Mrs. Will Palmer, Cataloochee, North Carolina
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Mrs. Will Palmer, 66 years old when recorded in 1939, was a native of Cataloochee in Haywood County, North Carolina, Before relocating to Waynesville, North Carolina, in the 1930's. She probably had some high school education.
[transcripption copyrigh Michael Montgomery and Paul Reed, 2017]
When I was a girl, we didn’t have any stove to cook on, we had to cook on the fire, we had uh what we called ovens, we’d put them on and heat them, put them, put some coals on the hearth and put the oven on it, put the bread, the dough in it, and put the lid on it, put some coals on top of that and bake our bread, had a, if we wanted to make coffee we had a tea kettle we put on and boiled our water and coffee pot and put it on some coals in front of the fire, and to fry our meat we had a skillet, we’d heat it and set it on top of the br-, bread, the oven that the bread was in, on the coals on the lid, and fry our meat, if we wanted to boil anything for dinner we had a, what we called a pot, we set it on the fire and put our meat in it or beans or anything we wanted boiled and boiled it for dinner, supper, whatever we, meal we wanted to have, I was grown before we ever had any stove, I can remember the first stove we ever, was in our house, we didn’t, we didn’t know hardly what to think when we got it, we didn’t know how to cook on it, but it didn’t take us long to learn, it was so much easier than the old-fashioned cooking, but I don’t know if the cooking was any better than the old-fashioned cooking, but it was much easier.
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Hmm, we used to dry our fruit, we’d gather our apples in of a day and peel our apples of a night and put them out on a scaffold, had a plank scaffold to put them on and dry them, go to it occasionally and stir it, and we’d fill our scaf-, the scaffold about every three days, and when it got pretty dry, we’d take it off on the cloth and lay it around the sun and fill our scaffolds again, we used to dry beans, string them up and dry them, do yet sometimes, and sweet potatoes, we’d dry them and dry blackberries and all such as that, such stuff as we can now we used to dry, we didn’t have cans, I can remember the first cans that we ever had, we brought a dozen and filled them with peaches, we used to have all together all of our fruit, but now we have to buy our peaches and stuff that way while we make our garden stuff, we have it each year.