Old Time Survival in a New Time World

Old time Survival

We need to learn to use some of the old methods now in this economic downturn our country is having. Below are some of the old ways I remember.
My parents ordered chickens by mail…100 at a time. They put the baby chickens in very large cardboard boxes with a light on them to keep them warm. I was talking to a cousin whose family did something similar and she said that they built a little house outside and heated it with lanterns. Each morning the kids had to fill the lanterns with kerosene and then relight them and put them back in with the chicks. She said her dad ordered 300 chickens by mail. They were just babies and the reason for buying them was for food.
Cold packing:
According to my cousin, they raised the chickens until ready to eat and killed and dressed them. Her mother preserved the meat two different ways. One way was to flour and fry the chicken as if ready to eat it then put it into jars, pour the grease down over it, then cold pack it. She said that you could get it out of the jar and heat it up and it tasted fresh. The other way was to put the raw meat into the jar and put water and salt over it and cold pack it. That gave a jar of boiled meat to be used during the winter. She says her mom did this with sausage and other meats as well.
We discussed what I remember about cold packing. I wasn’t allowed to do it but I remember my mother boiling the jars in a big pan of water before using them. She always bought new lids and rims each year but used the jars over and over. We had a cold packer which was a large kettle that would hold about eight jars of food. We didn’t have a rack for the jars so my mother put an old towel on the bottom, filled the cold packer with water and then set the jars of food down in the water. I think the jar and lid had to be covered with the water. She’d boil the food for a while and I think she knew the jars had sealed when there was a popping sound. Although she was blind, she listened for the sound and seemed to know when they were safely sealed.
Ramps;
This is a cross between onion and garlic and is very popular in West Va. I found an article about this a long time ago and shared this with my cousin. She didn’t know about them but has since found some and started growing them in her garden. She cuts off the tops and sautés them in bacon grease. In West Va., they have ramps festivals apparently.
My parent’s made sour kraut in a big crock. I don’t remember what went into it but I remember them putting the shredded cabbage into the crock and then covering it with a liquid mixture. It had to set and ferment for a long time I think.
My father helped a neighbor butcher a hog one fall and to keep the meat from spoiling they salted it. I remember that we had half the hog, ham and salt pork…I don’t remember what else.
A woman who lived up the hollow used to string green beans by using a needle and thread. When she got a long string of beans, she hung them up to dry, then apparently put water on them to reconstitute them when she was ready to cook them.
We had two cows and one or two horses at one point in my childhood. To provide clean bedding we gathered bags of autumn leaves to put in the stables for the horses. Otherwise we’d have had to pay for straw.
In the fields where the corn picker had been there were always ears of corn left. My parents would ask the farmer for permission to glean the fields and usually that was granted. We’d take a burlap bag and walk the rows picking up any corn that had been missed. That saved us money for feed for chickens, horses and cows. Often we could get three or four large bags out of a field.
My father arranged to tear down a building and haul it away for the lumber. Using that wood, he and I built a two room house. It wasn’t great but we lived in it for about two years. I was around 12 or 13 at the time. The largest room which was to the front was a combination living room and bedroom. The back room was a kitchen. The living room had a loft and I eventually declared that to be my space. I climbed up there and slept in order to have a private spot. It was very warm up there because the place where I slept was directly above the wood stove.
We need to go back to the recycle and reuse mode and to be certain we use everything we can before we throw things away, as was done in the good old days.