CORN BREAD

Betty said that even during the worst of the Depression her family did not go hungry.  As we learned in a previous post, the Jondles were very self-sufficient, raising most of their food and burning corncobs or logs from trees that Ed harvested for fuel.  They sold eggs to raise money for groceries that they could not produce themselves. They even brewed their own beer and fermented their own wine.

But this meant they had a limited choice of food.  Betty told me that the meals were the same almost every day:  fried eggs and potatoes. Her mother also made cornbread, probably from corn meal that was made from corn that they had raised.  Betty said that the monotony of the same food every day got to her.  There was a point were she could hardly stand to eat eggs and fried potatoes. She eventually came to tolerate them. But you could never serve her cornbread, a food she ate so often that she detested.  She said that one time she came home from school to find a cake with chocolate frosting.  She cut herself a big slice looking forward to a rare treat.  When she took the first bite she spit it out.  Her mother tried to trick her by frosting cornbread.

Betty:  The only groceries that they bought was flour, sugar and coffee.  Once in awhile there’d be a can of beans because they were cheap, yeah, and dad had to have his syrup.  The corn syrup came in a tall can but he liked to put the corn syrup on his bread when he ate breakfast.  He didn’t put sugar in his coffee but he wanted the syrup on his bread.  Well, that was my dad.

We never went hungry.  When spring work started, he tried to save the meat for the field work, she would open a jar of the pork and some of the pork was put into those stone jars they had and covered with the lard, that way it kept for quite awhile.  And supper was usually fried potatoes and eggs.  For a long time I could not stand fried potatoes, I could not stand eggs.  Now I will eat eggs, I can stand them, once in awhile I eat them.