The Old Buzzard Had It Coming Read online

  ALAFAIR’S NEVER-FAIL PIE CRUST

  3/4 cup shortening

  1/4 cup boiling water

  pinch salt

  2 cups flour

  1 tbs. milk

  Pour the boiling water over the shortening and mix until melted and creamy. Sift together flour and salt. Add dry ingredients to the creamed shortening and mix together to form dough. The dough will be rather crumbly. Add the milk and knead briefly to make the dough easier to handle.

  Flour the counter top and your rolling pin well before rolling out the dough. This recipe makes enough dough for two crusts. If you are making a single-crust pie such as the molasses pie above, the remaining dough can be frozen and will still be easy to work with when thawed. Of course, Alafair would have had no way to freeze the remaining dough unless it were the middle of winter, but then with nine children she wouldn’t have had any remaining crust to worry about.

  This particular recipe makes what Alafair would have called a very short (flaky) crust.

  The Drippings Jar

  Alafair and all her female relations would have been unable to cook without the drippings jar, which was kept within arm’s reach of the stove. Into this jar was poured the grease that was left in the skillet after frying any piece of meat. Bacon grease was especially desirable for both its quantity and taste.

  This grease, which was semiliquid in summer and semisolid in winter, was used to fry anything that needed to be fried, such as vegetables, eggs, pancakes, and johnnycakes. It was also used as a tasty flavoring when cooking savory dishes. Alafair could tell by the smell if the fat was going rancid, which it sometimes did in hot weather. She would then throw it out and start over. It never took too long to collect another jar full.

  Alafair and other farm wives had no idea about calories or cholesterol, so they never put them in their cooking. One could tell this was true just by seeing how thin these farm people were. They only knew that they craved fat after carrying yearling calves, buckets of milk and small children around under their arms all day long.

  Coffee

  Alafair made coffee by putting 1/4 cup of ground coffee in the bottom of a tin coffee pot, filling the pot with water, and boiling it furiously for ten or fifteen minutes. She knew the coffee was ready when a spoon stood up in the cup. Coffee was usually drunk with two or three spoonfuls of sugar. Cream was a matter of taste. After drinking a cup of Alafair’s coffee, one could go out and happily plow the south forty. Sometimes one didn’t even need a horse.

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