25 FORGOTTEN 1960s Foods Served at Every Black Barbecue!

In 1962, a 55-gallon steel drum was sliced lengthwise in a Memphis backyard, hinged with chain and packed with hickory by a man who worked porter at the Peabody. The smell carried. Saturdays, the whole block skipped church for the smoke. Number 19 on this list cost six cents a servant in 1965. Number 14 was the dish your grandmother in Watts carried to a folding table in July, 1967. Number nine on this list was made from the parts the white grocer wouldn't put in his case. These 25 dishes fed black neighborhoods through voter drives, church picnics and Saturday block parties when the city wouldn't. None of these dishes were lost. The block parties got broken up by the Reagan years and the recipes stayed in the basements. Hit subscribe and stay with us. Here are the 25 forgotten 1960s foods served at every black barbecue. Number 25, pork ribs cooked low in mustard sauce. The cut came from a butcher who sold them to black customers at half the price of the loin because the white side of the counter wouldn't buy ribs. The man at the drum brushed your slab with French's yellow mustard thinned with vinegar, brown sugar and a spoon of cayenne. He laid them bone side down for three hours. He didn't lift the lid, not once. The mustard turned to a glaze the color of an old penny and the meat pulled back from the bone before he ever touched it with tongs. A slab fed four people at your folding table for less than a dollar in 1963. The block knew the smell first. The mustard sauce was the part most barbecue books left out. White cookbooks called it a mistake. Your grandmother knew better. The ribs were the headline. Everything else was the supporting cast. Number 24, hot links from the East Texas butcher. The hot link was invented by a German in Pittsburgh, Texas in 1897. But black butchers in Louisiana and Mississippi rebuilt the recipe. Shoulder trim, cayenne, garlic, red pepper that lit up the back of your throat. By the early 1960s, every black barbecue stand from Beaumont to Chicago had a stack of hot links wrapped in butcher paper ready for the coals. They were grilled until the casing split and the fat ran clear. A man working the registration drive in Hattiesburg in 1964 could buy two links and a slice of white bread for 50 cents and feel like he'd eaten a meal. The links were spicy enough that your child took one bite and handed the rest back. The grown man finished them and asked for more. Here's how cheap they were. A link cost a dime. A dollar fed your whole family. Number 23, smoked turkey wings off the drum. A whole turkey was a Thanksgiving thing. The wings were a barbecue thing. They cost almost nothing in 1965 because no white restaurant served them. Your grandmother salted them heavy on Friday night, rubbed them with paprika and dry mustard on Saturday morning and laid them on the cool side of the drum for four hours. The skin pulled tight. The color turned to strong coffee. The meat under the skin stayed soft enough to eat with a spoon. Your cousins fought over the drumette end. Your uncles claimed the flat. By the time the church bus pulled up, every wing was wrapped in foil and stacked in a pan on the kitchen counter. A pound of wings fed five people for less than the price of a movie ticket. The cheapest cut, the hungriest table, the proof was on the plate. Number 22, brisket cooked on the drum. A whole brisket cost a quarter a pound in a Houston meat market in 1962. White cooks didn't know what to do with it. Black cooks rubbed it with salt, pepper, garlic powder and a spoon of brown sugar and put it on the drum at sunrise with the fat cap up. They tended the fire from a steel folding chair while your children played in the yard. Eight hours later, the bark was black and the inside was red and the slices fell apart on a paper plate. A man in his Sunday shirt cut against the grain with a kitchen knife and laid each slice on a piece of white bread. The bread soaked the juice, the edge turned pink. People ate the bread first and asked for the meat after. The smoke on a Houston Sunday was thick enough that you could find the brisket from two streets away. Number 21, smothered chicken cooked over coals. The yard birds were tough. A grandmother in Birmingham in 1961 would put boil them on the stove first then move them to the drum to finish in a pan of onion gravy made from the drippings. The chicken absorbed the smoke from the lid and the salt from the gravy at the same time. The gravy thickened on the coals. The meat held the heat. By the time the pan came off, the legs and thighs were tender enough to pull with a fork. She served it over a slab of cornbread and the gravy ran across