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Kitchen Tips From My Great Grandmother
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Sep 21, 2024
I wanted to share some of my great-grandmother’s, Ma Horton's, kitchen tips. They were handed down to us by her daughters, who put them in a family cookbook. I picked the top ten that I use in my own kitchen to share with you.
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Hi! Today I want to share 10 kitchen tips from my great-grandmother. In a previous
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talk, we shared household tips from my great-grandmother, and these are specifically kitchen tips. And there were some kitchen tips in there, I know, but
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these are specifically kitchen tips passed down from my great-grandmother, Ma Horton. They were handed down to us through her daughters, my grandmother, and
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her sisters. There were seven of them, and so I want to share them with you. I was
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blessed as a child, and as children often do, I took for granted the people and the
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things around me. Not only was I blessed to know my maternal and paternal
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grandparents, but I knew my maternal great-grandparents and my paternal great-grandmother, Ma Horton and Grandma Elsie. Actually, Grandma Elsie is the
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woman who named me, so I have a lot of fond memories. I've come from a rich
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farming heritage, not because it was trendy, but because it's who they were. It
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was their life. It was all they knew. Generations, that's just all they knew
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and they are the reason that I am who I am, as far as my lifestyle, this
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homesteading, farming, country, whatever you want to call this self-sustaining sustenance lifestyle. And I wouldn't want it any other way. Now, 10 kitchen tips
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from my great-grandmother. You have made a soup, and it's too salty. You've cooked
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some vegetable, and you double salted it, or you put more than you intended to
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Mix a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar and just a sprinkling of sugar, and add
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it to that, and it should remedy the problem. Number two, this is about farm
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fresh eggs, not the eggs you buy at the grocery store, because they've been
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washed and bleached and, you know, all of that. But, let's say you have a nest of
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eggs you found that you didn't know you had, or you keep your eggs in a basket
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like I do, and you don't know if you rotate it, or you just have a doubt. You
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want to be sure that it's a fresh egg. I use a mason jar if I'm just checking one
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or two eggs. You can use a big bowl or a pot, whatever you want. Fill it up with
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water all the way to the top, then drop the egg over in there, gently, of course
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You can add a little salt to the water if you want, but I don't find it to be necessary. If the egg sinks to the bottom, the egg is fresh. If the egg
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sinks to the bottom but tilts a little bit, it's fresh, but you need to use it
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If it floats at all, especially if it comes to the surface, but if it floats up
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don't use it. We would give that to the hogs, put the eggshells aside to bake
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and give back to the girls. You can put them in a compost pile, whatever you want to do with it, but do not eat it. Okay? Number three, no more lumpy gravy
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I was grown before I remembered this, and I don't even remember how I remembered it
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but it solved all my lumpy gravy problems. If I'm making gumbo, or just
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biscuits and gravy for breakfast, or whatever I'm making that needs a roux
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you get your oil hot, you put your butter in there, and you use a whisk
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I use a stainless steel whisk to stir it. Then when it's ready, you add the
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water, or the broth, or whatever you're making, and you stir it with the whisk
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and you will not have any lumps in there. In my memory, my grandmother's
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reminded me of a straw broom, so I'm guessing it was made out of broom straw
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Her whisk was my great-grandmother's, and my grandmother used a stainless steel
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whisk, which actually I still have, but I don't use it because I'm just nostalgic
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that way. Okay, no more lumpy gravies. Number four, for meringue, if you're
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making a pie, and you want a meringue that will not fail you, and that won't be
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weepy, you can add a teaspoon of cornstarch to the sugar before you add
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the sugar to the egg whites. So, you've got your egg whites beating, you've got
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your sugar measured out, add a teaspoon of cornstarch to that, mix it up really well, and then do it like you would always do it. Add the sugar slowly to the
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meringue. It won't weep or fail. Number five, now I don't use aluminum foil or
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plastic wrap, and I don't know when they became popular. My great-grandmother died
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when she was 85, and at that time she lived with my aunt, so I don't know at
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what point she became acquainted with plastic wrap or aluminum foil. I do know
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that she used a lot of butcher paper, but to keep it from sticking to the top
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of your pie or anything, the cake, anything you've made that you don't want
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the covering sticking to, you can rub it with butter. I used beeswax, and my
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great-grandmother used beeswax. She had a bar of beeswax that she kept in the
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pantry. I don't know where she got it from, where it came from. I don't know, but it was there. I used beeswax for my face cream, for some preserving
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applications, and for dusting. Rub it on my cloth and dust. That's my household tip
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but I use parchment paper, unbleached parchment paper, and I do rub butter or
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the beeswax over the top of it if I've got something I don't want it to stick
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to, and it works a wonder. Number six, a cloth, a cotton cloth, a dish towel. I
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prefer to use cheesecloth for this application, but if you put a little
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apple cider vinegar on that, it's your cloth, your cheesecloth, whatever, it's
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damp with apple cider vinegar. You wrap it around your cheese block, and it will
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not dry out. You may have to refresh it, you know, if you take it out of the
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refrigerator, and it will dry out in the refrigerator, so you may, whenever you cut a slice of cheese off, just re-dampen your cloth, but it will keep it from
