Blessed Are The Poor

Today driving to the grocery store I started thinking about how poor we were but what a blessing it was. Larry bought me some molasses at the feed store. It has lots of iron in it. I put my iron pill in a T of molasses and swallow it down. Iron pills make you sick. Especially if you inherited Dad's stomach. The molasses coats the pill and I am not sick at all taking it. I am supposed to take a chalk pill before each meal. It is yucky too.

This morning when I took my pill, I recalled how we made taffy. We only did it in the cold months. Colder the better. I think we put molasses, sugar, butter, and maybe some cream. You boiled that on the stove until it clumped in cool water. Then we dumped it out on a buttered plate. We never had anything like wax paper. Then, we would take off a piece and pull it and then pat it back and then pull. Over and over we pulled. The more you work the taffy the lighter color it had and it was more firm. We could never wait and ate some of it all gooey. I wonder if the sisters remember making taffy?

We also made fudge. I don't think we went by a recipe. We just put sugar, cocoa, butter and cream. We boiled that and then turned the heat down and cooked it until it made a ball in cool water. Then we whipped it with a spoon before we poured it on a buttered plate. Sometimes (well, most of the time) it did not set well, but we were not bothered by it. We would each get a spoon and eat it that way.

Mama liked for me to make cookies at night. Sometimes she would even ask me to make them. I remember usually it was sugar cookies.

The other candy in my memory is sugar candy. When we were so poor on groceries that all we had was sugar....we were not deterred. All we had to do was get the iron skillet really hot maybe a little red and dump a cup of sugar in the skillet. We stirred for a while and dumped all that on a plate. It would be sugar crystals and we had our sweet!

I can't remember making other types of candy, until Fleta went to work at the chicken plant...then we made all sorts of good stuff.

Being poor is really a blessing. I am not sorry that we grew up on the farm poor as mice. It was a good childhood really. We had to use our minds in play and work.