the key was that she fried it to a crisp, golden brown and then put it in the oven on low heat to remove some of the grease and make it tender beyond belief), throughout the summer. In colder months it might be baked instead of fried, but when you had chicken on the table in my boyhood you were living large.

• Enjoying the incredible bounty of Dad’s garden and that of Grandpa Joe. From about the first of July right through Labor Day one or the other had corn-on-the-cob available, and then there were the other delights. Tomatoes and tommytoes, ground cherries, creasy beans and other types of green beans, crowder peas, okra, cabbage, hot peppers (Grandpa Joe loved hot pepper tea), squash cooked in every way imaginable (fried, stewed, squash fritters, stuffed squash, squash bread, and more, with zucchini being used in similar fashion), June apples, ground cherries, lima beans, new potatoes, watermelon rind pickles, mushmelons, cucumbers (Dad wouldn’t eat cukes, saying he wasn’t going to put anything in his mouth a pig wouldn’t eat, and a pig won’t touch a cucumber), and of course buttermilk and cornbread. Dinner (which for the uninitiated is the mid-day meal in the southern highlands) was the big meal, and often supper would be nothing but a chunk of cold cornbread, some leftover fried streaked meat (also sometimes called side meat or fatback), and milk. Streaked meat was a cooing staple, and it was used in one way or another in most vegetable dishes. Desserts were things like cobblers, stack cakes, or fried pies (hot in the morning, cold at other meals). There was always an assortment of pickles. If the fishing had been good we might have fried trout. Otherwise, Mom could make half a pound of hamburger stretch a long, long way when blended in with milk gravy. I still love hamburger gravy over a piece of cornbread.

• Playing Indian. This was a variation on the “war games” mentioned above but involved a whole different set of weapons, attire, and the like. Making bows from hickory saplings was a time-consuming but rewarding undertaking, and the same held true for arrows (switch canes were used as were dogwood sprouts and other woods). We would adorn ourselves with war paint using things such as pokeberry juice to stain faces and bare arms, and of course no brave on the warpath wanted to be troubled with white man’s footwear so we went barefooted (except for one friend who was blessed to have a pair of moccasins).

That’s but a sampling of activities from my boyhood. Hopefully it will suffice to show those years were glorious ones, and they offer a simple message of just how joyful simple days and simple ways can be. I actually feel sorry for today’s kids, because they are prisoners, albeit unaware, of computers, DVDs, TVs, flip phones, iPods, and all sorts of other technological advances I know nothing about. That’s because I’m firmly and happily rooted in a world we have to a large degree lost. I can only hope that those of you who are somewhere near my age sampled and savored some of the things I knew as a boy, while for younger readers my message is a straightforward one. You’ve known some deprivation, but it isn’t too late to rectify the situation for yourself and your kids.

SUMMERTIME FIXIN’S

As these words are being written it’s blackberry pickin’ time in the N.C. high country, where I am at the moment, so it seems logical to begin with a celebration of that wonderful and wonderfully abundant berry.

BLACKBERRY JAM CAKE

1 cup butter, softened
2 cups sugar
3 eggs
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup buttermilk
1 cup blackberry jam
3 ½ cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon cocoa
1 teaspoon allspice
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon cloves

Cream butter and sugar together until smooth. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Dissolve baking soda in buttermilk. Add liquid with jam to creamed mixture. Sift flour, cocoa, allspice, cinnamon and cloves together. Add to creamed mixture and blend well. Spread batter in two greased and floured 9-inch round baking pans. Bake at 375 degrees until wooden pick inserted near cent comes out clean.

GREEN TOMATO MINCEMEAT

Tomatoes are a wonderfully versatile food, and my wife can eat them like no one I’ve ever seen. I like to tease her about facing the fate of chickens eating tomatoes (they love them but will starve themselves to death on a steady diet of tomatoes when turned out to free range in a late summer garden), but she assures me that dropping a few pounds won’t bother her at all as she eats tomatoes—never mind the fact that she’s fit and pretty lean. Anyway, tomatoes are a delight, and I especially enjoy growing and eating the heirloom varieties, although they are not as resistant to blight and related problems as some of the modern varieties.

If you have a surplus, here’s a recipe well worth trying (or use it with the green tomatoes remaining on the vines when frost is predicted in the fall).

4 large green tomatoes, chopped
4 large apples, peeled, cored, and chopped
3 cups yellow raisins
3 cups firmly-packed light brown sugar
1 cup cider vinegar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1 cup chopped English walnuts

Combine tomatoes, apples, raisins, brown sugar, butter, vinegar, cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg in large heavy saucepan. Simmer for two hours or until thickened. Remove from heat and stir in walnuts. Cool and store in refrigerator.

COUNTRY CORNBREAD

Cornbread was a staple of my boyhood diet, and to this day it is my favorite type of bread. Whether eaten with chili, a bowl of beans, slathered with butter as an accompaniment to a plate of fresh vegetables, with a slice of fried streaked meat tucked into a wedge, or crumbled up in either sweet or buttermilk, it’s a pleasure.

¼ cup plus 1 tablespoon bacon greased, divided
¾ cup plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 cup stone-ground cornmeal
¼ cup sugar
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon baking power
¾ teaspoon salt
1 egg, beaten
1 cup milk (you can substitute buttermilk if desired)

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Grease cast iron skilled with 1 tablespoon bacon grease and place in oven until well heated. Combine flour, cornmeal, sugar, baking powder, salt, egg, milk and remain ¼ cup bacon grease. Let stand for about 5 minutes while pan heats. Pour batter into hot pan. Bake for 25-30 minutes or until bread is golden brown and knife tip inserted in the center comes away clean. Turn oven off. Leave door ajar just a tad and let stand for 10-15 minutes.

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