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Robert H. Davison (rt.) and neighbor

Earl Talks About the Kinds of Food They Ate When They Had to Fend for Themselves

“One thing that we eat a lot of, me and Bill and my dad, Bill would make cornbread. And we would fry it like
pancakes and we would fry bacon and we would sop that grease with the cornbread. We also had other
foods too but that was just one of the main stays. Lots of time we would make mashed potatoes put them in
the oven with butter on top and brown them. We loved cube steaks, bean soup and spaghetti. I always

came home at dinnertime and made me spaghetti with Hunts tomato sauce, about a 1/2 pound of spaghetti
and I would eat it all. I loved spaghetti. I love peanut butter. Then when I was about 14 or 15 years old my
dad had a charge account at a little grocery store. I’d go over there and get me a quarters worth of baloney,

a loaf of bread, and a quart of milk and go over to the park and eat it all. You got quite a bit of baloney for a
quarter. Just some of the things I used to do.

Dad loved hot peppers, gravy, vegetables, and tomatoes, but not ripe ones. He liked to pour bacon grease on

them. He liked vinegar and oil on vegetables. We grew up eating a lot of what they call bean bacon or jowl
bacon. We would get that and slice it up and fry it for breakfast and when that was all cut off the rind we
would scrape it and get all the whiskers off of it and put it in a pot of beans and cook it and then make a
sandwich out of the rind. I always kind of liked that. That was a lot of fat meat, but it never bothered me.

Dad would eat all the fat meat he could get. Pigs feet, pig’s tails, pig’s knuckles. He would eat any part of
that pig that you had. Pickled pigs’ feet used to be kind of a treat to eat. I can remember eating that myself.”
Earl Davison, from 2003 interview