30 Black Cookout Dishes That Disappeared After the 1980s

The smoke started rolling before sunrise and by noon the whole block smelled like hickory and rendered fat. A cookout table in 1978 held dishes that would confuse most people standing in a backyard today. Pig ear sandwiches on white bread, grilled sweetbreads and foil, a dutch oven full of cobbler sitting in a bed of coals beside the pit. At number 14 a whole animal goes over the fire and the reason it disappeared tells the entire story. Number six used to cost pennies a pound and today it has been priced clean out of the neighborhood. These dishes did not fade on their own. The gas grill industry, grocery store consolidation and a generation taught to feel shame about what their grandparents cooked pushed every one of them off the table. Hit subscribe because this one runs deeper than food. Here are 30 black cookout dishes that disappeared after the 1980s. Number 30 grilled bologna steaks. A thick ring of bologna scored on both sides thrown directly on the grate until the edges curled and the outside turned black. On white bread with yellow mustard nothing else. Bologna was the first thing ready at the cookout and the first thing the children grabbed because the real meat was still hours from being done. A whole ring cost almost nothing. It needed no seasoning, no marinating, no overnight preparation. Bologna disappeared from the cookout when the gathering itself shrank. When a cookout became a two-hour event built around store-bought patties there was no reason to grill something cheap while the expensive meat finished because there was no expensive meat finishing. Number 29 the jar of pickled rinds that somebody's aunt carried in a paper bag. Nobody bought watermelon rind preserves at the store. The rind was peeled cut into small cubes and simmered in vinegar, sugar, cloves and cinnamon until it turned translucent. Sweet and sharp at the same time making them took an entire afternoon a big pot and the kind of patience that does not come with the schedule. The women who made them did not follow a recipe. They tasted and adjusted and tasted again until the jar was right. Those jars stopped showing up when the canning tradition left the kitchen and the generation that sealed them could no longer stand at the stove that long. The hands that made them grew still and no younger hands reached for the pot. Number 28 grilled corn still in the husk pulled straight from the coals. The ears went on the grate unhusked silk and all and roasted until the outer leaves charred black and the kernels inside steamed in their own moisture. When somebody peeled one open the steam hit first then the smell of roasted corn sweetened by its own sugar. Butter and salt went on while the ear was still too hot to hold and people wrapped the husk back around the bottom like a handle. Every cookout had a pile of ears stacked at the edge of the grill where the heat was lowest. Children grabbed them without asking. Nobody counted how many were left until they were gone. The corn disappeared from the cookout when the yard shrank and the grill got smaller. A kettle grill had room for meat or for corn not both and the meat always won. The ears moved indoors boiled in a pot on the stove and lost the char that made them worth eating outside. Number 27 whole cakes cooked on a flat iron by the fire. Cornmeal, water, salt, and a spoon of lard mixed thin enough to pour but thick enough to hold its shape on the griddle. The iron sat on a grate over the same coals that were heating the pit and the cakes went down one at a time. Each one came off with a crisp bottom and a soft steaming center that tore apart in your hands. Whole cakes at the cookout were never the meal. They were what you ate while you waited for the meal standing by the fire burning your fingers because you could not wait for them to cool. The flat iron left the cookout when the open fire gave way to the gas grill and cornbread from a box replaced everything a griddle used to make. Number 26 whole grilled porgies. Small flat bony pan fish scored three times on each side and seasoned with nothing but salt pepper and lemon juice laid directly on a well oiled grate over medium coals and flipped once. The skin blistered and charred. The white meat inside stayed moist because the bones held the heat. Porgies showed up at cookouts along the coast and in river towns where somebody still fished. They were free food caught that morning and they cooked fast 10 minutes a side. Porgies left the grill when the fishing stopped being a way to feed the family and became a weekend hobby that happened somewhere else. When the catch stopped coming home the grate stayed empty. Number 25 smoked pork jowl carved at the table. The jowl was the cheek of the hog. A thick piece of meat and fat that sat on the smoker for hours until the fat turned translucent and the meat went dark and pulled apart tender. Sliced thin against the grain it tasted like the richest bacon you ever put in your mouth but thicker softer and smoky all the way through. Jowl cost next to nothing because most people walked right past it at the butcher counter. The families who smoked it learned from the generation before them and the knowledge of how long to leave it and how thin to cut it never got written down. The cut vanished from cookout tables when butchers stopped breaking down whole hogs and started selling only the parts that had names people recognized. Number 24 hand