Economy lessons from Esther and Herb

Here we are in our Sunday-Go-To-Meetin' outfits. We both cleaned up nice for church on Sunday, but most of our time was spent in everyday work clothes.

From early in spring til the first hard freeze, we worked in our garden. It wasn't fun being hot and bug bit laboring in the garden, but eating all our tasty canned goods when the snow blew around the house made all the hard work worthwhile.

Hope you enjoy the recipes shared here.

Potatoes were a staple in our diet. Some days we ate them more than once a day because they were filling, nutritious, and could be fixed so many different ways.

We kept our gardening as simple as possible. We didn't buy expensive fertilizers or pesticides because one, we couldn't afford them and two, not many pesticides were available in earlier years of the 20th century. We enriched our garden soil with cow, horse, or chicken manure obtained free from farmers we knew. Nowadays you can buy sterilized manure from Walmart or garden stores, but back then we hauled it from the farm ourselves.

At the end of the growing season, we stored our potato bounty in the basement on newspapers, with more newspapers between each layer. When we lived in houses that did not have a basement, we stored potatoes the same way in a back bedroom closet. We rarely lost a potato storing them that way and always had potatoes left over at winter's end.

Herb believed that no one should go hungry when they were down on their luck. I supported that belief. We were poor as the proverbial church mice but always managed to have nutritious food even when we had very little money.

Seeing family men without work broke Herb's heart, and seeing men trudging the roads or door to door offering to work for food broke mine. When Herb was home, he invited such men in to share a hot meal and after they had eaten he always came up with some job of work for them to do. When he wasn't home, his instructions to me rarely varied. "Give them a sandwich and some soup if you have it. Then let them straighten out nails, or some other little job that will let them keep their dignity." Herb believed that what broke a man down in jobless times was the loss of dignity that came with all the other losses.

So, I kept a hammer by the front door along with a supply of bent nails. When a man came by wanting to work for food, He got a sandwich made out of thick slices of my home made bread, slathered with butter I made myself, and whatever else I could stuff between two slices of bread. We usually had cheese or eggs and bacon on hand. (Bacon and eggs were cheap back then.) And there's nothing like the smell of bacon sizzling to cheer a man's appetite! After a filling meal, I had the man straighten a few of Herb's bent nails with a hammer.

"Give us this day our daily bread..." had special meaning in those hard times.

From the youngest to the oldest in our family, we were a tomato-eating gang.
Herb and I liked to grow several kinds of tomatoes -- early growing, late growing, big tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, red and yellow tomatoes. Each one had a special job to do when it came to canning or making tomato preserves.

I don't know if folks today eat tomato preserves, but Herb was a tomato preserve eating monster, especially in his younger years. I swear, he would have eaten a paper sack if I spread preserves on it! Even more than tomato preserves, he loved breaded tomatoes so I'm including my recipe here.

We liked to fish and to reach our favorite fishing spot we had to walk through a field of corn. Herb said the farmers in the area had an unwritten "rule" that the first six rows of corn in a field were public domain. Now, Herb was a big jokester so I never knew if that was true or not. But after fishing, on our way home, Herb would pick a few ears of field corn to eat for supper.

I felt uneasy about that and fussed at Herb for stealing. Sometimes Herb did things just to hear me fuss and fume and this was one of those times. He told me much later that the farmer was a family friend and he had permission to pick a few ears of corn. I didn't believe him so he introduced me to the man at church and sure enough, the man had told Herb we could have all the corn we wanted. Both men had a good laugh at my expense.

Herb and I loved to fish. Almost every afternoon in summer we headed to our favorite fishing spot on the Big Blue River with our poles and bait.

Our fishing finery was quite stylish, like our gardening attire.

We liked catfish and carp, both plentiful in the river. Whatever we caught became supper, pan fried fresh from the river. When we caught a few extra carp, I canned it. Personally, I never understood why some people turned their noses up at carp. It's a big meaty fish and delicious canned or fresh cooked.

Carp are suckers for doughballs. To ensure a catch I made doughball bait from Herb's secret recipe. Just in case you'd like to try your hand at catching carp, I'll break Herb's rule and let you in on our secret.

OUR SECRET RECIPE FOR DOUGH BALLS

Stir together 2 eggs, 1 cup flour, 1 cup cornmeal, a splash of vanilla, and generous spoonfull of molasses until it makes a heavy dough. If it isn't thick enough to roll, add a bit more flour and corn meal until you find the right consistency.

You can vary the recipe depending on how many doughballs you want.

Roll into balls about the size of a quarter. Store in a plastic container in the fridge until you want to use them.

I'm so pleased that my grandparents were honored in this way.
Thanks so much!!