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drying out. Now, you're making cream, whipped cream, for the top of your chocolate pie
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because that's just what comes to mind, or your coconut cream pie, whatever you want whipped topping for. I like Cool Whip, but it's homemade. So, if you put your, of
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course, your cream is already in the refrigerator, but I put my stainless steel mixing bowl and my stainless steel whisk that I use in the refrigerator
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for an hour or so, and let them get really good and cold. Take it out, pour
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the cold cream over in there, whip it up. If they're cold, it won't get soupy. It
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will stay fluffier, you know, stay whipped better in the refrigerator longer. I'll
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get that out in a minute. Sometimes, I like to add a little vanilla to my whipped
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topping. If you add an egg white to your whipped topping, and then let it, it's a
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good and cold egg white, because I keep my eggs, my farm eggs, on the counter, so I
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have to put it in the refrigerator to get it good and cold. There you go, getting good and cold, and you put it in and then beat it into there. It'll take care of the
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soupiness, the egg white will. It makes more of a meringue now, instead of a
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whipped topping, so you just be aware of that. I don't, I don't really do that
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unless I'm going to make a meringue, just because of egg safety precautions, so
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that's just out there, because that's what she told them to do. Brown sugar. Now
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everybody talks about bread, putting a piece of bread, and she did put a piece
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of bread in her brown sugar when she had bread, but feeding the kids and
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everything, they didn't have a lot of leftover bread. If it was hard, she'd put
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a piece of bread in there, and it would soften it up. If they had apples, if
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apples were in season, she would put a slice of apple over in her brown sugar
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crock. It was a crock about this big, and it was actually brown with a little
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ceramic lid, you know, on it. Excuse me, so a pottery crock is what it was. She
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kept her brown sugar in, she would keep a slice of apple over in there. When
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apples weren't in season, or they didn't have them available, she would put a
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slice of bread over in there. So, that's, well, now I don't keep brown sugar. I make
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my own brown sugar, and that recipe is on the Farmer's Lamp, so because we don't
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use a lot of sugar, this doesn't make sense for me to buy it, especially. I just make it when I need it. So, this next tip, number nine, it only applies to farm-fresh
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bacon, but, and I think it's because I tried it with store-bought bacon. It
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doesn't work, and I think it's because of all the preservatives and the
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nitrites and nitrates and all they're in that are in most bacon and in the
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processing, and it's thinner than what we do here at home when we butcher our
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hogs. So, but if you have, or you can buy it from Seven Sons. If we don't have a
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hog to butcher, we do buy pork from Seven Sons. Fantastic! Won't get any better
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outside of making it yourself. No, we're not an affiliate. We're just a very
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satisfied customer. Love them. Love what they stand for. Love what they do. So
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Seven Sons. Now, to keep your bacon pieces from curling up, place them in a
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bowl of cold water just for a few minutes while your skillet's
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heating up. Place it in there. Take it out of the water and pat it. You just let it
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rip dry, you know, pat it a little bit, and then put it in the hot skillet. Now, she
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used cast iron, and of course, so do I, and she used farm fresh bacon because
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they raised their own and smoked it. My grandparents raised their own and smoked
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it. So, and we do grow some of our pork and smoke it. So, that, you know, there's
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there's something to that that's just, there's nothing else smells like it. I
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can still, in the morning sometimes, if my husband beats me up and I smell the coffee and the bacon, it just takes me back to being a child because those
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smells, those ties with memories. But, off of that rabbit trail, that will keep it
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from rolling up. If you've ever had real thick sliced bacon from, that you've
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bought at the farmer's market or from a butcher shop or something, it'll curl up
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on you, but that'll keep it from curling up. Number 10. If you're measuring honey
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or syrup or something like that that will stick to the inside of your cup
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just take your fingers and get them moist. I use coconut oil. You can use any
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oil you want and just run it around the inside of that cup. Just a light coating
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You don't want a lot in there. Then measure your honey or your syrup, whatever sticky substance that you're measuring, and it'll pour right out. Rinse
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it with hot water and you're good to go. My Horton's kitchen smelled like molasses
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cookies. And my grandmother's kitchen is biscuits and bacon and coffee. And you go
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into my Horton's house and the first thing she would say is, go to the cookie jar and get you a cookie. She had molasses cookies or sugar cookies or a
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cake or a pie every time you went. My great-grandmother, Elsie, the one who
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named me, always had a German chocolate cake for me. And when she got too old to
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make them, she would buy those Petrusch Farm German chocolate cakes. And even
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today, German chocolate cake is my favorite cake. And not many people in my
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family enjoy it like I do, so I don't make it very often. But when I do, oh wow
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yeah. Now these helpful kitchen tips were used by my great-grandmother, my
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grandmother, my mother, and now me. And I'm sure you have family treasures of your
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own. I would love to hear them. Share your tips with us and be sure to check out
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the Farmer's Lamp for more posts from my great-grandmother's recipes
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