cranked ice cream made in the yard. A wooden bucket packed with rock salt and ice a metal canister in the center and a handle that somebody had to turn by hand for the better part of an hour. Vanilla custard was the standard made that morning with eggs cream sugar and a split vanilla bean if the house had one. Children took turns on the crank until their arms gave out and then an uncle finished the job. The ice cream came out soft not quite set eaten straight from the canister with a long spoon while it was still melting. The hand cranked freezer left the cookout when the electric machine replaced it and then when the store replaced the machine. Nobody needed to churn for an hour when a half gallon cost less than the rock salt. Number 23 the outdoor catfish fry. This was not a dish it was a station a propane burner on bare dirt a cast iron pot of peanut oil a paper bag of seasoned cornmeal on a folding chair and somebody's uncle who did not leave that post until the oil went cold. The catfish came from the pond or the creek not the store. Whole fish gutted and scaled that morning dredged in cornmeal and dropped into oil that was already popping. The table was yesterday's newspaper the plate was a paper towel hot sauce and white bread on the side. The catfish fry was a cookout within the cookout a separate event with its own crowd its own schedule and its own rules. Children were warned once and kept back by a grandmother who did not warn twice. The fish came out golden with a cornmeal crust that cracked when you bit through it and white steaming meat that pulled clean from the bone. It disappeared for reasons nobody could argue with hot oil in a yard full of running children a propane tank three feet from a charcoal grill. By the 1990s the catfish fry moved indoors then to the restaurant then it stopped being a family event altogether. Number 22 smoked ox tongue peeled after smoking sliced thin across the grain and laid out on a platter rich beefy with a texture denser than any roast on the table. People who did not know what it was asked for seconds. People who found out what it was put the plate down and did not come back. Tongue was a dish that punished curiosity it tasted extraordinary and looked like exactly what it was and by the 1980s that combination was no longer welcome at the cookout. The butcher counter shrank the cuts that needed a story stopped selling and tongue left the yard for good. Number 21 fried green tomatoes brought from a skillet by the pit firm unripe tomatoes sliced thick dredged in cornmeal and seasoned flour and fried in a cast iron skillet set on a side burner or on a great prop next to the main fire. The outside turned golden and crunchy while the inside stayed tart and dense nothing like the soft sweetness of a ripe tomato. Green tomatoes at the cookout meant the garden was still producing and somebody had the patience to stand over hot grease while everyone else sat in the shade. The slices came out on a plate lined with a paper bag stacked like coins and they never lasted more than a few minutes. The dish left when the garden gave way to the driveway and grocery store tomatoes arrived already red. A green tomato from a store was just an unripe tomato the ones from the yard were a different thing entirely picked on purpose by someone who knew exactly what to do with them. Number 20 hog head cheese sliced cold on a platter the whole head was boiled for hours with onion vinegar and bay leaves until every scrap of meat fell off the bone and the liquid turned to gelatin. The meat was picked clean seasoned with cayenne and black pepper packed into a loaf pan and set in the ice box overnight. By morning it had firmed into a solid block that sliced clean and held together on a plate. At the cookout the loaf sat on the side table next to the pickles and the white bread. People cut their own slices the texture was firm and cool with pockets of soft meat suspended in clear jelly and the vinegar kept it sharp enough to cut through the richness of everything else on the plate. Head cheese disappeared when the younger generation decided they did not want to know what was in it. The name alone stopped people from trying it and the butcher stopped carrying whole heads because nobody under 40 asked for one. A cookout in the 1970s was a 12-hour commitment. Somebody dug a pit or lit a fire before dawn somebody else started the sides by mid-morning. The table filled slowly through the day dish by dish as people arrived carrying cover bowls they had been cooking since the night before. By the 1990s the cookout had become a two-hour event. A gas grill, store-bought buns, pre-formed patties, a tub of store-made potato salad. What disappeared was not just food it was time. Every dish on this list demanded time that stopped existing. Time to source the cuts, time to stand over a hot pot or tend a pit for hours. When the time left the food left with it. Number 19 smoked rabbit. Somebody brought it from the hunt, cleaned and quartered. Lean and gamey and the grill was not kind to it because it dried out fast if you looked away. Had to be basted with vinegar and fat the entire time it sat over the coals. Some people wrapped it in strips of bacon or fat back to hold the moisture in. Rabbit showed up at cookouts in the rural south where hunting was still a weekly household activity not a weekend hobby. It left the table when hunting left the raw team. When the generation that had grown up trapping and