25 Forgotten Foods Served at Every Black Memorial Day Cookout in the 1960s South

In 1963, a man in Selma, Alabama started a Memorial Day pit at 3 in the morning. He had been home from Korea for 11 years. His brother went to the same war and never made it back. By noon, 40 people were eating in the yard. At the end of the table sat a plate that nobody would touch. Fresh food, still warm, replaced every hour by the women in the kitchen. Nobody picked it up. Nobody sat in the chair beside it. That plate is number 2 on this list. And when you hear why it was there, you will understand why Memorial Day in the Black South was never just a cookout. Number 10 is where the children stopped running and the yard got quiet. Number 1 is not actually a food at all. It is the last thing that happened before the cars pulled out. Let us count down the 25 forgotten foods served at every Black Memorial Day cookout in the 1960 South. Number 25. Whole hog ear sandwiches on white bread with hot sauce. The ear was slow-cooked for hours in a pot of seasoned water with bay leaves, garlic, and a splash of vinegar until the cartilage softened and the skin turned tender enough to slice thin with a sharp knife. Layed flat on a slice of white bread, doused in Louisiana hot sauce, and topped with a second slice pressed down until the bread soaked through with the juice. The texture was unlike anything else at the cookout. Part meat, part gelatin, part crunch, where the cartilage held its shape. Most people under 40 have never seen a hog ear sandwich served anywhere, let alone at a Memorial Day gathering. Most people under 40 do not know what they missed. A pit master in Greenville, Mississippi served hog ear sandwiches at every Memorial Day gathering from 1958 to 1979. He cooked the ears the night before in a pot on the back porch and kept them wrapped in a damp cloth in the icebox until morning. When his grandson asked him why he stopped making them, he said nobody knew how to cook ears anymore and he was tired of being the only man in the county who remembered how the knife was supposed to move through the cartilage. Number 24. Mutton ribs on the grill. Not beef, not pork. Mutton. The working man's rib. Cheaper than beef by half. Stronger in flavor and tougher to cook, which meant the pit master had to know what he was doing. The fat rendered differently than pork. The smoke clung to mutton the way it clung to nothing else. A plate of mutton ribs in 1962 cost less than $1.50 to make and fed six people. Beef ribs cost three times as much and did not taste as good to the men who grew up eating mutton. The preference was not about money anymore. It was loyalty to a flavor that raised them. When the last generation of mutton ribs cooked past, the flavor went with them because nobody wrote down how long to smoke them or at what temperature. The knowledge lived in the hands and the hands are gone. Number 23. Grilled bologna sandwiches. The children's grill food. Thick slices of bologna scored at the edges so they would not curl. Laid directly on the grate next to the ribs, charred until the edges blistered and the center puffed up like a dome. Served on white bread with yellow mustard. A roll of bologna cost less than a dollar and made enough sandwiches for every child at the cookout. The children did not want ribs. The children wanted the bologna because it came off the grill faster and they could eat it with one hand while running through the yard with the other. A mother in Macon told her children the bologna was cooking and they stood at the grill watching it like it was the most important thing happening in the world. The ribs took four hours. The bologna took four minutes. The children chose speed every time. Number 22. Hot German potato salad with bacon and vinegar. This dish crossed an ocean in a soldier's memory. Black GIs stationed in Germany during World War II ate warm potato salad dressed with bacon drippings, vinegar and mustard at mess halls and at German tables in the towns where they were posted. When those soldiers came home, they carried the recipe in their heads and taught their wives to make it. The dish landed on Memorial Day tables across Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia because these men wanted to eat something that reminded them of a place they had survived. A veteran in Tuskegee served German potato salad at every Memorial Day cookout for 22 years. His wife made it because he asked her to every spring. After he passed, she kept making it because the table looked wrong without it. That salad was the taste of a man remembering a war he fought in a country that was not his own, brought home to a country that did not fully welcome him back. If that entry just surprised you, wait until you hear what number 18 did with a bucket and a mock. Number 21. Smoked turkey necks pulled out of the freezer from