| Narrator: Wilbur Barton |
| Date: April 1997 |
| Topic: Food [and daily life] in the Barton Family |
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| Side A |
| WB |
Food patterns of the William Carey Barton family in Normal, Illinois. |
| Location: |
We had three homes. One at 306 North School Street, which was the first. The next
one was at Beauport and Broadway Street. And the last was 304 East Cherry Street to the
present time. This time-span was from my time-1914 when I was born, to 1997. We had a family
of nine children-seven girls and two boys. The oldest and the youngest were boys-me being the
youngest. The house at 304 East Cherry Street was in the first addition to the Town of Normal.
We had seven rooms in the house. It had a barn, pigpen, chicken house, smokehouse,
outhouse-privy (laughs), garden, fruit trees such as apples, pears, peaches, plums, grapes,
walnut, and cherry. The barn was later torn down or made into a garage.
Meals: We had three meals a day, and they were known as breakfast, lunch, and supper. Usually,
they were at 7:00 A.M. in the morning, at noon, and 6:00 P.M. We all ate at the dining room
table at the same time. The foods we ate were usually raised. In the early years, we raised
hogs on that same lot. We had plenty of chicken, pork, ham occasionally, beef and fish. Some
rabbit and squirrel in season.
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| Vegetable foods: |
The vegetables were raised in our three gardens such as potatoes-white
potatoes. Sweet potatoes didn't grow very well in Normal. Peas, corn, onions, beets, beans,
mustard, radish, lettuce, Swiss chard, dock, turnip, cabbage, okra, lima beans, sassafras,
pumpkins, squash, and a few others, I guess. My mother had a canning season. It usually was in
the spring and summer. And she canned and cold-packed a lot of the food that we later ate
during the winter. She stored slaw and kraut in five-gallon crocks. Canned the fruit in one
quart and one and a half-gallon Mason jars. Made jelly preserves, pear honey, apple butter,
butter. And we had plenty of canned peaches-also in Mason jars. She canned some fruit that was
bought from hucksters who came by with their wagons.
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| Cooking facilities: |
[My mother] had a cook stove with four lids, oven, and boiler with a
warming oven at the top. Here she did most of the cooking. She had a black kettle-big
kettle-to make soap and boil clothes to get them white out in the back yard. Soap was made from
hog grease.
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| [Water]: |
Our water facilities were at that time a well, probably fifty feet deep. The water
was very hard. You couldn't use it to wash clothes. And we had a cistern with rainwater, which
we used for about everything else. Later, we had city water and sewer service.
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| Neighborhood: |
Our neighborhood was a working-class neighborhood of white and Black. The
economic status was from very poor to middle class. My family was one of three Colored families
that lived on Cherry Street. What we ate depended on our income and what we grew and raised.
My father had a very good job. He was a tinsmith and coppersmith. My mother never worked out.
She had nine children and how could you. (laughs) She was in charge of the house and the three
gardens. She put us all to work in the gardens.
My mother was a very good cook. My mother was a very good wash lady. My mother was a very good
ironer. She had to be. My mother came from Kentucky. My father came from Southern Illinois and
Missouri. My mother's cooking was representative of the cooking in those three states, not of
the Deep South. We had plenty of chicken-either fried, baked, or boiled. Every year my mother
would get three hundred chicks from the Bloomington Hatchery for year and raise them for our
meat, and she sold some. The chickens ran wild in the neighborhood. They usually came home at
night. As they say, "The chickens came home to roost."
A typical day at 304 Cherry Street consisted of breakfast-my mother made hot biscuits-powder-in
two large pans maybe ten by eighteen [inches] with jelly, preserves, and butter, hand sliced
back-slab bacon or salt pork, sliced fried potatoes and onion or fried apples or tomatoes,
and sometimes apple sauce, coffee, and tea. My mother drank coffee. My father drank tea. My
mother liked her coffee boiled openly in a pan. It was strong enough to walk. We as kids had
Quaker Oats and milk probably. The neighborhood children usually stopped by on their way to
school to get leftover biscuits that my mother would save for them in the warming oven.
As for lunch-probably [for] lunch, we all came home to lunch from school. White bread, sliced
by hand. We had no sliced bread at that time. Probably ham, corn, peas, milk, lemonade, and
butter, margarine that we had to color. My father took his lunch to work. He worked five days
a week. Took the streetcar to work in Bloomington.
|
| Supper: |
Dinner was known as supper. To honor our Lord we were to say the blessing and break
bread together. My mother always said, "The families that prays together, stays together."
Supper probably consisted of roast pork, chicken, beef, potatoes, green beans, with creamed
style corn, salad of leaf lettuce, and sliced pickles. Desserts were fruit pies from the fruit
trees in the yard, fruit cobblers, tea, coffee, milk, butter, water, pop, pudding, and cake.
After supper, we usually sat on the porch, weather permitting, or go into the living room, which
is now called the family room, until bedtime. And as we would slowly succumb to the "sandman"
who picked us off one at a time, my mother would instruct us to go to bed.
As for family protocol: We all had time to eat together. Had to with no exception. We all had
time to break bread together. Nothing should be more important. We discussed family discipline
and problems and correction at this time of day. The next day's work for all of us was
reviewed. We always set a place for a guest or temporary visitors before we asked them to eat
with us. My mother had picked this up from living in Kentucky. She detested "Chicago dining."
Chicago dining was when people would have dinner, and each one in the family would slowly
disappear to the kitchen and eat, and then come back and entertain you. As for discipline, my
father and mother were heads of this house. They ruled with a strap, switch, and backhand. My
mother was the enforcer.
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In generalities, I would say baked food was all in a coal-stove oven. And as I said there were
biscuits, corn bread, muffins, corn ponies, crackling bread, cobblers, apple dumplings, fried
pies, cake, etc. Desserts were all of the above, and occasionally we had homemade ice cream,
sherbet, tapioca pudding. The ice cream was hand cranked. I can taste it even now. We usually
had to make the ice cream in the back yard so the neighborhood kids couldn't see us. It usually
didn't work. They usually came around, and everybody that came to our house was fed by my
mother. We as kids didn't like this because we had to share our ice cream with our friends.
Well, I'll stop and if I think of anything else, I'll add to it. Right now I'll say, "That's
all folks. I'd like to have my tape back. Wilbur W. Barton. Class of 1936, Illinois State
[Normal University]. Thank you." (tape is turned off)
I might also include mode of transportation, which I just thought about. Early we had a horse
and buggy and wagon. They were used on the eleven acres that we farmed behind the Orphan's
Home. After the horse and buggy days, we finally got a 1914 Mitchell automobile and 1921 Nash
later on. I don't remember what we had after that. Thank you. (tape is turned off)
Probably a 1928 Ajax Nash.
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| End Side A |