shooting for the family table moved to cities where the skill had no use. Number 18 homemade muscadine wine poured from a mason jar. Somebody's uncle or grandfather made it every fall when the muscadines came ripe on the vine that grew along the back fence or up into a tree at the edge of the yard. The grapes were thick skinned and musky and the wine was made in a crock with sugar and patience. It came out dark and cloudy never filtered and tasted like nothing from any store. Sharp and sweet and heavy with the smell of grape hull. At the cookout the jar moved quietly among the older folks poured into cups that were not labeled and never discussed around the children. The wine stopped when the person who made it passed away and nobody learned the timing. The vine got cut down or the property changed hands and the muscadines went back to feeding the birds. Number 17 fried chicken gizzards boiled first in salted water to soften the dense muscle then dredged in seasoned flour and fried crisp in a cast iron skillet until they turned dark gold. Chewy compact iron rich with a flavor that sat heavier than any other part of the bird. Served in a bowl with hot sauce at the cookout always as a side never the main attraction. Gizzards were the dish that sorted children early. A five-year-old who was handed one and chewed through it without complaint would eat them for life. A five-year-old who spit it out was lost forever. There was no converting anyone after that first encounter. Gizzards disappeared when the younger generation drew a hard line at anything that could be described as organ meat and once the demand dropped the bowl stopped being refilled. Number 16 chitlin plates. The chitlins had been cleaned for days before the cookout soaked scraped boiled and boiled again. The smell carried down the block and announced exactly what kind of gathering this was going to be. Served with hot sauce and white bread sometimes fried crispy after the boiling. Chitlins at the cookout were a line in the sand between the generation that cleaned them without complaint and the generation that wanted no part of it. They were gone from most cookout tables by the mid-1990s pushed out by the sheer labor they demanded and the embarrassment the younger crowd attached to serving them where neighbors could see. Number 15 grilled quail from the morning hunt. Small birds plucked and cleaned split down the backbone and pressed flat seasoned with salt pepper and a touch of cayenne brushed with butter and grilled fast over high heat. The breast cooked in minutes 30 seconds too long and the bird dried out completely. A grown man ate three or four and still reached for a rib. Children got one to hold in both hands and pick clean. The bones were thin enough to snap between your teeth. In the rural south quail were common. Coveys flushed out of the brush along fence rows and a morning hunt before the cookout could put a dozen birds on the grill by noon. The quail left the table when the farms consolidated and the hedge rows were cleared. The brush that held the coveys was plowed under for row crops and by the 1990s the only quail most families saw came frozen from a specialty store priced like something that would have confused the generation that hunted them for nothing. Number 14 barbecued goat. A whole goat or a half slow cooked over wood in a pit dug into the ground. Common in east Texas along the gulf coast in parts of the Carolinas and at family reunions across the rural deep south. The tradition ran straight through the Caribbean and back to west Africa. Goat meat was lean and tough if you rushed the cooking and you could not rush it. It needed all night over low coals basted with nothing more than salt pepper and cider vinegar. The flavor was sharper than pork, wilder than beef and there was nothing else on the cookout table that tasted anything like it. Goat was cheap because it was easy to raise. It grazed on scrub land that would not support a cow. A family could keep two or three animals in the yard without owning pasture land. The cookout that served a whole goat was a serious event. The kind of gathering where somebody stayed up all night watching the fire and the guests arrived knowing that what they were about to eat could not be bought at any store. By the late 1980s goat started leaving the table for the same reasons that pushed most of this list out of the yard. The generation that knew how to slaughter, dress and pit roast a whole animal was aging out. The grocery store did not stock goat. The skills required to handle a carcass that size were not being taught to children who had moved to the city. Today goat costs more per pound than pork in most American cities and the families that once roasted it in an earthen pit live in places where digging that pit is no longer an option. Number 13 smoked whole chicken not pieces. The entire bird rubbed down with salt pepper garlic and cayenne set on the cooler side of the grill with the lid closed and left alone for hours. The skin turned mahogany and tightened against the breast until it cracked when you pulled it. The drippings fell into the coals and sent up bursts of smoke that flavored the meat from the outside in. Smoked whole chicken was the quiet anchor of the cookout table. Nobody bragged about it the way they bragged about the ribs. It simply sat on a cutting board pulled apart by hand and everyone took what they wanted. It faded when the rotisserie chicken arrived at the grocery