winter. Frozen in December after the holiday bird was stripped down to the carcass, the necks were wrapped tight in foil, then sealed in a freezer bag, then buried in the back of the freezer behind the ice cream and the bread where nobody would find them and eat them before May. Thawed the night before Memorial Day in a bowl of cold water on the kitchen counter and reheated on the grill the next morning where the low smoke deepened a flavor that had been developing for five months. Inside that foil, the turkey necks were not fresh and they were not supposed to be. The freezer was the aging room. The time was a technique. A grandmother in Montgomery kept turkey necks in her freezer for up to eight months and said the cold made the collagen tighten and the smoke concentrate into the meat. Whether that was science or superstition did not matter to anyone at the table. The turkey necks tasted like they had been smoked twice, once in November and once in May, and that double smoke was a flavor that no fresh turkey neck could replicate. The men at the grill pulled the meat off the bone with their fingers and ate it standing over a paper plate, the smoke still rising off the neck in the morning air. 20. Pickled Beets and Boiled Eggs in the Same Jar The eggs went into the beet juice three days before the cookout and sat in the back of the refrigerator where the cold and the acid did their work slowly. The beet juice seeped through the shell first, then through the white, then all the way to the yolk until the entire egg had turned a deep wine purple that looked almost artificial but tasted like the earth and vinegar had gotten together and made something sacred. The beet juice stained everything it touched. Fingers, plates, table cloths, the front of a white shirt if you were not careful. The jar was the most dangerous item on the Memorial Day table and the older folks ate from it like they were handling something precious because to them it was. A child in Birmingham reached into the jar without permission and got beet juice down the front of a white church shirt that had been worn to the cemetery that morning. The shirt never recovered. It became a play shirt. The child learned to ask before reaching into any jar at any table for the rest of his life. Number 19. Souse on Ritz crackers. Head cheese, the pressed meat made from the head of the hog, set in its own gelatin, sliced thin and served cold on Ritz crackers. The younger generation walked past the plate without slowing down. The older generation sat with it like it was an old friend they had not seen since last Memorial Day. A grandfather in rural Georgia ate souse at every cookout from the time he was a boy in the 1930s until the year he passed in 2001. His grandchildren never tasted it. He never asked them to. He said souse was for people who remember what it was like to eat everything because you had to and the children who grew up with choices did not need to understand the version of life that had none. The Ritz cracker was the only concession to modernity. In his childhood, the souse was eaten on cornbread. The cracker was easier. The souse was the same. If you have ever watched an older relative eat something the rest of the table refused to touch, you know exactly what this looked like. Number 18. The pit master's secret sauce. Every Memorial Day cookout had one man in charge of the grill and that man had a souse recipe he guarded like classified information. Mixed in a bucket behind the grill where nobody could see what went in, applied with a mop made from a stick and a clean rag tied to the end, dipped into the bucket and dragged slow across the meat in long strokes that left streaks of dark red across the ribs. The bucket sat on the ground next to the pit and the man positioned himself between the bucket and whoever was watching so the ingredients stayed hidden. If you asked for the recipe, he gave you a version that was close but deliberately missing one thing. The missing ingredient was always different depending on who asked. A cousin got a recipe without the apple cider vinegar. A neighbor got one without the brown sugar. A pit master in Jackson mixed his souse at four in the morning before anyone else arrived. His son watched him once through the kitchen window at dawn and counted 14 ingredients going into the bucket. When the father died in 1981, the son tried to recreate the souse from memory. 