your plate like a roadmap. Your child got the wing because the wing took longest to cool. The grown people got the thighs because the thighs were what tired hands deserved at the end of a long week. The recipe was simple. The hand that worked it wasn't. Number 20, grilled corn rubbed with bacon fat. The corn was bought in bushels from a country cousin who drove up from Tunica with the bed of his pickup full. A black father in Detroit in 1963 peeled the husk back, rubbed each ear with the bacon fat your grandmother had saved in a tin can on the stove, twisted the husk back over the kernels and laid the ears on the cool side of the coals. They steamed inside the husk for 20 minutes and turned the color of yellow gold. He pulled the husk off in the alley with a kitchen towel. The kernels burst in your child's mouth and tasted like butter and smoke at once. A dozen ears cost a quarter. Every ear got eaten. The cobs went to the compost the same day. Nobody bought corn from a can if the country cousin had made the drive. Number 19, hot water cornbread fried in the cast iron. The cornbread on a 1960s black barbecue table was not the sweet yellow kind they sell in supermarket boxes today. It was hot water cornbread mixed in a bowl with white cornmeal, salt and water hot enough to scald your fingers, then patted into hand shapes and dropped into a black skillet of bacon fat. Your grandmother in Greenville, Mississippi in 1963 made 40 pieces in a single afternoon. The fat had been saved in a coffee can on the back of the stove since Easter. Every drippings strained through a piece of cheesecloth and poured back in. She dropped the patties one at a time so the fat stayed loud. They came out crisp on the outside and soft as pudding on the inside and they cost about a penny a piece to make. The hot water cornbread was the platform under everything else on your plate. The collars leaked their pot liquor onto it. The ribs leaked their grease onto it. The deviled egg sat on top of it on the way to the picnic table. By the end of the night, every cousin had a folded paper plate stained yellow at the bottom and three pieces of cornbread missing from the stack on the kitchen counter. The hot water cornbread also traveled. It was the bread that went to the church bake sale, the funeral repast and the voter registration meeting in the basement of Mount Olive Baptist on a Tuesday night in March, 1964. The recipe was three ingredients and a hot pan. The lesson was older than the recipe. Now, here's what most cookbooks miss about hot water cornbread. It wasn't a substitute for any pretty yellow cake. It was its own thing, older than any cookbook on a Mississippi shelf and the recipe came north with your great grandparents during the great migration. It stayed in the family because it worked when nothing else did. One by one, every other bread on the picnic table changed. The cornbread didn't. Number 18, candied yams in the foil pan. Real sweet potatoes, not the orange kind from a can. A black mother in Houston in 1965 peeled 12 of them on Friday night, sliced them thick on the cutting board, layered them in a foil tray with butter, brown sugar, a pinch of nutmeg and a splash of orange juice and covered the tray with foil for the trip to the park. The foil tray went on a corner of the drum to warm. The brown sugar bubbled through the slits in the foil. Your kitchen smelled like the holiday before the holiday. A scoop of candied yams next to a slice of brisket was the plate every cousin wanted. The yams were the dish that crossed every line at the table. Your children ate them like candy. Your old folks ate them slowly with the back of a fork and remembered. The pan went home empty. The recipe got passed across the back fence the next morning to a neighbor who couldn't come. Number 17, deviled eggs from the chilled glass plate. A dozen eggs cost 40 cents in 1962 and a deviled egg was the cheapest fancy thing your hostess could put on a sidewalk table at a block party. She boiled them on Saturday morning, peeled them under cold water in a sink, sliced them lengthwise and mashed the yolks with mustard, mayonnaise, sweet pickle relish and a dash of paprika. The plate came out of the ice box covered with the clean dish towel. It stayed covered until the moment it hit the table. The first child to spot the plate got the corner egg. The second child got the egg next to it. By the time the men came back from the drum, the plate was half empty and your hostess was already laughing about it. She didn't mind. The plate was a sign that the children were comfortable enough to grab. A good party always lost its eggs first. Number 16, baked macaroni and cheese, the kind with three cheeses