The other night as I was preparing my evening meal, I was reminded of how cooking methods have changed in the past 80 some years. The state of the art refrigerator/freezer in my kitchen holds my frozen entrée which I pop into my state of the art microwave and presto! Along with a store bought salad, I have a meal - usually finished off with ice cream, also from my freezer. Go back to the 1930’s and a different scenario presents itself.

My parents had a garden which produced a portion of our food, mostly vegetables. What we did not consume in the summer, we preserved either by canning in glass jars or drying, which was done in the oven and weather permitting outside in the sun. The late fall potato crop was stored in our cellar and lasted for a greater part of the winter months. Corn, another big crop, was dried on the cob and mostly done in the oven. My job as a child was to take the corn kernels off the cob. When that was done, the corn was taken to a local mill where it was ground up into corn meal.

Corn meal was used to make corn meal mush which we often had as our evening meal. Mush is like cream of wheat, a cereal that is eaten with milk and sugar. You have to like dried corn to like mush - and I do. The leftovers were chilled and served the next morning for breakfast. To prepare fried mush, it had to be sliced thinly, and then fried in a cast iron skillet until lightly browned. It was served with molasses or Turkey syrup. Yummy! If you are a connoisseur of dried corn dishes, you will like it.

My very favorite meal was and still is chicken pot pie. Some people in the South know it as chicken and dumplings. To prepare it, we needed chicken, so my dad would go to the chicken house (which was a part of our small barn), and select a hen that he hoped was a non layer (of eggs that is). That bird became the basis for our meal.

The pasta dough or noodles, was made from scratch with a twist in the ingredients. Also going into the pot along with the noodles and chicken were potatoes, onions and parsley. YUM!!

Most of the cooking was done on a coal fired kitchen range. The range also served as a source of heat in the winter months. In the summer months we switched to a kerosene fueled stove for our cooking needs. The stove had three cooking burners and two burners for the oven. It served our needs very nicely and certainly was much more comfortable in the summer months then a hot coal stove.

So began my journey from the more simple, do-everything-yourself life to one of prepackaged, prepared-buy-it-at-the-grocery-store-or-go-out-to-eat life. But the journey has been so gradual and forward looking that the changes and the passage of time seem like a blink of the eye.