13 of the 14 were correct. The 14 has never been identified. The son has been making the souse with 13 ingredients for 44 years and every Memorial Day, someone at the table says it tastes close but not the same. Close is the best anyone has ever gotten. The links were never the main event. They sat in a foil pan away from the direct heat, slowly warming, splitting at the casing, releasing juice into the foil. The links were the between food. What you ate while waiting for the ribs to finish. What you put on white bread with mustard when the potato salad was not ready yet. A man in Tupelo kept his links on the cool side of the grill for so long that the casing turned crispy and the fat inside rendered down to nothing. When someone asked him why the links were so far from the coals, he said the links know where they belong. But the hot links were sometimes better than the ribs themselves. And saying so out loud at a Memorial Day cookout was a violation that could get you removed from the pit master's circle of trust for the rest of the summer. This was the cold version. Elbow macaroni tossed with mayonnaise, sweet pickle relish, diced pimentos, celery, and hard-boiled eggs. Served in a bowl on ice and tasted better after sitting in the sun for two hours than it did straight from the refrigerator. The warmth brought the sweetness out of the pickles and softened the bite of the onion. A woman in Mobile made her macaroni salad the night before every Memorial Day and left it in the refrigerator uncovered so the top layer would dry slightly and form a thin crust that sealed the moisture inside. She said the crust was the secret. Her daughters never managed to replicate it. Memorial Day in the Black South was not just a cookout. It was the one gathering each year where the table carried a meaning heavier than the food on it. The men standing at the grill had served in wars that asked everything of them and gave almost nothing back. The women who cooked had sent brothers, husbands, and sons to places they could not pronounce and waited for letters that sometimes stopped arriving. The children running through the yard did not understand yet why the adults went quiet for a moment before the first plate was made. They would understand later. They always did. And before we continue, if you want to actually cook these recipes, instead of just remembering them, we put together a collection of printable recipe guides with the exact dishes your grandmother made. The ones that were never written down, written down for the first time so they do not disappear with the generation that created them. It is called Grandma Made A Way and you can grab it right now from the link in the description. Every guide sold helps us keep making these videos. Number 15 Saltine Crackers and Sardines What the men ate while sitting at the grill before the real food was ready. A tin of King Oscar or Brunswick sardines, a sleeve of saltines, and a bottle of hot sauce arranged on the tailgate of a truck at 7 in the morning. The men stood around the pit eating crackers and fish and not saying much because the morning of a Memorial Day cookout was working time. The sardines were the fuel for building the fire, arranging the grate, hauling the coolers from the bed of the truck, and setting up the folding tables that had been leaning against the garage wall since last Memorial Day. An uncle in Dothan, Alabama ate sardines and saltines at every cookout for so long that his nieces and nephews bought him a case of King Oscar sardines every Christmas. He kept them stacked in the pantry like currency. When he passed, the family found four unopened tins in the pantry and nobody could bring themselves to eat them. The tins are still there. Number 14 Poop Cheese on a Paper Plate A wheel of orange cheddar the size of a small tire sitting on the table under a sheet of wax paper, sliced with a pocket knife by a man who had been carrying that knife for 30 years and sharpening it on the same whetstone his father gave him. The cheese was out before the grill was lit. Poop cheese was pre-cookout food, the thing you ate standing in the yard while the coals were getting started and the women were still inside finishing the sides. The man who sliced it controlled the portions with the slow authority of someone who had paid for the wheel out of his own pocket. Thick slices for the grown folks, thin slices for the children. The cheese sweated in the heat and by noon the edges had turned slightly translucent and the older men said that was when it tasted best, warm and soft and just starting to turn. By 2 o'clock the wheel was down to nothing and the paper plate was stained orange in a perfect circle. Number 13 Boiled Peanuts Wrapped in Newspaper Coves Served in cones twisted from yesterday's newspaper because the newspaper absorbed the salt water dripping from the shells and kept the hands dry enough to keep eating. A woman in Valdosta boiled peanuts in a stock pot on the back porch the morning of every Memorial Day cookout. The children circled the pot the way children circle an ice cream truck. The peanuts were ready when the shells could be cracked between two fingers without effort. A handful in a newspaper cone cost nothing to make and kept a child occupied for 15 minutes, which in 1963 was long enough for the