and a brown crust. The box kind didn't belong on this table. A black grandmother in St. Louis in 1964 boiled elbow noodles, drained them in a colander and built the casserole with sharp cheddar, mild cheddar and a small block of Velveeta for the smooth pull. She laid the noodles in a pan with butter, beat eggs and evaporated milk together in a bowl and poured the custard over the top. Another layer of cheese went on. The pan went into the oven. The crust came out blistered and brown. Your spoon dragged across the top, pulled three inches of melted cheese behind it. A scoop on your paper plate was the side that ended every argument about the meal. It was rich enough to fill a working man and cheap enough to feed a yard full of children. Number 15, vinegar coleslaw in the metal mixing bowl. Mayonnaise, coleslaw was for the picnic at the White Park. The Black Yard ran on vinegar coleslaw because vinegar coleslaw kept all afternoon in the heat without spoiling. A father in Oakland in 1963 shredded a head of cabbage on a handbox grater, tossed in shredded carrot and slivers of green pepper and dressed your bowl with cider vinegar, sugar, salt, celery seed and a splash of oil. The slaw sat in the kitchen for an hour while the flavors married. By the time the bowl hit the picnic table, the cabbage had wilted just enough to taste sweet at the bottom of the bowl and sharp at the top. A spoonful on a pulled rib sandwich cut the fat and woke up the bread. It was the side that made the rest of your plate work. Number 14, soul potato salad with mustard. The potato salad on a black barbecue table in 1962 was not the white potato salad from a deli case. It was his own dish with his own rules. Your grandmother in Watts on a Saturday in July, 1967 boiled six pounds of red potatoes in their scans, peeled them while they were still hot enough to burn your fingers and chopped them into chunks the size of a half dollar. The dressing was Duke's mayonnaise, French's yellow mustard, sweet pickle relish and a spoon of pickle juice straight from the jar. She mixed in chopped boiled egg, diced celery, chopped sweet onion and a pinch of celery seed. The salt was kosher salt, never iodized because iodized salt left a metallic taste in the mayonnaise. She covered the bowl with plastic wrap and chilled it overnight in the ice box so the flavors had time to settle. On Sunday morning, she spooned it into a serving bowl, smoothed the top with the back of a spoon, dusted paprika and a stripe across the surface and lay sliced boiled egg on top in a circle like the petals of a flower. The yellow mustard was the line in the sand, white potato salad in a deli case was pale and one note. The Watts version was yellow and tangy and sweet at the same time and the color came from the mustard the family had been buying for two generations. The bowl traveled to the church social, the family reunion, the block party and the Juneteenth gathering at the public park. A spoonful went next to the ribs, a spoonful went next to the macaroni, a spoonful went on the side of the plate next to a single deviled egg as a kind of garnish. The bowl went back to the kitchen at the end of the night with a quarter inch of potato salad in the bottom because somebody always wanted to scrape the corners. The recipe was simple, the hand was not. Now, here's the part few people talk about, the mustard wasn't just a flavor, it was a marker. A bowl of yellow potato salad on the picnic table told the cousin coming up the sidewalk which side of the park he was on and the people on his side passed the bowl back without ever needing to ask. Year after year, that bowl traveled the same neighborhood circle. Number 13, black eyed peas slow cooked with smoked ham hock. The peas were soaked overnight in a metal pot on the back porch. Your grandmother in Charleston in 1964 dropped a smoked ham hock into the pot at dawn, added an onion cut in half, a clove of garlic, a bay leaf and a couple of pinches of pepper and let the pot whisper on the stove all morning while she tended the rest of the spread. The ham hock fell off the bone and the peas thickened into a brown gravy. She lifted the bone out, picked the meat off in pieces and dropped the meat back into the pot. The peas went into a covered dish for the trip across town. The peas had been a new year tradition for two centuries but at a 1964 cookout, they showed up year round because the dollar stretched and the protein in the hock fed your household for two days running. A cousin home from the army ate two helpings and asked for a third. Number 12, baked beans with neck bone in the deep pan. Canned beans were the start. The transformation was the work. A father in Cleveland in 