My Mountain Mother's Gravy

Abstract

My Mountain Mother's Gravy by Ruth Trimble Folks living here below the Mason-Dixon Line have finally come out of the kitchen closet with a staple item ofourdiet, one we've huggedjealouslyto ourbosoms eversince this area formed the frontispiece of the rapidly expanding "portrait of America." This delicacy is gravy—not the browned meat juices of a more refined cuisine, but gravy made by combining some kind of drippings with enoughflourto thicken abowlofmilkto one's liking. One reason for its emergence in recent years may well be due to more wives working outside the home, leaving hapless husbands to seek their breakfasts elsewhere. At any rate, innumerable signs at family restaurants and fast-food places fairly shriek: "Gravy & Biscuits , All You Can Eat!" A batch of hot biscuits is never the same from one cook to another. Neither is the taste of the gravy itself. One of my earliest memories is that of waking in the morning to the heady aroma of bacon frying in the heavy black iron skillet. Mama would use the drippings to make a bowlful of gravy. When it was done, she'd pour it into the old mottled-brown bowl. She then crumbled up a biscuit in each of our plates, covered it with the hot bacon gravy, and laid a rasher alongside. This, then, was breakfast. The bacon memory didn't survive long because around my sixth birthday the Depression hit, Daddy was out of a job, and we couldn't afford it. We started through a period ofmoving from one place to another— just getting settled when the rent would go up a dollaron the month, and here we'd go again, leaving schools and newfound friends behind with monotonous regularity. To this day I seem to know all the faces in town from having spent a few months at some school with most of them. In the four drab years Daddy had no regular work we never missed a meal, but I still don't know how they managed to keep three kids fed. One thing never changed, however, and that was the breakfast menu. During this time the gravy was made from canned milk. Fresh milk cost five cents a quart at the store even if you took your own fruitjar to be filled. I still prefer to make gravy with canned milk on the rare occasions when we ignore calories and feast away. But I never could make gravy that tasted like Mama's. Ruth Trimble 84 When times improved enough so we could get tires and gas for ourold Chevy, we would visit ourkinfolks who lived in the country. In retrospect, since we always came back laden with garden produce of whatever was in season, perhaps these were primarily foraging trips to supplement our own meager supplies as well as family visits. Who can tell now? I never knew my grandmother—she died when my mother was only nine—but she had two sisters, Aunt Dinah and Aunt Rose. We alternated visits to them with trips to see our grandfather's brother, Uncle Reuben and his wife, Aunt Eliza. Even though they all lived within a radius of fifty miles from our home, it seemed to take forever to get there and always meant spending the night—a special treat for us kids. When we reluctantly rolled out of Aunt Dinah's soft, warm featherbeds, we were herded out onto the back porch. There we would use the gourd dipper to get rainwater from the nearby barrel into the tin wash basin. We kids would gingerly wash our hands and faces in the icy water with the worn bar of pearly castile soap, then dry ourselves by using the communal feed sack towel on the roller bar. While we were outside, the tangy morning air mingled with the fragrant woodsmoke from the huge black range in the kitchen. We hurried back inside to bask in this welcoming warmth. The polished copper teakettle would be boiling furiously, and the smell of big puffy biscuits browning in the oven insured that we didn't take long getting to our seats at the long formal dining table. Aunt Dinah always had...