adults to finish a conversation about the mortgage that they did not want the children to hear. Number 12 Three Bean Salad with that Sweet Tangy Dressing Kidney beans, green beans, and wax beans in a dressing made from vinegar, sugar, and oil in proportions that belonged to one woman in the family and that woman adjusted by taste without measuring a single thing. The salad sat on the table all day and tasted better at 4 o'clock than it did at noon because the heat softened the beans and the sugar in the dressing deepened as the afternoon wore on. A daughter in Hattiesburg asked for the recipe in 2004. The answer was, there is no recipe. You have been making it since I was born. Exactly. I make it until it tastes right and right is not a measurement. The daughter tried the following Memorial Day from memory. Beans right, vinegar right, sugar wrong. One taste and the verdict was more sugar. How much? The mother took the spoon and added sugar for six seconds. That was the measurement. Six seconds of an old woman's hand. If that story sounds like your family, you are watching the right video. Number 11 Pickled Pig's Feet from a Jar The older uncles claimed them before the table was officially opened. The jar sat in the sun all afternoon on the end of the table closest to the lawn chairs where the old men sat playing dominoes and talking about people who were not there. The feet had been cured in vinegar and brine with pickling spices, bay leaves and red pepper flakes. The meat was soft and gelatinous and fell off the bone in strips that the uncles ate slowly, pulling each piece apart with their fingers and chewing with the patience of men who had nowhere else to be. The younger generation walked past the jar the same way they walked past the Souths. The older generation ate from it with a reverence the young people would not understand until they were old enough to miss the men who sat in those lawn chairs. The vinegar? The brine? The pig's feet? The 90 degree heat? Nobody got sick. The medical opinion of every uncle who ate pickled pig's feet in the sun was that vinegar kills everything and a man who survived Korea could survive a jar of pig's feet. Microbiology would disagree. The uncles did not consult microbiology. Number 10 is where the children took over and the adults sat down and the cookout shifted from noise to something quieter. Number 10 Hand Cranked Peach Ice Cream A wooden bucket packed with ice and rock salt. A metal canister inside filled with custard and fresh peach slices. A crank handle on top that the children took turns operating while the adults sat in lawn chairs holding drinks and offering detailed criticism of the cranking speed and technique. Too fast and the custard would not freeze evenly. Too slow and the ice would melt before the cream thickened. The ice cream was ready when the crank refused to turn anymore. That resistance meant the custard had frozen solid around the paddle and the child who had been cranking longest got to lick the paddle before anyone else touched it. A boy in Tuscaloosa cranked the ice cream at his family's Memorial Day cookout every year from age 8 to age 17. The bucket was heavy and the handle was stiff and the rock salt stunned the cuts on his hands but he cranked until his arm burned because being the ice cream boy was the most important job a child could hold at a Memorial Day cookout. At 18 he went to Vietnam. When he came home two years later his mother had the bucket packed and waiting in the yard and he cranked it standing in the same spot as if the two years between had been two minutes. 47 years later his daughter cranks it in the same spot in the same yard. The bucket is different because the original finally cracked. The recipe has not changed. The spot in the yard has not moved. The tradition survived a war and a generation and a cracked bucket because someone decided it was worth keeping. Grandmother's tea cakes made the night before the cookout so they would be cool and firm by morning. Not cookies, tea cakes. Soft, plain, lightly sweet. Rolled by hand on a floured counter and cut with the rim of a drinking glass because the cookie cutter was lost in the 1970s and replacing it would have meant admitting the glass did not work just as well. Tea cakes were the dessert that nobody under 30 asked for and everybody over 60 reached for first. The younger generation wanted brownies or cookies from a box. The older generation wanted tea cakes because tea cakes tasted like their mother's kitchen on a Wednesday afternoon when the house was quiet and the oven was warm. A grandmother in Pine Bluff made tea cakes for Memorial Day every year from 1947 to 2002. 