1965 doctored two cans of pork and beans with brown sugar, yellow mustard, ketchup, a chopped onion, a splash of molasses and a smoked pork neck bone he had bought for 15 cents at the corner store. The pan went into the oven for two hours and your kitchen filled with the smell of brown sugar and smoke. The beans came out thick and shiny, the neck bone falling apart at the touch of a spoon. He spooned the beans onto your paper plate next to the ribs and let the sauce run into the bread. Every child in the yard came back for seconds. The beans cost less than a dollar to build and fed 12 people without strain. Number 11, collards simmered slow in pot liquor over the coals. Two big bunches of collard greens washed three times in the kitchen sink to get the grit out. Your grandmother in Memphis in 1963 ripped the leaves off the stems by hand, stacked them in a tall pot with a smoked turkey neck, added water, salt, sugar, vinegar, red pepper flakes and an onion cut in half. She moved the pot to a corner of the drum smoker to simmer for three hours. The leaves cooked down to a quarter of their volume. The pot liquor at the bottom turned green and salty and smoky at the same time. People drank it straight from a coffee mug at the end of the meal. It was medicine. The greens went on your paper plate next to the cornbread. The cornbread soaked the liquor the way it was supposed to. Number 10, fried catfish from the Freshwater Lake. A father in Mound Bayou, Mississippi in 1962 went out to Lake Beulah at dawn with two cane poles and a coffee can of red worms. By 11, he was back in the yard with a stringer of channel catfish in the bed of the truck. He cleaned them on a board nailed to the back fence, dunked them in buttermilk, dredged them in yellow cornmeal seasoned with salt, pepper and a spoon of cayenne and dropped them into a black skillet of bacon fat heated over the coals. The cornmeal hit the fat and roared. The fish came out gold and crisp on the outside and white and sweet on the inside. A plate of fried catfish next to a paper bowl of pot liquor was the meal that married the river and the field on your same plate. The catfish was free if a man knew where to fish. Number nine, pickled pig feet from the Big Jaw on the counter. The white grocer in 1964 sold pig feet for 10 cents a pound because his white customers wouldn't eat them. A black butcher in your own neighborhood pickled them in a brine of vinegar, salt, sugar, garlic, peppercorns, bay leaf and a sliced onion and packed them in a one gallon glass jaw that sat on the counter of every corner store from Watts to Harlem. The jaw was the first thing your teenager saw when he walked in for a Coca-Cola. A pickled pig foot cost a quarter. It came wrapped in a piece of wax paper. He ate it on the curb outside, peeled the meat off the bone with his fingers, sucked the gelatin off the joint and threw the bone in the alley. The pig foot was a snack and a lunch and an act of cultural pride at the same time. The white world had thrown it away. The black world made it a treat. Number eight, cracklings from the Saturday morning rendering. A father with relatives back in Tunica, Mississippi in 1965 brought home pork fat from a hog his cousins had killed the week before. He cut the fat into squares, dropped them in a black pot on a drum and let them render slow for an hour. The fat melted into a clear amber liquid. The squares of skin shrank and curled and turned crisp and golden brown. He scooped them out with a slotted spoon, salted them on a paper towel and let them cool in a tin pan on your back porch. The cracklings went into a brown paper bag. Your children grabbed handfuls and walked them around the yard like popcorn at the picture show. The rendered fat went into a coffee can for next month's biscuits. Nothing was wasted. Nothing on the hog had ever been free. Number seven, pickled watermelon rind in the mason jar. After the watermelon was cut and eaten and the seeds were spit into the alley, the rind didn't go in the trash. Your grandmother in Charleston in 1964 took the green and white rind, peeled the green skin off with a paring knife, cut the white rind into chunks and pickled them in a brine of sugar, vinegar, cinnamon stick, clove and lemon peel. The jars sat on your pantry shelf for a month before the next gathering. By the 4th of July picnic, the rind chunks were translucent and sweet and tart and crisp at the same time. A spoonful next to a slice of brisket was a kind of dessert in the middle of the meal. The rind didn't get tossed. Nothing did. A jar in the pantry on a hot August Sunday was proof of a household that had thought ahead in March. Number six, banana pudding chilled in the cooler