When I was growing up, almost every meal I ate was at home or school. At home, our fare was usually pinto beans, potatoes, and corn bread with onions. One thing that without doubt developed my taste buds was Mother’s liberal use of Lay’s Clover Leaf® Brand Pure Lard.

If only once more I could go back through time and sit down to one of Mother’s meals. I would want it to be spring so we could have killed (“kilt”) lettuce, soup beans, fried taters with fresh garden peas, cornbread, and a good glass of store-bought buttermilk to wash it all down.

I am surprised at the number of people I meet who don’t know what killed (“kilt”) lettuce is. At its best, the lettuce is crispy fresh from the garden. It has to be selected just at the right time in the growing season, or it has a bitter taste. The lettuce is washed, preferably shredded, and is “killed” by having sizzling hot melted lard or preferably bacon grease poured over the leaves to wilt them. Mix in a few fresh garden onions, both the diced bulb and green stalks, and some bacon bits to be killed with the lettuce and you have a meal to die for.

And die you might. When I think of all the grease and lard in the cornbread, fried taters, and killed lettuce it makes my intestines feel a little watery. And you can imagine what might happen next! Trust me, it’s worth it, at least once a year.

The closest I have come to having such a meal in my later years was at my brother J. C.’s house. J. C., just like my father, grew beautiful gardens. Like my mother, he loved to cook. Usually once a year for the last few years of his life, he would cook such a meal and have me at his table. The meal rivaled the claim of Ivory® soap—it was 99 and 44/100% close to Mother’s cooking, but . . .

My mother would cook a large enough pot of beans every Monday to last through Friday. One of the treasures I have from my youth is the green bowl from which she served those beans. On Monday the beans were fresh, Tuesday you added salt, Wednesday you added more salt and pepper, on Thursday you prayed they’d all be eaten, and if any remained on Friday, you knew how good your relationship with the Lord had been on Thursday.

“Taters” (to city folk known as potatoes) were cooked in smaller quantities and usually only lasted for one, rarely more than two, meals. Mother’s taters were usually fried, though sometimes for variety she stewed them with onions and butter. For variety we sometimes had them mashed, and if any were leftover, they were fried into “tater” cakes. Oh, how delicious those tater cakes were with ketchup on them! In season, Mother would cook taters with fresh garden peas.

And of course all this fare was made better with some good onion and milk. Mother used to quarter slice her onion, and I used to eat them in layers, from the smaller inner to the larger outer layers. Mother and Dad never knew it, but I almost choked to death before their very eyes at the supper table. I swallowed one of the larger quarter slices whole, and it stuck in my throat. It would neither go up nor come down. I kept drinking milk, and finally with a gulp the onion went down. This scared me, and to this day I do not eat onions in quarter slices. I prefer them cut cross section, as thin as possible, or diced.

I have eaten at many a fine table of my friends over the years, but I have never been treated anywhere but my boyhood home to cornbread like that my mother used to make. If she was a perfectionist at anything, it was her cornbread. I liked it when she baked it thin with a slightly greasy, crunchy crust.

And could that woman ever fry a chicken! Colonel Sanders had nothing on my mother. Chicken was usually a weekend treat, a reward for having been so patient with the soup beans all week long.

For after school snacks, the cold biscuits from breakfast with red Kool-Aid® were a treat. My father liked his biscuits baked in one pone in an iron skillet, just barely brown on bottom and white on the top. My Aunt Duskie said of my after school treats, “That’d gag a dog!”

Sunday, as the Lord commanded, was a day of rest. We went to church, and for lunch every Sunday I had a fried egg sandwich with mayonnaise and some form of red Kool-Aid®. To this day I still love the occasional fried egg sandwich with a bottle of water flavored with the red sugar free single packets. Soft drinks were not common in our home until I reached my twenties and Mother lots of times only had herself to cook for.

There were a few occasions when Chef Boyardee visited our table in the form of ravioli, spaghetti and meatballs and other forms of pasta. And has there ever been a home where peanut butter sandwiches didn’t at times hold body and soul together? We occasionally had hamburgers or hot dogs, but this was a rarity. Mother preferred to provide home cooked meals.

After I graduated from college and started working, I began going out to eat with friends from the church for Sunday lunch. This evolved to my driving a group of the elderly ladies from Mother’s Sunday School class to lunch. Our ritual was to go to the Captain D’s in Halls for the all-you-can-eat fish. Once I was able to put away eight pieces of that glorious fish. If I did that now, I don’t think I would be able to function for a few days, but joy to the metabolism of youth! Those were certainly glorious times.

Now I find myself in a church other than the one in which I was raised, and now my wife and I go out almost every Sunday to eat lunch with a group of friends. Next week I’ll tell you about some of our misadventures with dining!