store for a few dollars. Already cooked, already warm, already sitting in a plastic shell by the checkout lane. Why stand over a grill for four hours when the answer was already waiting at the store on the way home. The food that got left behind was not the food that tasted bad. It was the food that looked poor. The organs, the awful, the parts of the animal that required explanation before anyone would touch them. A generation moved to the suburbs bought gas grills and served hamburgers and hot dogs because those were foods that needed no defense. Nobody had to explain a hamburger but a plate of hog maw, a jar of brine pig feet, a bowl of chitlins at a cookout in a new subdivision required a kind of pride that not everyone was ready to show. The shame was quiet. The dishes simply stopped appearing one cookout at a time replaced by foods that blended in. The recipes that took the most work were the first to go because they asked the most of the people trying hardest to move on. Number 12 Grilled tripe. Honeycomb tripe boiled tender first then cut into strips and thrown on the hottest part of the grill until the edges charred and curled, dipped in hot sauce or vinegar sauce eaten with the fingers. The texture was chewy and slightly rubbery and the char gave it a smokiness that the boiling alone could never deliver. Tripe at the cookout was an older generation's dish brought by somebody who had cleaned and prepared stomach lining since childhood and saw nothing unusual about it. The younger crowd treated the platter the way they treated most of the awful on this list. They walked past it, reached for the ribs and never looked back. Tripe left the table when the person who brought it stopped coming. Number 11 Pigtail sandwiches smoked low or braised in a pot with vinegar and pepper then piled onto white bread with hot sauce. There was almost no meat on a pigtail, mostly fat cartilage and skin wrapped around small vertebrae. You gnawed your way through one working the bone clean and tossed the scraps into the grass. The flavor was rich and porky and concentrated in a way that leaner cuts could not match. Pigtails disappeared from the cookout when families stopped buying parts of the whole animal at the butcher and started picking pre-wrapped individual cuts from a grocery store cooler. A sealed rack of ribs replaced a paper-wrapped bucket of tails and the tails never came back. Number 10 Grilled venison steaks from a fall deer hunt. In the rural south deer season was not sport. It was a calendar event that filled the freezer for months. Backstrapped and round steaks cut thick, soaked overnight in Worcestershire, garlic and black pepper and grilled hot and fast. Cooked past medium and the meat turned to shoe leather. Cooked right and it was tender, clean and deeper than any beef at the table. Venison appeared at late season cookouts in November and December still cold from the ice chest in the bed of the truck. The hunter who brought it carved the steaks himself and stood by the grill to make sure nobody overcooked them. The venison left the same way the rabbit and the quail did. The hunters got older, the land they walked got fenced off or sold and the freezer that used to hold a season of deer meat started holding bags from the grocery store instead. Number 9 Smoked turkey necks. On a smoker for hours, low and slow, until the collagen broke down and the dark meat clung to the vertebrae in rich shredded strands. You pulled it off with your teeth and your fingers and wiped your hands on your shirt because the napkin was already gone. Turkey necks were never the center of the cookout. They sat on a foil tray near the pit and people walked over and picked at them between rounds of the real meal. Nobody made a plate of turkey necks. You just grabbed one when you passed by. They faded when the deep fried whole turkey arrived and replaced every other method of cooking poultry outdoors. The spectacle of dropping a whole bird into hot oil made the slow smoked neck feel small. Number 8 Cucumber and onion salad in ice water and vinegar. Sliced thin, almost translucent and dropped into a bowl of ice water with white vinegar, sugar, salt and cracked black pepper. The bowl sat on the table all afternoon getting colder and sharper. People forked out a few slices between plates of heavy meat and bread and the cold sour crunch cut through everything. The salad required nothing but a garden cucumber, a white onion and five minutes. It never had a name more formal than cucumbers and onions. The dish stopped showing up when the table stopped having a garden behind it and when the side dishes started coming from a deli container instead of a mixing bowl. Number 7 Smoked possum brought by the oldest man at the cookout. Trapped or hunted, cleaned, soaked in salt water overnight, rubbed with pepper and garlic and smoked low over hickory for hours. The meat was dark, rich and fatty with a flavor that divided people hard. Some loved it, some would not touch it, but the man who brought it never asked permission and never explained himself. Possum was a food that carried a weight heavier than its taste. It belonged to a generation that ate what the lamb provided because the grocery store was either too far, too expensive or not interested in serving them. Cooking possum was not poverty, it was self-sufficiency practiced by people who had been denied every other kind of sufficiency. The older folks at the cookout understood this without