When mother baked bread (we never had store-brought bread) she always made 8 loaves at a time (once a week). It was always tasted so good right out of the oven with home churned butter and jelly from the cellar. Our cellar was under the smokehouse. It had shelves for canned goods and a bin for the potatoes. Mother had us carry the jars of canned food down to the cellar when it was preserved. We had to really be careful not to drop a jar because it would break and would be a mess to clean up with glass and all. There was a certain way you could carry 4 or 5 at a time if you were able. Sometimes we carried them in a dishpan. At suppertime, we had to go down into the cellar to get vegetables, fruits, and meat to prepare.
When I was very small, I remember the family making molasses. We had a mule then. Her name was Old Bert. She was hitched to a pole and this pole turned the wheel that squeezed the juice from the cane. The mule went round and round. The juice spilled into a large vat that sat on a frame. Under the frame a good, hot fire was built that cooked the juice into molasses. It was cozy at night watching the making of molasses around the big fire. But I never could like molasses, although I did try.
Mothers bread was so good when it first came from the oven. It was so tempting to run off with a loaf and eat it. Naomi Lloyd and I did that several times. We took a loaf when mother wasn’t in the kitchen, and hid somewhere, and tore the outside crust off the loaf and ate it. Then we sneaked the ( white inside of the loaf)back on the table and went about our business like nothing was wrong. Mother never said a thing about her mangled up loaf of bread, she just used it to make milk soup or bread pudding. It was always fun making molasses, even stripping the stalks of their leaves so the stalks could be fed into the press to squeeze the juice out of them. You didn’t have to buy sugar to make molasses. That was good because sugar was hard to get in those days of rationing. To this day I can’t stand to eat molasses, we had to much of it, I guess.
I wonder if she made 8 loaves for the missing one?? Over the years I am sure she knew one might disappear.
I wonder if any of the older ones took a loaf too.
Lloyd often talks about his grandma’s (and mom’s) delicious bread. I need some recipes!
Grandma’s bread was amazing. I’ve never found a full loaf that I like nearly as well. The is a bakery in Lincoln that has small hard rolls that I think taste a lot like it.
Mahlon says you can’t go by Mom’s recipes cause she always added something else to it.
He always stole the middle from the loaf and turned it so Mom couldn’t see. I think she knew what was happening.
You girls must not of worked hard enough to get hungry. I ate molasses and bread at pretty near every meal. I really enjoyed it. My school lunch bucket would have the molasses in the bottom where it ran off the bread. It was a mess and sticky as …. but I ate it and it was good.
I ate it, but it was embarrassing.Like Mahlon said, it saturated the bread and ran to the bottom of the lunch tin which was usually a 1/2 gallon molasses bucket.One time we took pop corn because we hated molasses so bad. We always had popcorn and molasses and we had a lot of peanuts also(that was good)
I went hungry a lot of times because I wouldn’t eat the horrible molasses bread sandwiches.
Happy birthday, Rachel and Kenny!! Love from us all.