Whenever a job that was too big for one family needed to be done such as harvesting or barn raising, the men in the community of McLaughlin, South Dakota would show up to help. The family whose property was being worked was expected to provide the meals and the men usually came to the house at noon for what was called dinner. The wife would cook for days ahead and all morning to put a good meal on the table. She would skimp on food for her own family rather than not have enough good food for the help. Roasted chickens, hams, pork chops, slow cooked beef with several side dishes were common with an assortment of desserts. The quality and variety of these meals was a frequent topic of conversation of the men, and a wife who could cook well was definitely an asset. My Dad absolutely loved to eat (LOVED!) and he remembered those meals as though they were yesterday. He told of a family that had hit a rough patch and only served beans and cornbread. Then he added, “But they were good beans.” The men had noticed how much Dad liked food, and one day they started complaining about the food at the next farm. It wasn’t enough and the wife only made sandwiches, they said. Daddy was getting worried. Food was serious business. Finally the time came for working “the bad food farm” as he had privately begun calling it, and he worried all morning long. As noon approached, a wagon came to the field. It had side curtains which they unrolled and propped up to make shade. The women in the wagon began spreading out food. There were two huge cauldrons of soup…one of delicious pinto beans and the other chicken and homemade noodle soup. There was a big bowl of mustardy potato salad and side dishes of pickles and relish. And there were trays of huge sandwiches on tall crusty bread covered by damp cheesecloth. They were filled with thick slabs of ham and pork and beef with homemade mayonnaise and mustard and horseradish and were absolutely delicious. Afterward, several pies were brought out for dessert, and each man was given a large cookie to put in his pocket for later in the day. The men were making the customary compliments, but it was easy to see that the food had been extraordinary and they had been saved a long rough ride to the farmhouse as well. Dad realized that he had been the butt of a good natured joke, but he called it the bad food farm from that day on. Dad told me that story over a dinner of chicken and homemade noodle soup which had probably reminded him. I then asked him what was the best thing he had ever eaten. After a long minute, he said that during the depression he was riding a freight train and had jumped off just before town to avoid the vicious railroad police they called “the bulls.” He made his way toward a fire which said there were other men there who had done the same thing. They were celebrating the catch of some fish…carp…a bony trash fish they would have discarded out of hand such a short time ago. Dad had passed an abandoned farm house, and so he and another man went back and dug through the kitchen garden for old vegetables. He filled his shirt with the few he could find and some miner’s lettuce which grew wild. When he got back a kettle was boiling and someone had a packet of salt and so they made fish stew. Daddy said, very quietly, that he would never taste a meal as good as that one again. To a good next year, everybody… Rich and Judi
Posted on: Thu, 25 Dec 2014 18:27:35 +0000
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