with the ice. The banana pudding came out of the kitchen in a glass bowl wrapped in a clean dish towel and went straight into the ice chest with the bottles of red drink. By the time it came out two hours later, the bowl was cold to the touch and the pudding had set firm enough to hold a spoon. Your grandmother in Atlanta in 1965 made it from sliced ripe bananas, vanilla wafers from a box of Nilla wafers and a custard built on the stove from sugar, egg yolks, evaporated milk, butter and vanilla extracts. She layered the bowl bananas, wafers, custard, bananas, wafers, custard until the bowl was full then crushed a handful of wafers across the top. The pudding fed 20 people and cost less than $2 to assemble. Every child wanted the corner with the most wafers. The bowl sat in the cooler until the last grown person had cleared their plate. The pudding was the reward for sitting still through the prayer. Number five, pound cake from the kitchen scratch recipe. Your grandmother in Birmingham in 1963 made it the old way. A pound of butter, a pound of sugar, a pound of flour, a pound of eggs, a splash of vanilla and the patience to cream the butter and sugar by hand for 10 minutes until the mixture was the color of yellow ivory. The cake baked in a tube pan for an hour and a half. Your kitchen smelled like a holiday. She let the cake cool on the counter, dusted the top with confectioner's sugar and wrapped the pan in foil for the trip. A slice of pound cake on your paper plate next to a slice of cold watermelon was the closing argument of the meal. The cake stayed moist for three days. The Birmingham church ladies in the same neighborhood had each been baking a pound cake every Saturday since the bus boycott and a pound cake on a folding table at a 1963 block party was the sign that some kind of normal had survived the previous Sunday. Number four, peach cobbler bubbling out of the deep pan. A father in Macon in 1964 bought a half bushel of fresh peaches from a roadside stand for a dollar and brought them to your mother's kitchen on Friday night. She peeled them in the sink, sliced them into a deep pan, sugared them, dusted them with cinnamon, dotted the top with butter and laid a sheet of homemade biscuit dough across the surface. The pan went into the oven for 40 minutes. The juice bubbled up around the edge of the dough and turned the corners of the biscuit dark gold. The cobbler came to the cookout still warm in a foil tent and your spoon broke the crust like it was breaking a promise. A scoop on your paper plate ran orange across the surface. The cobbler tasted like the orchard hadn't been an hour from the table. Number three, sweet tea by the gallon in the metal pitcher. The tea on a black barbecue table in 1965 was not the polite kind. It was the Southern kind. Your grandmother in Jackson, Mississippi brewed a gallon of black tea on a stove with six family size Lipton bags, dropped two cups of sugar into the hot water while it was still on the heat, stirred until the sugar dissolved into the brown liquor and poured the tea into a metal pitcher with a chunk of ice and four lemon slices. The pitcher came out to the table sweating in the August sun. Your glass was filled to the brim. The first sip was a sugar rush. The second sip was a memory. The pitcher was refilled four times in a single afternoon. By sunset, the lemon slices had turned soft at the bottom. Your children were running on pure tea. The heat had broken on the lawn. Number two, devil crab cakes folded with green pepper and cracker meal. The crab came from a cousin who worked the Chesapeake docks and rode the train back to Baltimore with a basket of fresh blue crab on Friday night. A black mother in West Baltimore in 1966 picked the crab meat by hand at your kitchen table on Saturday morning, mixed it gently with a beaten egg, mayonnaise, mustard, Worcestershire, a chopped green pepper, a chopped onion and a handful of cracker meal and shaped the mixture into eight cakes the size of a salsa. She fried them in butter on a black skillet until the outside was brown and the inside was still tender. A crab cake on a slice of white bread with a smear of yellow mustard was the East Coast contribution to the spread. The cakes were rich enough that a man ate one and stopped because he had to leave room for the cobbler. Number one, red drink in the middle picture with the moon ice. The red drink was the heartbeat of every black barbecue. And here's the part textbooks rarely mentioned. The color went back 400 years to West Africa where hibiscus flowers and kola nuts were boiled into a deep crimson tea that crossed the Atlantic with the people who drank it. By 1965, the recipe had become a packet of red