55 years of the same recipe, the same counter, the same glass for cutting. When she stopped, her granddaughter asked for the recipe. The grandmother pointed at the counter, the glass and the oven and said, those are the recipe. Everything you need is standing right there. The granddaughter started making tea cakes the following year. Using her grandmother's glass, the shape was identical. The taste was close. Close was good enough because close meant the tradition survived. Number eight, sweet potato pone, not pie, pone. The rougher, older version baked in a cast iron pan until the edges darkened and pulled away from the sides and the center stayed dense and chewy with a texture that sat heavy on the tongue. Pone came before pie in the history of black southern baking. Grated raw sweet potato mixed with molasses or brown sugar, a little flour, butter, eggs and whatever spices were in the cabinet. Cinnamon always. Nutmeg if there was any. Ginger in some families. The result was earthier and heavier and closer to the sweet potato itself than any pie could manage because the pie was refined and the pone was not trying to be. A grandmother in Demopolis made sweet potato pone in the same cast iron pan every Memorial Day from 1948 until 1991. The women who made pone considered pie a shortcut. The women who made pie considered pone outdated. Both were served at the table every Memorial Day and the argument about which was better lasted longer than the cookout and was never resolved because both sides were right and nobody was willing to say so. Number seven, Memorial Day pound cake. Every black family had a pound cake baker and the pound cake baker made a cake for every occasion. Christmas pound cake, funeral pound cake, birthday pound cake. And Memorial Day pound cake. The recipe never changed. A pound of butter, a pound of sugar, a pound of flour, a pound of eggs. What changed was the intention behind it. The Memorial Day cake was baked for the living and the dead. It sat on the dessert table between the banana pudding and the tea cakes and it was always the last dessert cut because slicing the pound cake meant the cookout was officially entering its final hours. Once the pound cake was cut, the day was winding down. A woman in Natchez baked her Memorial Day pound cake at five in the morning and drove it to her brother's house still warm in the pan, the car smelling like butter and vanilla for the entire drive. She made that drive for 31 years until her eyes would not let her drive at dawn anymore. Her daughter made the drive after that. The recipe never changed. The pan never changed. And the road never changed. The only thing that changed was the hands on the steering wheel. Number six, banana pudding in a Pyrex dish with the lid that never matched. Vanilla custard cooked on the stove from scratch, layered with Nilla wafers and sliced bananas, topped with meringue and browned under the broiler. Made at dawn while the house was still quiet. The wafers softened into the custard across the morning hours and by noon the whole thing had transformed into a single texture that was neither cake nor pudding nor cream but something that required its own word and never got one. A woman in Shreveport made her banana pudding so early on Memorial Day morning that her husband said the roosters had not started and she was already layering wafers. By three o'clock the dish was scraped clean. By four o'clock someone was walking through the yard asking who made the banana pudding and whether there was a second pan hidden in the kitchen. There was never a second pan. The woman who made it knew exactly how much to make and she made exactly that much because running out meant people remembered her pudding all year. Running out was the goal. Every sweet thing on the Memorial Day table carried a weight that the children running through the yard did not understand yet. The pound cake was baked by a woman whose brother never came home from the Pacific. The tea cakes were rolled by hands that had wrapped letters to a son stationed at a base he was not allowed to name. The ice cream was cranked by a boy who would leave for Vietnam three summers later. The desserts were not just desserts. They were the quiet part of the memorial. The part that tasted like sugar but meant something the children would not feel until they were old enough to know who was missing from the table. The oldest bread on the table and the oldest connection to a history that most people at the cookout did not discuss out loud. The hoe cake was originally cooked on the flat blade of a field hoe held over an open flame by enslaved women who had no kitchen, no oven, and no time between tasks to prepare anything more complex. Cornmeal, water, salt. Shaped by hand, fried on metal, eaten standing up. The fact that this bread was still being served at a 1965 Memorial Day cookout in Alabama meant the recipe had survived slavery, reconstruction, Jim Crow, two world wars, and the Great Migration without ever being written down. 200 years of history in a piece of fried cornmeal