Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/26

 10 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

modernizing of the region, the conditions become less primitive and simple.

The food of eastern Kentucky ought not to be confused with that of the Bluegrass and Pennyroyal regions. Corn pone, bacon, and fried chicken are appetizing enough in print, but they vary in attractiveness with different parts of the South. The mountaineers have preserved all the primitive processes of the real frontier. Their cooking is correlated with all the other elements of their life, and they seem to thrive upon a diet which to the stranger from without makes the call to meals the gloomiest of summons. We were too early for chickens, which were served only two or three times during the trip. But, so far as v/e could learn, the rest of the menu was thoroughly typical. The staple article is corn bread. It is made by mixing coarse corn meal and a dash of salt with cold water, until the whole is a pasty mass. This is pressed into a frying pan, or skillet, three or four inches deep. The pan is then covered with an iron lid and thrust into the open fire, where glowing embers are piled upon it. It is left only long enough to form a crust or skin upon the surface of the bread. The center of the loaf is never cooked. After the allotted time the bread is turned out upon the table, sometimes broken into pieces on a plate, sometimes left whole to be plucked away as needed by the hungry family. Biscuits of wheat flour and soda or baking powder are sometimes served. They are usually heavy and yellow, and exhale an unpleasant odor. Potatoes are usually boiled or baked. Sometimes they are mashed and given a brown color by the liberal use of ham fat. " Ham meat" is for the most part fried in irregular pieces, which float about in a flood tide of grease. Occasionally the meat diet is varied by roast spare ribs, and, in the season, it is, of course, relieved by " chicken fixings." The butter is a white cottage cheese, very much like the butter made by the Bedouin goatskin churns in Palestine. The coffee is ordinarily a black, uninviting liquor, boiled for a long time in a large pot. This pot is a type of perpetuity. It seems never to be cleaned. Before each meal a little more ground coffee is added and the same amount is drained away into the cups.