Kool-Aid mixed with two cups of sugar and a middle picture of cold water from the tap or a six pack of big red soda from the corner store or a quart bottle of Faygo Red Pop pulled from your cooler with the bottles still beaded. The cup was passed to a child first because the child had been waiting all afternoon and the parents knew it. Your child took a long pull and grinned with red around the mouth. And that grin was the picture every grandmother kept in the back of her mind for the next 40 years. The red drink was not just a beverage. It was a kept promise from one ocean to another. These dishes were never written down because they were never meant to leave the yard. They moved from a grandmother to a daughter, from an uncle at the drum to a nephew holding the tongs, from a folding table on the sidewalk to a paper plate on your kitchen counter 40 years later. Try one this weekend. Pick the hot water cornbread or the soul potato salad and call somebody who knew the recipe before you did. Number three, army issue dried beans. Pinto, Navy, or whatever the subsistence department shipped that quarter. A Buffalo soldier received about a 10th of a pound per day, which sounds small until you stew it for six hours and watch a cup of dry beans become four cups of supper. The cooks at Fort Davis soaked beans overnight in canteens, then simmered them all day in a single iron pot with salt pork and a halved onion if anyone had one. By 1880, dried beans were the most reliable thing in the mess. They survived heat, weevils, and bad water. They filled a man up and kept him filled. Number nine on this list grew straight out of this same pot, only with chili and Mexican spice. Beans were the floor of every Western post kitchen. Here's what surprised me reading the regimental cookbooks. The bean pot was passed between cooks like a sacred object, never washed dry, only wiped, so each new pot tasted of the last. That habit is older than the army itself. Your grandmother in Mississippi worked her stew pot the same way. The continuity is the story. Number 17, smothered pork chops with rice and gravy. In-cut pork chops ran 89 cents a pound at the Piggly Wiggly in 1984, and a grandmother in Atlanta bought four of them on a Tuesday because Tuesday was when she let herself remember what Sunday used to taste like. She seasoned the chops with lauries, dredged them in flour, and browned them hard in Crisco until the bottom of the pan went brown and sticky. She lifted the chops out, sweated a chopped onion in the drippings, stirred in three spoons of flour, and poured in a cup of water and a splash of evaporated milk. The gravy turned the color of pecan shells. She nestled the chops back in, covered the pan, and let it simmer 40 minutes on the lowest flame, a pot of rice on the back burner. Your Sunday supper on a Tuesday. She set two plates out of habit. She ate from one and said, grace anyway. Number 23, chitlins with vinegar and hot sauce. This was the supper that tied a black family in Chicago directly back to a farm in the Delta because chitlins were the part of the hog. White folks had always thrown away. A woman on East Garfield would buy 10 pounds of chitterlings from the corner meat market for about 39 cents a pound, clean them in her kitchen sink for three hours, and simmer them on a low flame with an onion, a whole clove of garlic, and a bay leaf for four hours. The apartment would smell for two days. She served them in a shallow bowl with white vinegar and a bottle of red hot sauce, a slice of white bread on the saucer to sop up the pot liquor. Old timers from Alabama came from three buildings over when they heard she was cooking. They sat at her car table and they did not speak for the first bowl. That was reverence. That was a memory you could chew. This was no frozen grocery store pie. Venison pot pie came from hunters and homesteaders made with fresh shot deer meat that had been stewed for hours over low heat. It was mixed with carrots, potatoes, or wild onions if you had them, and poured into a rough pie crust made from flour and lard. The crust was thick, never flaky, and it needed to be. It had to hold up against days-old stew and keep well without a refrigerator. The pie would bake in a heavy Dutch oven, often buried in coals, while the smell filled the entire cabin. It was a special dinner, usually reserved for after a good hunt or around holidays when families gathered. You could slice it like cake and serve it warm or cold. It tasted like salt, smoke, and hard-earned luck. If you had enough venison to make two, you stored one under a towel for the next day. No one ever said no to a second helping. Number 22, Salmon Croquettes with White Sauce. The 15-ounce