Sufferin’ Succotash

by Moira Goering

We weeded and watered. We hauled, hoed, and harvested. We picked, peeled, and pickled. This garden of ours was no Eden.

“What is this yucky stuff?”

My little brother’s honest question reflected what our turned-up noses asked when Mom put the lima bean and corn dish on the table.

“Succotash,” Mom replied. “The Pilgrims survived on it. They got the recipe from local Indians but decided to leave out the dog meat. So did I. We also have corn bread and pumpkin pie. Want some?”

So this is what Sylvester the Cat means when he says “Sufferin’ succotash,” I thought. It makes a lot more sense to me now. Poking my fork into the concoction I wondered why Mom had suddenly gone pioneer with the food storage.

It didn’t take long to find out. Dad announced that he had lost his job, and we would be living on our food storage for a while. I envisioned weeks of whole wheat porridge, fried rice, and bean or lentil soup.

Our next family home evening was kind of scary when Dad and Mom went over our expenses and explained that all cash and savings would have to go for the house payment and utilities. Tears came to my kindergarten brother’s eyes when it was announced that no extra things could be purchased. He looked down at his shoes and whispered, “I guess I can’t get a book club book, huh?”

I didn’t dare ask if I would have to miss the prom and the band trip. I was afraid of the answer, so I just looked at my shoes too.

The only fun part of the evening was planning that month’s menus. It was comforting to see lots of home-canned fruits and vegetables on Mom’s storage list. Green beans, peaches, pear sauce, and apple sauce made me take a grateful look back at our family’s bumpy road to self-sufficiency.

When we had moved to Iowa eight years earlier, my parents were determined to follow the counsel of President Spencer W. Kimball to store food and grow a garden.

One of the first things we did was to build three food-storage can racks. Once they were finished, it was obvious something was needed to fill them. I felt like the prime minister in “The Emperor’s New Clothes” when I would pass the shelves in the kitchen on my way downstairs to my bedroom. “This,” I would apologetically say to my friends, “is our food storage.” I could see them thinking that they weren’t going to dine with us if there was a disaster. Dead flies and spider webs inside a bunch of empty jars didn’t look very appetizing.

My parents thought the problem would be solved when our neighbor came over with his tractor and plowed our side yard. After hauling away the sod, we planted a garden. There was a magnificent crop of weeds the first year. Some of them grew to be over eight feet tall. About the only plants tenacious enough to survive in the clay were pumpkins and zucchini. This did not discourage my parents in their never-ending quest to find things for us to do, however. We got to haul, shovel, and rake mountains of manure, compost, and sawdust. The ground finally softened so that it could be worked, and vegetable seeds began to stay long enough to sprout.

Since then we have expanded every year and now grow a large garden and own a 40-tree orchard of apples, peaches, plums, and pears plus several hazelnut bushes, an ever-expanding raspberry patch, and grapes. All need to be weeded. In drought years, they also need to be watered. Luckily we have a pond and an irrigation pump, but it still requires a lot of work to move the pipes and lug buckets full of water to the faraway trees.

My mom feels an obligation to help us “improve” ourselves during the summers so we don’t turn into “weeds.” Each day begins with scripture study, family prayer, and the inevitable list of daily jobs. All of us except baby Christina get at least one big job according to our abilities.

About the time our neighbors are abandoning their gardens and heading for the Farmers’ Market, we are out planting radishes, lettuce, broccoli, beets, and Chinese cabbage. Just when we think the weeding is done, another crop of veggies pops up, and we’re very glad that school is about to start so we can rest. Quite honestly, an early frost doesn’t bother me.

One day Mom had everybody either weeding, picking beans, skinning tomatoes for canning, or chopping vegetables. My sister and I shredded gallons of squash and made 16 loaves of zucchini bread and two zucchini spice cakes. In between our use of the food processor, Josh, my seven-year-old brother, chopped up cucumbers, banana peppers, cabbage, onions, and celery to make medley pickles.

As sliced vegetables poured out the spout, he dumped them into an empty ice cream bucket. It looked blah, so mom headed out to the garden to get red cabbage, yellow tomatoes, carrots, and a handful of green beans.

Meanwhile, six-year-old Danny dashed into the house after emptying the compost bucket. It was his job to deposit scraps like tomato skins and zucchini ends into the compost pile. Noticing a new bucketful, he ran out the door, dumped it, and scooted back. Beaming with pride, he showed Mom how he had dumped some “extra stuff without being asked.” There went the pickles!

With 11 kids in our family, we eat a lot. We share extra produce with friends, and they share with us. One summer, though, we got more than we ever dreamed of.

We awoke one morning to find 150 torn plastic bags disgorging potatoes onto our front lawn. Why were they there? Where had they come from? Had a fiendish french fry franchiser gone insane? Had frivolous aliens traveling the states for food samples jettisoned Idaho potatoes in favor of Iowa sweet corn?

Nothing so exciting. Dad’s reputation as a pack rat reached the ears of a green grocer with potatoes that weren’t quite good enough to sell, but not quite bad enough to throw away. His solution was to give them to my dad, who brought them home, slit open the bags to let them air, and then, of course, left for work. Getting rid of them was left to us.

There were many suggestions. Drop them off a cliff and watch them splatter far below. Save them until they were really rotten and then throw them at each other. Let them ferment and use the alcohol to run the car.

Mom decided to stage the first and only GPPM (Great Potato Peeling Marathon). We began by sorting them. The good ones—probably about 1,000 pounds worth—were piled on the lawn. Out came the lawn chairs, towels, and the little kids’ wading pool full of water. Divided into teams, we began washing, wiping, peeling, and hauling them into the house to be canned in one of our three pressure canners.

Joshua, then two, came toddling out. Seeing what looked like a beach party, he ran over to the pool and jumped in. Up he sputtered from the slimy water with his mouth full of starch, his hair plastered with peels, and a betrayed look in his eyes.

We peeled until our fingers blistered. Countless quart jars later, we quit. The storage shelves were full, the lawn was clear, and I thought that I would never look another potato in the eye again.

My parents thought otherwise and called a family council to discuss how to eat them. Have you ever thought about how many ways there are to eat potatoes? There’s a Walt Disney song about Johnny Appleseed in which he says, “Apple fritters, oh so tasty, apple tarts, and apple pasty—You can cook an apple any way.” If I were a musician I would write a ditty like this, “Scalloped potatoes and au gratin, mashed, souped, but not rotten—You can cook a potato any way.” The P file in our recipe box expanded beyond the pumpkin section, and all of us tried a lot of new casseroles.

Over the years we have learned to eat a lot of homegrown foods in a variety of ways. Some years one thing does well, and in other years it’s something else. Depending on what we have canned or dried, our winter diet varies quite a bit from year to year.

All this was good training for dealing with my dad’s unemployment. Our help in tending the garden, in canning, and in eating what Mom cooked all helped get us through. I was even able to go to the prom and to go on our band trip to Lake Okiboji.

This experience really opened my eyes to how much teenagers can contribute to their family’s self-sufficiency. I can see now that no matter where you live or how your parents try to deal with getting their food storage set up, it takes the whole family’s cooperation for it to work. And you never know when you might need it.

Illustrated by Scott Greer