the size of your palm. A grandmother in rural Georgia made corn pones on a cast iron griddle the same way her grandmother had made them on an actual hoe. The griddle was a step up in technology. The recipe had not changed. The hands that shaped the dough moved the same way they had always moved because the knowledge was in the motion, not in a book. Watermelon rind preserved spooned onto white bread. The preserves were spread on white bread as the sweet course before dessert arrived. Making them took the better part of a morning. Peeling the green skin from the white rind required patience that most people under 40 no longer have. A woman in Valdosta made watermelon rind preserves every Memorial Day weekend from the first watermelon of the season. The jar sat on the table between the bread basket and the dessert plates, and the children walked past it because they did not understand why anyone would eat the part of the watermelon that was supposed to be thrown away. The adults understood. The adults remembered a time when throwing away food was a luxury that did not exist. Red Kool-Aid in the Orange Igloo Cooler The most universal memory on this list, and the one saved for the viewer who stayed this long. The cooler sat on the ground next to the table. The lid was propped open because someone was always reaching in with a styrofoam cup. The Kool-Aid was red, regardless of the flavor printed on the packet, because the color was the point. Cherry, Fruit Punch, Strawberry, Tropical. It made no difference as long as the liquid in the cup was red and cold and sweet enough to make your teeth ache. The smell of warm plastic from the igloo mixed with the sugar in the ice was the smell that told you the cookout was real. Not the smoke from the grill or the music from the radio. The Kool-Aid smell rising from the cooler every time the lid opened. A man who grew up in the 1960s once said the color red does not remind him of fire trucks or stop signs. It reminds him of Kool-Aid in a styrofoam cup at his grandmother's Memorial Day cookout in Tuscaloosa. That is what red means. Not danger or stop signs. Home The final two entries on this list are different from everything above. They are not foods. They are what the food was for. Number two. The plate that nobody touched. At every Black Memorial Day cookout, where the family had a veteran who did not come home, a plate was made and set at the corner of the table. The plate had everything on it. Ribs, potato salad, cornbread, a drumstick, macaroni salad, a spoonful of beans, a cup of Kool-Aid sat next to it. The plate was a place setting for someone who was not there and would never be there again. Black veterans came home from World War II to a country that would not let them drink from the same water fountain as the men they had fought beside. From Korea, they returned to towns where the uniform they wore overseas carried no weight on the streets they grew up on. From Vietnam, they came back to a nation that blamed them for a war they did not start and offered nothing when it was over. And some of them did not come home at all. A telegram arrived at the door. A folded flag arrived at the funeral. And every Memorial Day after, a plate arrived at the corner of the table. The women who made it did not announce what they were doing or explain it to the children running through the yard. A plate was simply made the same way every other plate was made and set down in a spot where nobody would sit. The food stayed untouched all afternoon while the sun moved across the table and the ice in the Kool-Aid cup melted slowly. When the cookout was over and the table was cleared, the memorial plate was the last thing removed. A woman in Meridian, Mississippi made a memorial plate at her family's cookout for 43 years. One plate every Memorial Day. For a husband who left for Vietnam in 1966 and never walked back through the door, she made that plate at the same corner of the same table for four decades. Her children watched her do it every year. They never asked who the plate was for. They already knew. The plate spoke louder than any words she could have said. The last act of the Memorial Day cookout. When the table was almost cleared and the foil pans were nearly empty and the sun was going down and the cars were starting to pull out of the yard, the women went to the table one last time. They made a plate. The last rib. The last scoop of banana pudding. The last piece of pound cake. A drumstick. A spoonful of macaroni salad. A hoe cake. Wrapped tight in aluminum foil so nothing leaked and nothing went cold, the plate was pressed into the hands of the oldest person at the gathering and walked to their car. The send-off plate was not leftovers. It was the opposite of leftovers. It was the best of what remained. Chosen and wrapped by hands that understood that this might be the last