The Cross Timbers Read Online Free PDF

for the milk. Evidently the word got around among the hoboes that our home fed well, for hardly a week ever went by without our having a least one tramp as a visitor.

3. Vittles: Plain and Fancy
    All the residents of the Cross Timbers demanded three square meals of what was collectively known as “vittles.” These meals were always referred to as breakfast, dinner, and supper. Not until long after my boyhood days were past did I ever hear the midday meal called lunch or the evening meal dinner. In fact, the word “lunch” was hardly in the vocabulary of ourselves or most of the neighbors. A slice of buttered bread or some cheese and crackers eaten between meals was usually known as a “snack.”
    Breakfast did not differ much from the other two meals. Breakfast foods were unknown in our community. Biscuits, fried potatoes, bacon, eggs, butter, milk gravy sometimes called “hushpuppy gravy,” and syrup or sorghum molasses constituted a good breakfast. Sometimes the thrifty housewife omitted the eggs, especially if the local grocery store was paying a good price for them. In the winter homemade sausage might take the place of bacon, and hominy and fried sweet potatoes were common. If “company” was present at breakfast, ham and eggs were often served and sometimes fried chicken.
    In our home my father always said grace before every meal, unless we had one of his church brothers as a guest, in which case the guest was asked to “return thanks.” In our household Fathersaw to it that we were all present before grace was said and we began eating. No doubt he would have been horrified by having a child come drifting in when the rest of the family were half through the meal.
    As my father came to Texas from Nebraska and had spent most of his life in Missouri, our fare was a bit different from that of others in the community, who were either born and reared in Texas or had come from the Deep South or Tennessee. Most families from those states ate either cornbread or biscuits at every meal. My father said that he had eaten enough cornbread as a Missouri farm boy to last him the rest of his life. Both my mother and Alice made large snowy loaves of what was usually called “light bread.” Slices of this were often toasted on top of the stove for breakfast, although biscuits made with buttermilk and soda appeared more often on the breakfast table.
    The striking difference between the food in this part of Texas during the 1880’s and that of today was that most of it was produced on the farm. Perhaps we raised more of our food than did most of our neighbors because of the large orchard and garden, and yet my father sometimes complained bitterly of the high cost of living.
    â€œWhen I was a boy in Missouri,” he would often declare, “my father had a big family and three or four Negro slaves, but a hundred dollars in cash was all we spent in a year. Now I do not have a big family at home but it takes two or three hundred dollars a year to run us!” He would then explain that they tanned their own leather, made their own shoes, and spun and wove the wool from their sheep to make homespun clothing. He admitted,however, that they ate cornbread three times a day every weekday and seldom had biscuits except on Sunday morning for breakfast.
    Looking backward it seems to me now that we bought very little at the grocery store except sugar, coffee, flour, soda, syrup, salt, and pepper. We always bought green coffee, which was roasted in the oven and ground in a small coffee mill nailed to the wall above the cook-table. Very few persons drank tea, coffee being the universal beverage often served three times a day.
    The grocery stores bought syrup in barrels and drew it into gallon jugs brought by customers. There were several types, such as sugar drip, ribbon cane, and corn syrup.
    Nathan Vick, one of Mr. Taylor’s renters, owned a sorghum mill and made sorghum every