saying it. They ate the possum because they remembered a time when refusing free meat was a luxury nobody had. The dish left in stages. First the young people stopped eating it, then they stopped pretending to respect it. Then the man who trapped and smoked it every summer passed away and nobody in the family knew how to set a trap. The skill, the knowledge and the taste disappeared together in one generation without a single written recipe to prove any of it happened. Number six, chicken purlew cooked in a cast iron pot over a wood fire. Not jambalaya, not pilaf. Purlew, a dish that lived along the Carolina and Georgia coast built from a whole cut up chicken, browned in fat, rice added to the same pot with onion, celery and enough broth to cook it all together until the rice absorbed every drop of flavor. The grains came out separate, stained golden from the chicken fat and the meat fell apart into the rice so that every spoonful carried both. At the cookout the pot sat on a grate over an open fire and the person tending it knew by sound when the rice was done. The bubbling slowed, the steam changed. Purlew required no oven, no timer and no thermometer. It required someone who had cooked it enough times to know by ear and smell when to pull it off the heat. The dish faded when the open fire left the yard and when the word itself stopped being spoken. Ask for purlew at a cookout today and most people under 50 will not know what you mean. The food did not die, the name did and without the name the recipe lost its anchor. Number five, sweet potato pome carried out from the kitchen. Grated raw sweet potato mixed with molasses, butter, cinnamon and a little flour poured into a greased pan and baked low and slow until the top cracked and darkened and the inside turned dense and almost candy sweet. It was not a pie and not a cake, it was something older than both, heavy enough to hold in your hand and rich enough that a small square was plenty. At the cookout the pome sat on the dessert table still in the pan it was baked in, cut into squares, already half gone by the time the meat came off the grill. Children ate it like candy, adults ate it like a memory. Sweet potato pome faded when the recipe stopped being passed along. It required grating by hand, long baking and a feel for molasses that could not be measured with a cup. Younger cooks replaced it with sweet potato pie from a store which was faster and easier and tasted like something else entirely. Number four, buttermilk pie. A custard pie with no fruit, no chocolate, no pecans, just buttermilk, eggs, sugar, butter, vanilla and a dusting of nutmeg poured into a single crust and baked until the filling set and the top turned freckled brown. It tasted tangy and sweet at the same time and the texture was somewhere between flan and chest pie. Buttermilk pie came to the cookout wrapped in foil on the back seat of somebody's car. It was the dessert that cost almost nothing to make and fed the most people and it was always the first one finished. It left the cookout table when the younger generation stopped baking from scratch and the store-bought sheet cake took over the dessert end of the spread. Number three, candy yams made in a foil pan on the side burner. Sweet potatoes peeled, sliced thick, layered in a disposable aluminum pan with butter, brown sugar, cinnamon and a pour of vanilla. The pan sat on the side burner or on the cooler edge of the grill covered in foil and cooked low until the slices softened and the sugar melted into a dark syrup that thickened as it cooled. The yams were the dish that bridged the cookout in the sundae table. They belonged at both and the woman who made them never used the recipe. She poured the sugar until it looked right, added butter until it smelled right and checked the pan by tilting it to see how the syrup moved. Candied yams left the cookout when the cooker moved indoors and the side burner disappeared. The dish survived on the holiday table but the outdoor version made in a throwaway pan with smoke drifting into the foil had a flavor the oven could not replicate. Number two, barbecue pig feet on the grill, not from a jar, grilled, split in half lengthwise, seasoned with salt and cayenne and placed directly on the grate over medium coals. The skin blistered, the fat rendered out in long drips that made the fire spit, the cartilage softened until it bent without snapping. You ate them standing up with both hands and the napkin was already useless before you finished the first one. Grilled pig feet were the dish that separated a real cookout from a backyard party. They disappeared when the cookout shrank from an all-day affair into something that fit between church and the football game. Number one, the whole hog pit. The last entry on this list is not a single dish, it is the thing that held every other dish together. A pit dug into the earth the day before the gathering, hot wood burned down to white coals. A whole hog split down the spine and laid open on iron rebar, fat side facing the sky, cooking through the night while somebody sat in a lawn chair and tended the fire with a shovel. The whole hog pit was the center of the black cookout. Everything else arranged itself around it, the table, the chairs, the music, the children chasing each other through the yard. When the pit disappeared, the cookout lost its anchor. The gas grill replaced the hole in the ground. The supermarket replaced the butcher. What vanished was