can of pink salmon at the corner grocery cost 49 cents in 1957, and your great-aunt in Detroit could feed four people from one can. She drained it, picked out the soft, round bones with her thumb, mashed the meat with a fork like pulling a thread, and stirred in a beaten egg, a half cup of cracker meal, a chopped onion, and a dash of black pepper. Six round patties fried in hot bacon grease until the outside went brown and crisp. While the patties drained on a brown paper bag, she made a white sauce from the drippings, two spoons of flour, and a tin of evaporated milk. The sauce went over your rice, the patties on top. The salmon was leftover Friday food in any White House. In a Black House, it was a Tuesday supper that tasted like Sunday. Number four, Green Coffee Beans. Until 1872, the army shipped coffee unroasted. Each company received raw beans, and somebody had to lay them in a skillet over the fire and roast them dark before anyone got a single cup. The smell of scorched coffee beans hung over every cavalry camp from Texas to the Dakotas like a signal flag. After 1872, John Arbuckle began packing pre-roasted coffee in one pound paper bags with a glaze to lock in freshness. Buffalo soldiers called it Arbuckles, and a bag became the most traded item in the regiment. You could buy favors with it. You could settle debts with it. A scout swapped two pounds of Arbuckles to an Apache scout for fresh antelope meat. Coffee was currency. Coffee was the first warm thing a soldier touched on a winter morning at Fort Robinson. It carried memory in a single cup. Your kin who served started his day this way two decades back. Same dark roast, same tin cup, hand to hand. Number 21, Oxtail and Onion Stew. Oxtails, onions, and water. Three ingredients and three hours of patience. Oxtails were the cut nobody wanted except the people who knew what to do with them. In Southern butcher shops, they cost less than 15 cents a pound through the 1950s. You brown them in a heavy pot, layered the onions around them, covered everything with water, and waited. The collagen broke down slowly, turning the broth into something almost sticky with richness. The meat melted without resistance. The onions disappeared into the liquid. A single pot served a family of six because the broth was so rich that a modest portion over rice was a full meal. Your grandmother did not call this a stew. She called it sundae. It could not be rushed. That was the whole point. Number 24, Hoe Cakes with Cane Syrup. A cast iron skillet on a wood stove in Hattiesburg, Mississippi in 1953, holding a quarter inch of bacon fat. Two cups of yellow cornmeal, a pinch of salt, hot water from a tin kettle mixed with a wooden spoon until the batter could be dropped flat. Three cakes at a time, the fat crackling around the edges like a wet match, the bottom going gold and crisp. The cane syrup came from a half gallon jug bought at the country store for 50 cents and poured slow over the hot cake until it pooled like dark honey. A glass of buttermilk on the side. Your great uncle ate supper standing at the counter because the table was being used for a quilting frame. Cornmeal had crossed an ocean on a slave ship and ended up on a plate in your great grandmother's brick row house. The skillet was older than the cook. Number 24, Fried Bologna Sandwich on Wonder Bread. A retired postal worker in Newark fried two slices of Oscar Mayer bologna in a dry pan until the edges curled up like a small bowl. He spread Mrs. Philbert's margarine on two slices of wonder bread and pressed the bologna between them with a slice of yellow American cheese. The cheese melted from the heat of the meat. He cut the sandwich on the diagonal because that was how his mother cut yours in Macon, Georgia in 1947. Bologna ran $1.19 a pound at the A&P. One pound made six sandwiches. He ate it standing at the counter with the radio tuned to the news. It was not country ham. It was not sundae. It was Tuesday after the rent. If you grew up on this sandwich, you remember the way the cheese melted onto your fingers. Number 25, Liver and Onions over Rice. The butcher in any small black neighborhood in 1955 sold beef liver for 15 cents a pound on Tuesdays after the weekend cuts had moved out the door. Your grandmother would slap two slices into a pan of bacon grease, salt and pepper them heavy, and cook a yellow onion down beside the meat until both went soft and dark like coffee grounds. She poured a thin gravy from the drippings. A teaspoon of flour stirred into the fat. Water from the kettle on your stove. The whole supper went over rice that had cooked while she was at the ironing board. The kids who hated it ate it anyway because there was