Foods of Virginia

Watchers
Share
Image:Long Boone Cumberland--thin.jpg
Southwest Virginia Project
Return to Southwest Virginia Project Main Page

From: Southern Literary Messenger Vol 37 1863]

Still, I love to think over the glorious meals I have enjoyed in times past, when I had the stomach of a Muscovy drake, and could eat forever.

The first good eating I remember, was at my Aunt Betsy's. She lived in the County of Cumberland, so far out iof the word that she took to good eating as a recourse against ennui. She had more kinds of bread than any woman I ever heard of; splendid hot, high light bread, the best bread for breakfast of all others if I am a judge, and rolls and biscuits, and waffles and battercakes and muffins and pone and ash cakes and hoe cake, and salt risen bread---and many others; to say nothing about fritters and pancakes and suet dumplings and things of that sort. Then meats, especially at hog killing time---when we revelled in spare ribs, saussages, chine, souce, brains, ---particularly brains---dear life! How I did eat brains! and even chtterlings. But I can't say I loved "chitline. Don't ask me whether I ate the pig tai!s, too. Do you think I would dare call mysell a Virginian if I had not gnawed a many one; tasting it gently with the up of my tongue -while it was burning hot, and sousing it in the snow to hasten it cooling, so that I might the quicker glut my appetite upon the brown, crisp skin! How much more delightful, too, because of the presence of half a dozen little negro playmates, engaged in the same occupation. Tell me Lamb's Chinese nothing about Charïts theory of the origin of roast pig; mankind would never have learned the sublime virtue of cooked pig skin, but for the Virginian practice of eating pig tails.

In my " youthful age," as Rabelais would say, I cared little for vegetables, but fruit was my joy ; and in one of my Aunt Betsy's apple orchards — she had three — there grew a kind of apple which I never saw elsewhere, and which was, par excellence--- the apple of apples. It was rather a small apple, with a green skin, speckled with minute black spots. The meat, if I may so call it, was crisp as celery, and abounding in delicious juice. There was only one tree that bore these apples. I recollect well where it stood — on the left hand as you entered the garden, but not in it, and near the lower corner of the fence, not far from the patch of reeds planted for the benefit of my Cousin Horace, who wa« a great fisherman, and would use only reed poles. And then the Cherries---bless me! the visceral agonies I have had from eating blackheart cheries. But I never could go morellos, could you?