Vegetable Stand

There’s a vegetable stand we like to stop at in the summer once local veggies and fruit start coming in. It’s on a side road so not everyone knows about it. In the front yard of a small well kept brick house, protected from the elements by one of those portable carports with the plastic roofs. 

It’s on the honor system. Prices are written on a white board, and you do your shopping, then put the money in a slot in the top of a metal box. Last week when we stopped, there were beautiful peaches, yellow squash, silver queen corn, white potatoes, cucumbers, and…. wait for it …. home grown tomatoes. 

We bought some of almost everything. And that night had a memorable vegetable supper of fried yellow squash, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, and coleslaw. Along with iron skillet cornbread, sliced tomatoes and vidalia onion. And fried peach pies for dessert. It all tasted wonderful, and brought back memories of my grandmother’s kitchen when I visited every year on summer break.

All that was missing from the meal was her green beans, long cooked with pork belly. This was before pork belly became a staple as an appetizer in hipster restaurants. A humble cut of meat marked up astronomically. I love it as a seasoning agent in beans. On a bed of arugula with five spice maple glaze, not as much.

My grandparent’s house was on a nice sized piece of land in Cherokee County, where I learned to shoot but not really hunt. I was way too tender-hearted to actually kill anything. My grandfather plowed up a half acre of bottomland for my grandmother’s garden spot. And in case you don’t think in acres, a half acre vegetable garden is a big ass garden. I would look out my bedroom window in the mornings and see her broad brimmed straw hat in amongst the pole beans. She had a short three legged pine stool my grandfather had made for her, that she could carry around, and sit and weed, or pick. A large old apple tree stood at one end of the garden, and in Fall we had fried apple pies, small turnover affairs fried in lard and sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. Unbelievably delicious.

I am certainly biased, but my grandmother was one of the great southern cooks, all the more improbable because of her handicap. Working in the cotton mill as a girl, she had been hit in the head by a spinning loom handle, which knocked her completely out on the mill floor for twenty minutes. When she awoke she no longer had a sense of smell or taste. In spite of this her seasoning of food was always spot on. A small miracle in itself.

I thought about all this as we left the vegetable stand the other day, and on the way home took a slight detour by the old homeplace. It’s completely unrecognizable now, torn down and leveled off for storage units. Lots of storage units. A high fence rings the property, right by a Home Depot, which overlooks the cemetery where they’re both at rest. There goes the neighborhood I guess. Or maybe progress, depending on one’s viewpoint.

But we had a couple of bags of fresh fruit stand vegetables, and that night shared that fine southern dinner, a tribute to our mothers and grandmothers, and generations of home taught southern chefs. It wouldn’t be exactly the same, as I don’t normally use lard for frying. But then, on a whim and at the last minute, I stopped into the grocery store and bought some. And slipped a little in, just for tradition.