nothing else and because she would not be told what her own children would or would not finish. Liver was iron and iron was what kept her standing through a double shift day after day. Your plate was clean by seven. Number 22, Sauce with Saltines. Sauce was the jellied meatloaf your grandmother made out of pig trotters ears and snout and it lived in the ice box on the top shelf wrapped in wax paper. A woman on Indiana Avenue, born in Selma, would boil the parts with vinegar, red pepper flakes, bay leaf, and a whole onion for five hours, pick the meat off the bones and pour the spice broth over it in a loaf pan. By morning, it had set into a cold, savory jelly. She sliced it thin and laid it on saltine crackers with a dab of yellow mustard. It was breakfast, lunch, or supper eaten standing up before a night shift at the stockyards. A pound of sauce cost about 15 cents to make and fed a grown man for three days. It is easy to forget that food like this was survival engineering handed down through generations. Prairie chicken was not chicken at all. It was wild grouse or quail, lean and gamey, and harder to catch than it was to cook. These birds were everywhere across the plains in the early days and they fed whole families with just one shot and a lucky morning. The dressing, what we would now call stuffing, was made with old bread, sage, and whatever herbs you could find or grow in the yard. When it was baked in a cast iron Dutch oven, the whole cabin would fill with the kind of scent that stopped everyone in their tracks. This meal showed up on tables for Sunday dinner or after a good hunting day. It reminded folks of home, even if that home was just four walls and a dirt floor. The meat might have been tough, the bread might have been stale, but put them together with sage and heat and they made magic. No one complained, not when it filled your belly and made the cold nights feel shorter. Number 19, smelt fry at the lakefront. Every April in the 1960s, black families from 43rd Street would walk down to 31st Street Beach at midnight with charcoal, cornmeal, and an old iron skillet. The smelt were running. Men stood knee deep in the freezing lake with dip nets and pulled up silver fish the size of a finger, a hundred at a pass. The women dredged the fish whole in seasoned cornmeal and fried them on a grill on the sand while the children slept on blankets. You ate them bones and all, crunching through the tail with a squeeze of lemon and a dash of hot sauce. A grandfather who had grown up fishing the Yazoo River would smile and say the lake remembered him. Here's the part that surprised me about that night on the beach. It was free food, fresh food, and a ritual that tied Mississippi boyhood to a Chicago spring. That mattered more than any restaurant meal ever did. Number 20, fried corn and bacon. Fresh corn scraped off the cob, fried in bacon drippings, salted, and served. Three ingredients that tasted like August in the South. You cut the kernels from the ear, then scraped the cob with the back of the knife to get the milk, that starchy liquid that made everything creamy when it hit the hot fat. Two strips of bacon fried first, pulled out and crumbled, and the corn went into the drippings until the edges browned. This was the dish that disappeared when families moved north and fresh corn came wrapped in plastic instead of pulled from the stalk. In the 1940s, a family with a garden and a hog had everything it needed from July through September. It cost nothing. A grandmother in Selma made this every summer evening and served it in the same bowl her mother had used. The bowl cracked in 1972. The recipe did not. Number 22, tuna and rice casserole. A retired bus driver in Cleveland kept his pantry to seven items by the middle of the month. Two cans of chicken of the sea, a box of minute rice, a can of Campbell's cream of mushroom, a sleeve of saltines, evaporated milk, an onion, and a brick of government cheese. He chopped the onion, browned it in margarine, stirred in the rice, the soup, the milk, and a splash of water, then folded in the drained tuna and a handful of crumbled saltines. He grated the government cheese over the top and baked it covered for 30 minutes. The casserole came out hot and binding and quiet. It fed him for three nights. The pan went into the sink and stayed there until morning. If you ever lived alone, you know that the dishes wait. He had stopped washing them after dark when he stopped having a wife to tell about his day. Tell us in the comments which dish your kin made, in Memphis, in Watts, in Detroit, because these were not just barbecue dishes. They were the proof that your community could feed itself when the city would not.