not a cooking method, it was the reason 30 people showed up and stayed all day. Number 21, pimento cheese ribbon sandwiches on white bread with the crust cut off. In 1967, on the morning of a wedding in Tuskegee, three women stood at a kitchen counter cutting the crust off four loaves of sunbeam bread. Hands moved without looking. Pimento cheese had been mixed the night before, sharp cheddar grated by hand, a jar of pimentos drained on a paper towel, mayonnaise, a spoon of grated onion, a shake of cayenne. The mixture sat overnight to thicken. Saturday morning, the women spread it on the trimmed bread in three layers, alternated with thin slices of cucumber, pressed down with a baking sheet for an hour, then cut into ribbons. Each tray held 30. The ribbons came out striped white, orange, pale green. Guests held them between two fingers, no plates. By 1991, the women had moved into nursing care and the wedding sandwiches on the table were grocery store croissants. Number 21, hot water cornbread. The hot water cornbread was the trick that separated grandmothers who could cook from those who only thought they could. Yellow cornmeal went into a wide bowl with a heavy shake of salt on top and boiling water poured straight from the tea kettle while a wooden spoon stirred fast. The dough firmed up into a thick paste, hot enough to burn your hand if you it. Patties were shaped between two wet palms and dropped into half an inch of hot bacon grease in a heavy skillet. Two minutes a side, crisp golden outside, steamy and soft inside. No oven, no rising time, no buttermilk needed, no eggs to spare. A working mother in Mississippi could put a stack of six on a table in under 15 minutes, alongside greens and beans and whatever scrap of pork was bubbling in the pot. Black grandmothers in the Mississippi Delta swore the trick was the tea kettle, not the cornmeal. Hot water cornbread was speed cooking before anybody invented the term. Number 19, smothered rabbit. This was the dish that started the argument. Every family had someone who claimed they made the best one. A man in Tuskegee, Alabama, hunted rabbits on his own land every fall from 1955 to 1983. He skinned them, soaked them overnight in salt water, dredged them in seasoned flour, browned them in a cast iron skillet, then smothered them in a gravy made from the pan drippings, onions, and a little water. The rabbit simmered on low heat for two hours until the meat slid from the bone. He served it over white rice. The whole plate cost him nothing but time and a box of shells. At the reunion, his pan was always empty first. His wife brought the side dishes. He brought the rabbit. That was the arrangement for 28 years. The thing about smothered rabbit is that it required a man who knew the land, knew where the rabbits ran, knew which fields had been sprayed and which had not. That knowledge was passed from father to son in the same backyard where the reunion happened. But by the 1980s, the sons had moved to Atlanta and Detroit and Chicago. The land got sold or sat empty. The rabbits kept running, but nobody was out there to catch them. By 1990, you could not find smothered rabbit at a reunion in Macon County. The men who made it were buried in the same churches where the reunions used to end with a prayer. Number 25 Hot Yeast Rolls Wrapped in Damp Dish Towels Yeast rolls came out of two ovens on the morning of the wedding. One in the bride's mother's kitchen, one in the church basement. The dough had been mixed Friday night by a deacon's wife who measured nothing. Flour, sugar, lard, scalded milk, a packet of Fleischmann's. The rolls came out golden, brushed with melted butter, stacked in a roasting pan, covered with a wet flour sack towel to keep them soft until two o'clock. The towel was the secret. Without it, the rolls hardened in the hour between the ceremony and the receiving line. Guests pulled them apart with their fingers, no knives. Each roll cracked open with steam still inside. By 1988, the deacon's wife had passed, the recipe lived in nobody's hand, and the rolls on the church table came from a bag in the freezer aisle. The towel went with her. Number 23 Fried Bologna Sandwiches And by 1983, when generic store brand Bologna sat at under a dollar a pound and Oscar Mayer ran closer to two, black mothers across the Midwest had perfected the art of frying both. A thick slice went into a hot grease pan with a small slit cut into each side to keep it from puffing up like a balloon. The edges crisped to brown, the middle stayed soft, and the smell filled the kitchen in under a minute. Two slices of cheap white bread, a smear of French's yellow mustard, a slice of American cheese if payday had hit, and a leaf of iceberg lettuce if you had it. This was the after-school plate for the latchkey kids of Detroit and Cleveland whose mothers worked second shift at the hospital or the post office. The sandwich was assembled in three minutes flat and eaten in front of cartoons at 4.30 in the afternoon. A small glass of Kool-Aid washed it down. Fried Bologna was the snack that became supper when the paycheck was three days late. Number 22 Crackling Bread This was cornbread with a secret. After a hog killing, the skin was rendered in a cast iron pot until the fat melted away and the skin crisped into golden crunchy pieces called cracklings. You folded those cracklings into cornbread batter and baked it in a hot skillet greased with lard. Crispy on the outside, dense on the