Aunt Bill Rambles

Law me, I’ve had the awfulest day you ever see’d.  I been a-wantin’ to cook  a apple pie lack my ma did fer 60 years and every year I fail.  Today ain’t no different.

When I’s growing up, we had a apple orchard and Ma could make the best pies.  She called ’em plate pies.  When the apples got big enough in the spring she started making them pies and always made two on Saturday.  Now she had a china cabinet with a glass door and them Saturday pies set in that china cabinet ’til Sunday.  They wuz not to be cut ’til Sunday. She always said, “Somebody might come home with us from church.” Now when I cook sompin’, and we want to, we eat it right then.  We might not live ’til Sunday!

I can’t start to make a crust like her’n — I know one thang — she used plain flour ’cause she wouldn’t have self-risin’ flour in the house.  She thought the cook ort to be smart enough to put the right parts together to make whatever.  Another thang I know is that she used lard and I ain’t got none.  I think she made her pie crust about lack she made biscuit dough, but maybe used more lard.  My recipe calls fer a egg and some vinegar and I’d bet money that Ma didn’t use nair one.  Well, I’ve tried hit both ways and I fail ever time, but I keep on a-tryin’.  Now Ma used metal pans and I ain’t got that kind neither — she took her pies out of the pan and let them rest on a plate ’til they’s cut. She used a wooden rollin’ pin (I wish I know’d what went with hit) and mine is a marble rollin’ pin that come out of the North Georgie marble mines.

When I talk about the apple orchard, I allus think of some cousins I had that lived across Skirum Creek and they’d come over here and work for my Pa.
One cousin could walk the foot log and tote a bushel of apples and his brother didn’t tote apples and had to coon the foot log to git on the other side.  We allus got a good laugh out’n that un.

But back to the pies — most times I’d be the one to go to the orchard and pick up the apples, then Ma wrenched ’em off and peeled ’em.  She allus saved the peelings and cooked ’em, strained the juice and then made apple jelly.  She know’d how to be savin’ and didn’t waste nothing.  Atter the apples was cooked, she mashed ’em with a tater masher, put the sugar in and then added some Allspice.  It seems to me they had to cool a while a’fore she put ’em between the crusts.  Them good pies wuz cooked in a wood-burning stove, too, so stove wood had to be toted in so’s enough could be added to keep the oven hot.  Then to clean up, water had to be drawed from the well and toted in to do that job.

My pies ain’t nothing like hers and they shore ain’t nothing to look at, but I guess we can eat ’em.  Anyway this is how hit is with country livin’.

Old saying for the day:  (I here’d my ma say this all my life and I never know’d what it meant — I had to git older to understand.) “Living trouble is worse than dead trouble.”  (If you live long enough may can understand, too.)