Memories of my childhood growing up in Graceville have been racing through my mind lately. The main fuel for heating and cooking in our house was wood. There was a triple, double and single fireplaces in the house each with a separate chimney. Mama Wall and Mother cooked on a wood burning stove. I remember that we got most of the wood from scrap wood pieces from Rex Lumber Co.
We had a building we called the Car House that we kept the wood dry in. Why we had a building called the Car House, I just don’t know. The first car we ever owned as I remember, we didn’t get until 1948. One of my jobs when I got big enough was to chop the wood into lengths that would fit into the stove and make sure that there was enough wood in the wood box in the kitchen. (I played games in my mind as I chopped the wood. I would think of myself as a knight with a sword fighting in wars with other knights as I yielded my axe.)
Mama Wall and Mother did a lot of baking and I remember Mama preparing her biscuit dough. She would knead it until it was the right consistency she wanted and then she would pinch off just the right amount for a single biscuit. My wife rolls her dough out and uses a round cutter to have consistently uniform biscuits. I don’t know how but Mama’s biscuits always looked just same size. I also remember that when she had pinched of the number of biscuits she was going to cook, she rolled each one in her hands into the perfect shape and then placed the equally a part in the baking pan. The last thing she would do is pat shortening (lard, Bacon grease, cooking oil) with the back of her fingers onto each biscuit. Each morning this routine was performed for breakfast.
We had our own cows for milk and butter. Mama used a churn to make her own butter and buttermilk. I remember her retrieving the butter from the churn and putting it into a mold that held about one pound of butter. Her mold had a design on the lid that she pressed down on the butter and made a design of a flower. That homemade butter in a perfectly baked biscuit and sopped in some cane syrup sure was some fine eating. My brother Jimmy loved to mash the butter up into a plate full of syrup and then drag a piece of biscuit through it to eat.
By: Bill Clark
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