inside, with pockets of salty pork fat that melted on your tongue. In the 1950s, you could buy cracklings at any country store in Mississippi or Georgia for a few cents a bag. A woman in Yazoo City made crackling bread for every reunion from 1958 to 1981. She brought it wrapped in a flour sack towel inside a paper bag. By the mid-1980s, hog killings had all but stopped. Families moved to cities, supermarkets replaced the smokehouse, and without fresh cracklings, the bread was just cornbread. It was good, but it was not the same. Number 23 Wedding Punch in a Borrowed Crystal Bowl On the long table, set on a square of lace from the auxiliary closet, sat a cut glass punch bowl that did not belong to anyone in the wedding. The bowl had been borrowed from the church mother three doors down. It came in a cardboard box wrapped in a folded quilt to keep the cut glass from chipping. Inside the bowl, the punch sat pink. Pineapple juice, frozen orange concentrate, two bottles of ginger ale poured in at the last minute so the bubble still rose when the bride dipped her cup. A ring of frozen lemonade with strawberry slices floated on top in place of regular ice because regular ice diluted the sweet. Children stood on tiptoe to see in. By 1989, the crystal bowl had been packed away in a basement on Florida Avenue, the church mother had passed, and the wedding punch on a folding table came from a plastic gallon jug. Number 22 Sausage Gravy Over Biscuits Inside every black household kitchen in the South Carolina Low Country sat a tube of cheap breakfast sausage and a sleeve of canned biscuits from the dollar store cooler. The sausage went into a hot heavy skillet first, broken up with the back of a wooden spoon, browned until the edges caught and the fat ran clear. Three heaping spoons of flour were stirred into the drippings to make a quick roux, then evaporated milk and water were added slow, whisked steady until the gravy thickened into a slow-pouring river. The Pillsbury biscuits popped open from the can with a satisfying smack, baked off in ten minutes, split with a knife while still steaming. Gravy ladled over the open biscuit until it ran off the plate onto the napkin. This breakfast carried black grandfathers to the steel mill at five in the morning and church mothers to choir rehearsal at six in the evening. The whole pan cost under two dollars in 1986 dollars and fed four hungry working people. Sausage gravy was southern luxury at southern black prices. Number 21 Possum and Sweet Potatoes Nobody talks about this one, not anymore, but in the 1940s through the 1970s it was a legitimate reunion dish in parts of Georgia and rural Mississippi. A man would trap the possum, pin it for a week on table scraps and sweet potatoes, then roast it whole in a pan surrounded by halved sweet potatoes basted in the drippings. The meat was dark, rich, and greasy. The sweet potatoes absorbed the fat and caramelized into something that tasted like a savory dessert. During the Depression, possum suppers were fundraising events for black churches. A church in Decatur, Georgia, held one every fall from 1932 to 1968. By the late 1970s, the tradition had faded. Younger men did not trap. Health departments frowned on wild game at gatherings and the cultural association shifted. The dish didn't disappear because it tasted bad. It disappeared because people were told it was something to be ashamed of. Number 24 Smoked Country Ham with a Brown Sugar Glaze The ham was hung in a smokehouse outside Camden, South Carolina, for nine months before it ever came north. It arrived in a flour sack on a trailways bus, salt-cured, dark as walnut on the rind. The bride's father scrubbed the rind under cold water for an hour, soaked the ham overnight in a roasting pan in the bathtub, then baked it slow on Saturday morning. Cloves stuck in a diamond pattern, brown sugar, dry mustard, and a splash of Coca-Cola brushed on every 20 minutes. The slices came thin off the bone, served on the church platter that had belonged to a great-aunt born in 1898. A pinch of red pepper sat in a saucer next to it. By the late 1980s, the smokehouse outside Camden had been torn down for a strip of highway and the wedding ham on the church table was deli-sliced from the Piggly Wiggly. Number 25 Smothered Neck Bones The neck bone was the cheapest pork on the meat counter in 1982, and black grandmothers knew it better than the butcher behind the case did. A pound went for under a dollar in most southern grocery stores, and one three-pound package fed a household of six on a Sunday if you stretched it right. The bones went into a heavy pot with chopped onion, garlic powder, a splash of cider vinegar, a bay leaf, and water enough to cover by an inch. Two hours of low simmering pulled the marrow into the gravy and the meat slid off the bone with the gentle pull of a fork. Working mothers in Detroit and Atlanta put this pot on before church on Sunday morning and came home at noon to dinner already made and waiting. A scoop of long-grain white rice underneath caught the gravy and a slice of soft white bread mopped the plate clean at the end. The neck bone was poor man's meat with rich man's flavor. Number 24 Hog Head Cheese This was not cheese. It didn't have anything to do with dairy. It was the face of a pig, slow simmered until every scrap of meat fell from the bone, then seasoned with vinegar, hot sauce, onion, and celery salt, pressed into a loaf pan, and chilled until the natural