“Miss Nettie’s” Kitchen

“Miss Nettie’s” Kitchen

This post reminds me so much of my Grandmother. I still remember her cooking in the Kitchen and us kids playing in the backyard. Climbing the old apple tree beside the underground cellar where they kept all the canned goods! What a wonderful memory this has dug up!

All eight of “Miss Nettie’s” grandchildren spent the summer with her after every school year. The moment they were out of school, they landed at her house. She didn’t mind, because four of them were with her most of the time anyway, and the other four got along really great with their cousins. They played outside most of the time. The biggest thing she had to do; keep enough food ready for this swarm.

Anytime you came into Miss Nettie’s kitchen, you would find biscuits left from breakfast full of churned butter and sugar. They lay in a pan, wrapped in a flower sack. Another item in a bowl beside those biscuits was small cooked sweet potatoes you could eat like a banana. The potatoes were so sweet you didn’t need sugar and if you put a little butter on them they were even better.

Miss Nettie cooked two pans of biscuits every morning. These were not ‘whop’ biscuits! Oh NO! They were made by her two strong hands. She made them by pouring out the flour in a large green bowl. She makes a big hole in the middle of the flour with her hand and flopped in a big glob of lard. Then she would pour in the milk. She never measured a single ingredient; she just knew by eye how much it took to make the biscuits exactly right. She would get both her hands in the bowl and kneed the flour until it was ready. She would put flour on her hands and get to where she kept the slop for the hogs. She raked the flour off her hands into the bucket. (The bucket was usually on the back porch with a lid on it.) Instead of rolling out her biscuits she would start pinching off the exact same size biscuits rolling them in her hands and placing them on the greased pan. Of course the pan was greased with lard too. She could make those two pans of biscuits fast. It would amaze anyone who watched. It was almost like second nature to her.

She also had ham cooking on the stove, along with eggs, coffee brewing, and she would set the table. She had to get four of the kids up, because they usually stayed all night during the summer, and she would ask them to get the old green bench from the back porch putting it along the back side of the table against the wall, so they could sit at the table with the adults. She didn’t like the children sitting at another table and not with the grown-ups. How would they every know how to act, if they didn’t learn from the

Grace was always said before anyone was fed. Mr. Marlin got his food first, and then the kids got their food. Everyone else got their food once the children had their plates. Usually, Miss Nettie had sixteen to eighteen mouths to feed during the summer months. This didn’t happen every day, but several days during the summer, according to how many were off from work on any given time. Mr. Marlin and Miss Nettie had three children, two boys and one girl. The oldest boy had two girls. Their daughter was the second child who had the four kids which Miss Nettie kept all summer. The youngest child was a son and he had two boys. All these kids got along really great to be so different in ages.

Miss Nettie had her hands full during the summer, but she had a way of getting all of these children to do exactly what she said. If they got out of line, she would say, “Go get me a switch!” And each one of them knew exactly what she meant. They were to walk up the middle of the house. The house had a long hallway in the center of the house to the front door. Off the front porch was two large ‘switch bushes’ with long runners which grew up taller than the rest of the bush. If any of the eight picked a little flimsy ‘switch’, she would MARCH up the hall and reach down in the bush and get a LIMB. When she walked back down the hallway, the sound of those leaves stripping off the ‘switch’ could be heard. When she caught the one by the elbow who needed the punishment cried, or tried to get away from the punishment by going around and around, Miss Nettie would say, “you keep on, it’ll be worse. I am not talking all summer! This is the only time I am going to do this! Make up your mind you will listen and this will be the last time we have to do this! The more you dance, the more you’ll get!”

Unless the child was brain dead, they learned she meant business. It didn’t take her talking all summer about the same thing. When she said, “Come here” she had children who would listen. Did it hurt the children to be disciplined? NO! They became people who knew there was authority over them. Did they know they were loved? YES! Because she showed them in so many ways! Did the kids have to walk the hall more than once a summer? NOPE!

Miss Nettie always wore an apron. When tears came down the cheeks of any of these eight children she would dry the tears with the edge of the apron. If a scrape would happen, she would wet the corner of the apron and wipe off the blood. She always had Band-Aids in the apron. She would kiss the ‘boo-boo’ and put on the Band-Aid. The kids were off again.

Lunchtime would be a wild time in Miss Nettie’s kitchen. She would start almost immediately after breakfast fixing lunch. Green beans with okra cooked on top, cornbread, some sort of meat, small potatoes, and peach cobbler was on the menu sometimes. She would always have coffee for Mr. Marlin, and she would make the best sweet tea.

When she made the coffee too weak, Mr. Marlin would set his coffee cup and saucer on the floor. She asked him, “What in the world are you doing Marlin?” He would say, every time, “it’s so weak, I’m afraid it’s going to faint and fall off the table. I thought I’d put it on the floor before it hurt itself.” The kids would get tickled, because she would pick up the cup, and hit him with her dish towel. He would make a face at her and wink at the kids.

Miss Nettie always had flowers setting in her windows growing roots. She was a firm believer of getting cuttings from friends or from the neighborhood nursery. She would go to the nursery with a wet paper towel in her purse. She would find a broken limb off a favorite flower on the floor of the nursery. She would pick it up, putting it in her purse. After getting it home she put it in a snuff glass of water on the window sill to grow those roots, and within a few weeks, she had a yard full of flowers. She had a wonderful green thumb.

Dinnertime at Miss Nettie’s was the time all of the family would gather. It sounded like a room full of magpies. Everyone was trying to talk.

Before the kids came to the table, the green bench had to be brought back to the table. Then they would line-up at the back porch sink. They washed their face and hands, up to their elbows, with Lifebuoy soap. This was Mr. Marlin’s soap. He said, “If you are dirty, this will clean it along with the top layer of skin”.

Most of the time, the dinner was left-overs from lunch, but everyone had enough to eat. Mr. Marlin had cold buttermilk and cornbread, so this left the rest of the food for the grown-ups. Most of the children wanted peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with cold sweet milk.