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96
STORAGE WARE FOR AUTUMN CANNING
In the late summer and fall, demand increased markedly for
storage ware in which to preserve, or put up, a wide variety of farm
meats, fruits, and vegetables. It was a time of considerable activity for
Cheever Meaders, who, like all potters in the region, was taking in his
farm harvest as well as trying to keep up production in the ware shop.
For him it meant round-the-clock effort: "Oh, good grief, couldn't do
it! What about six or eight wagons a-standing up there, come every
day a-wanting pott'ry to put dieir stuff in, and us might near working
day and night at it. It was more so that way in the fall of the year when
stuff was getting ripe and ready to put up."
In preserving meat, butchered beef and hog meat were mosdy
dried and cured in a smoke house; other meat was salted and layered
in long bins. When Arie Meaders was a youth, some local hunters
brought her family their rabbit catch, which the Waldrops skinned
and hung in the chimney jamb for smoke curing. When Arie's mother
desired to cook one of the carcasses for gravy and meat, she would
simply haul it down from its perch.
A popular alternative to drying meat was to pickle it in four-gallon
churns (fig. 40). Hog meat was very often prepared in this manner.
Because the pickling was done in vinegar solution, the churns were
not sealed tighdy; only a wooden lid was set in place to keep foreign
matter out. What was important, however, was that the pottery
vessels be completely leak resistant, as Lanier Meaders cautions: "If
you butcher a beef and start pickling the beef in die churn and die
vinegar starts dripping out wimout your knowing, it isn't long before
you've got a rotten can of beef." Consequendy, the Meaderses nearly
always applied their most durable glaze, ash glaze, to dieir pickling
churns. Smaller churns were also used to store lard —a mainstay for
shortening, seasoning, and frying. 4
Like meat, winter vegetables were preserved in a variety of ways.
During the growing season, the Waldrops and Meaderses garnered
and ate fresh cornfield beans while they were still "green and snappy."
Later, at harvest time, most of the remaining beans were thrashed out
and were either dried in die sunshine on board scaffolds or were
threaded togedier in their pods and hung up on the porch or in die
kitchen. Once dried, these "leatherbritches" were then stored away in
wooden sugar barrels. Prior to cooking, they were soaked in warm