gelatin set it solid. You sliced it cold and ate it on crackers or white bread. In rural Alabama, a man named Roosevelt Jenkins made it every family reunion from 1961 to 1979. He got the hog heads from a slaughterhouse outside Selma for 35 cents each. His children fought over the last slice. By the late 1980s, slaughterhouses stopped selling hog heads to walk-in customers. Industrial processing changed the supply chain and the knowledge of how to clean a hog head, how to judge when the gelatin was right, that lived in the hands of people who were getting old. When they stopped, nobody picked it up. Number 22 Smothered Chicken in Cream Gravy The chickens came from a yard in Greenwood, Mississippi, dressed by the bride's grandmother on Friday morning before the train left, packed in an ice cooler that traveled north with three women in the backseat of a Buick. Saturday morning, they got cut into pieces, salted, peppered, dredged in flour, browned in a heavy skillet of lard, and finished in a covered roasting pan with onion gravy poured over the top. The gravy was cream, not stock, because the wedding day was the one day cream went into the pan. The chicken sat on the table in a chafing dish with a sterno can underneath. The thigh was always claimed first, then the leg. The breast went last because it was dry. By 1990, the chicken in the church basement was catered fried chicken in a foil tray, and the smothering pan stayed home. Number 20 Red Beans and Rice Pour the dry red beans into a heavy pot Monday night, cover them in cold water, and soak them through until morning, and you had the foundation of Tuesday supper in every Louisiana black household. Tuesday was wash day, and red beans needed almost no washing while sheets and work shirts hung on the line out back. A smoked turkey neck, a cut up yellow onion, two cloves of garlic, a bay leaf, a shake of Tony Chachere's, and fresh water to cover. The pot simmered low for four hours while everything else got done around the house. The beans broke down into their own thick gravy, served over hot white rice with a square of cornbread on the side and a splash of vinegar pepper sauce on top. It fed five working people for under $2.50 in 1984 dollars. Red beans were the Tuesday tradition. Number 23 Watermelon Rind Pickles. Your grandmother did not throw away the rind. She peeled off the green skin, cut the white flesh into cubes, and soaked them overnight in salt water. The next day, she boiled them in a syrup of sugar, vinegar, cinnamon sticks, and cloves until the cubes turned translucent and sweet. She packed them into mason jars and sealed them with paraffin wax. In the 1960s, jars of watermelon rind pickles showed up at every reunion table in the deep south. A jar cost almost nothing to make because the rind was garbage to everyone else. By the 1990s, the canning tradition had faded. Younger women did not own pressure canners and watermelon came pre-cut in plastic containers from the grocery store with no rind attached. The raw material vanished. The skill vanished with it. Number 20 Deviled Eggs Dusted with Paprika. At every reception in every fellowship hall from Mobile to Gary, the deviled egg platter sat on the corner of the table closest to the door because deviled eggs were the first thing guests reached for after the receiving line. Two dozen eggs, hard-boiled Friday night, peeled while warm halved Saturday morning. The yolks were mashed with mayonnaise, sweet pickle relish, a teaspoon of yellow mustard, a shake of vinegar. The filling went back into the whites with a spoon, never a piping bag because a piping bag would have made the platter look store-bought. Paprika dusted across the top from a tin shaker. A sprig of parsley on each plate sat there by the niece who had been allowed to help for the first time. The platter was the same one that had carried deviled eggs to her mother's wedding in 1949. By 1992, the niece had stopped making them and the eggs on the table at her own daughter's reception came pre-stuffed from Sam's Club. Number 24, Pinto Beans and Ham Hocks. Open the bag of dry pinto beans and you're looking at the cornerstone of the 1980s soul food pantry. A pound sold for 50 cents at the Piggly Wiggly and a single smoked ham hock cost less than a dollar fifty. Soak the beans overnight in a cold pot of water. The next morning, drain them, add the hock, cover with fresh water, and let it bubble all afternoon. The pork fat melted into the broth and turned plain beans into something that tasted like sundae. Grandmothers in Birmingham and Memphis kept this pot going on the back burner from Monday through Wednesday, adding water as it cooked down. Served over rice with a slice of raw onion on the side, it fed four working adults for under three dollars. Church kitchens used the same trick for fellowship suppers, doubling the recipe in a stockpot the size of a car battery. Pinto Beans were the workhorse of every black kitchen that survived the Reagan years. 30 dishes from the yard and every last one of them required somebody who refused to take a shortcut. Try one this summer. Grill a whole chicken low and slow with the lid closed. Fry gizzards in a cast iron skillet outside, shape some hot water cornbread, and drop it in a hot skillet. Drop the one dish your family refused to let go of in the comments below. And if your cookout table still holds any of these, share this with somebody who remembers what the smoke smelled like before the sun came up.