Memorial Day this person would attend and the food needed to be good enough to carry that weight. The tradition died quietly. Cookouts got smaller. Families scattered, the generation that carried the plates to the car aged out, and the generation that replaced them did not know the ritual. The send-off plate was never written into any cookbook or any tradition guide because writing it down would have missed the point. The tradition was taught by watching your mother wrap the foil, walk the plate to the car, and press it through the window into hands that took it with a grip that said, thank you, without words, and understanding without anyone explaining that the food was never the point. The point was the walk from the table to the car, and the hands reaching through the window and making sure the oldest person in your family left, knowing they were the last one you thought about before the day was. Done. Here is my challenge. This Memorial Day, make a plate, not for yourself, for someone who was there when the cookouts were bigger and the yards were louder and the table had a place setting for someone who never came home. Wrap it in foil. Walk it to their door. Press it into their hands the way it was done for 50 years before the tradition went quiet. Because that plate was never just about the food. It was the way a family said, we remember everything. We remember the ones who did not come back. We remember the ones who did. And drop the food your family served at every Memorial Day cookout in the comments. I want to know if the mutton ribs get remembered, or if the hot links take it. I want to know if anyone else's family made a plate for someone who never came home. Because these were not just cookout foods. They were the way black families in the South turned a Monday in May into a memorial that no government ceremony could match. Built from smoke and sugar and a table that always had one plate too many. Here are three honorable mentions that deserve their own moment. Honorable mention one. Deviled eggs on the good plate. The eggs were boiled the night before and left in the refrigerator to cool. In the morning, the shells were peeled. The yolk scooped out into a bowl, mashed with mayonnaise, yellow mustard, sweet pickle relish, and a pinch of salt. The filling was spooned back into the whites, and each egg was dusted with paprika. Not for flavor, for color. The deviled eggs were arranged on the good plate. The one that only came out for holidays and gatherings. And set on the table with a seriousness that suggested the eggs were more important than the ribs. A woman in Savannah made deviled eggs for every Memorial Day from 1954 to 2009. 55 years. Her secret was a teaspoon of the brine from the pickle jar stirred into the filling. Her grandchildren tried to replicate it after she passed. The pickle brine was the right brand. The eggs were the right size. The mustard was the same yellow. The taste was close. Close was the word that came up every time someone tried to cook a recipe that had lived in one woman's hands for half a century. Honorable mention number two. Homemade peach cobbler in a foil pan. Canned peaches in heavy syrup poured into a buttered pan. A batter of flour, sugar, milk, and melted butter poured right on top. No mixing, no layering. The batter sank to the bottom. And as the cobbler baked, the batter rose through the peaches and formed a golden crust on top that crackled when you broke through it with a spoon. The cobbler cost less than $2 to make and fed 15 people. A church mother in Columbus, Georgia, baked two cobblers every Memorial Day morning. One for the table. One for the family of the veteran being honored that year. The second cobbler was delivered to their house before the cookout started so they would have something sweet waiting when they got home. The delivery was made without announcement. The cobbler was left on the porch with a note that said, From your church family. Nobody signed it because the church mother said the cobbler should speak for itself. Honorable mention number three. Freed okra in a cast iron skillet. Fresh okra sliced into coins, tossed in seasoned cornmeal, and fried in shallow oil until the edges turned brown and the cornmeal crust cracked between your teeth. The trick was slicing the okra thick enough that the inside stayed tender while the outside crisped. Too thin and the okra dried out. Too thick and the center stayed raw. A quarter inch was the width and the width was taught by watching, not by measuring. A grandmother in Lafayette, Louisiana, fried okra every Memorial Day in a skillet that had been seasoned so many times the cornmeal barely stuck because the iron surface was slicker than any non-stick pan on the market. Don't forget about the Complete Kitchen Secrets Guide. It's honestly jam-packed with valuable recipes. And thank you for watching.