Caldwell County MO Archives History .....AN OLD CALDWELL COUNTY STATE ROAD 
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File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by:
Karen Walker khw4@yahoo.com September 4, 2008, 1:12 pm

PIONEER FOOD IN THE OZARKS IN MILLER COUNTY
	Narrators:  Mrs. Sarah Workman of Iberia and Others

     One of the "standbyes" of food among the pioneer Ozarkians, as Mrs. 
Workman says, was sorgham.  This was her experience and that of her parents 
down there.  Sorghum day was one of the big work days of the year.  All day 
long, a big line of kettles (or "kittles" as they say) were boiled and skimmed 
at intervals to keep the sorghum clear.  The scum was deposited in a hole in 
the side of the yard, called the "gosh hole," the origin being unknown to 
her.  At night, when a person went out in the dark, the warning was, "Look out 
for the gosh hole."  There was little sugar in the average pioneer Miller 
county home, and sorghum made the main sweetening in the 60s and 70s.
     Sassafras, being free for the gathering in the woods, was used for drink 
instead of store tea.  Besides, it was good for the blood as a spring tonic.  
Coffee, if used at all, was green, and was roasted at home in the stove oven.  
It like sugar, came from town, and town those days in Miller county often 
meant Jefferson City or in the earliest days of 70s, might be St. Louis.  That 
was a long trip and took too much time and money.
     There was milk to drink in the summer, but in the winter, the family cows 
were turned into the woods to feed themselves.
     Bread on weekdays was corn bread, corn cakes and fried mush.  Mush and 
milk made fine suppers.  There was little wheat bread, hence wheat bread was 
saved for company or made into biscuits for Sunday.
     There was little fruit yet in the pioneer farms.  Of course, the hills 
were full of wild blackberries and gooseberries which some women dried for 
winter.  Apples and peaches also were dried by exposing them on the sloping 
tops of porches, tables or ovens in the house.  Corn was cut off the cob and 
dried under cloth, beans and black eyed peas were dried on the vines and kept 
for the winter.  Peppers were hung in clusters from the rafters of the 
kitchen.  Tomatoes (love-apples, they were called then) were grown as 
decorative plants, but the fruit was not eaten, they would poison (pizen, as 
some said) the ones eating them.  Oranges and bananas, as well as lemons were 
not known by sight some of these early people.  Even within the last 35 years, 
so people in Iberia told me, there were times when such fruit was not on sale 
in these mountain towns of Miller Co., and one had to go to a town on the 
railroad and buy them off the train.
     Meat was the cheapest and commonest food they had.  Game was everywhere, 
and no game laws, all you needed was a gun and a steady eye.  Wild turkey, 
venison, squirrel, prairie chicken maybe, and rabbit was just too common to 
eat, so they used it for its hide.
     Stoves were rare even till the 80s.  They used hearth cooking.  They 
baked potatoes there, fried their meat, make their pan cakes, corn bread, and 
even baked wheat bread there by the use of a three legged skillet.  They put 
coals under it and then covered it with a lid on which more coal rested.
     Keeping fire was quite a task in summer, they covered it with ashes 
between meals.  You see they had no matches.  If fires went out, they had to 
go a mile or so to the next neighbor and bring some home in a hurry.  Some men 
knew how to strike a spark from flint and catch it in light leaves and thus 
get a fire.
     Interview  1930.


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