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cornbread. On the way to Lake City, just north of town a Mr. Butler
had a mill, we used him most of the time. He was convenient, we would
drop off the corn in the morning, that afternoon on the way home we
would pick it up. The grits was not a quick cook food item. It
usually took about an hour to cook up a pot of them, but they were
always fresh and good.

All the farm produce we grew had to have farm fresh butter to go
along with them. Some things butter went better with, corn on the
cob, fresh hot cornbread, or even a big ole cathead biscuit just to
name a few. With a good supply of milk on hand, the butter making
process was done quite often. When butter making time approached the
sour cream was collected placed in a large crockery urn to begin the
process. Then the dasher with its top plate was added and a towel
around the plate to keep the splashing milk and cream from going
everywhere. Then we would begin to pump that dasher, for what seemed
like an eternity. But, before long little gobs of butter would begin
appearing on the dasher handle, we knew it would not be long then.
Burnette would check to make sure it was finished, then she would
take over and collect the fresh made butter. Then she would wash it
to remove all the remaining milk, salt it, pack it into a mold,
presto a fresh block of homemade butter. It was just waiting for some
hot food to be brought in and a good supply of butter added. I never
could develop a taste for fresh buttermilk, to this day I still don't
like it. Give me a big piece of cornbread and some freshmilk, and
I'll finish it off in short order. In winter when the milk supply was
less we would make butter in a 1/2 gallon fruit jar. Fill the jar
about three-fourths full of sour cream, put a good top on it, sit in
a rocking chair in front of the fireplace and have a rocking good
time. We had to be careful and not rock ourselves to sleep, with
Burnette around not the best thing to do. With the jar she could see
the butter forming on the inside of the jar, and would know when it
was time to collect and wash it. It never seemed as long making with
the jar as the urn churn, maybe the added heat from the fire helped
speed things up a bit. The butter was just as good either way it was
made.

In the early forties (about 42) we went to the Christie place and
picked several bushels of purple hull (black-eyed) peas to be canned.
At about 4 years of age I didn't do a lot of peapicking, got more in
the way than anything else, I'm sure. Mama went to Fargo picked up
Maggie Mae Hall, and they went to Homerville, Ga. to a canning plant
and spent a day preparing and canning all those peas. At the time it
was a good prudent thing to do, except, the canning machine that was
supposed to seal the cans was not working properly and we lost just
about all that was canned. There went down the drain a lot of work by
a lot of people. The problem was

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