Southern Baking Traditions - Home

INTERVIEWS

Matthew Fuller
Annelle Lindsey
Sandy Pollard
Eula & Alton Stitcher
James & Evelyn Tamplin

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The Center for Public History
Online Baking Exhibit

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*NOTE: A complete set of interviews from the Southern Baking Traditions project is archived in the Southern Foodways Alliance’s oral history collection at the University of Mississippi.

Eula Mae & Alton Stitcher

There are few dishes Eula Mae Stitcher cannot cook. The very thought of Eula’s fruit cobbler or Red Velvet, fresh apple, Amish Friendship, Coca-Cola, and punchbowl cakes can leave anyone’s mouth watering. The biggest fan of Eula’s baking is her husband of forty-two years, local musician Alton Stitcher. Mr. Stitcher has seen the modern evolution of baking and his wife’s recipes over the years, and he still has vivid memories of the ingredients and methods his mother used in preparing food for his family as a child. Growing up the son of a widow on his grandfather’s farm in Carroll County, Georgia educated Stitcher on how various ingredients could be produced by a small family farm, as well as how individuals survived during times of scarcity. At sixteen years of age, Alton began working at Carrollton’s Lawler Hosiery Mill, a job where he learned the exact value a cheap, filling, and portable breakfast and lunch had to a tired and overworked mill worker. Often in the Stitcher household the leftover biscuit from breakfast was saved and used as lunch with a slice of ham or other filler. Mr. Stitcher can still recall with great clarity his mother’s bread bowl, iron boiler, bread pan, stove, and the family flour barrel, and how she effortlessly made delicious cakes, pies and other dishes for holidays or the church’s dinner on the grounds.

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What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

Interview of Alton Stitcher
March 19, 2002
Interviewed by Rebecca J. Glasgow
Southern Baking Traditions
Center for Public History

AS: And a, my, my daddy was sharecroppin’ down at the river at that time.

RG: Mmhmm.

They would leave the mill, and go, they would farm awhile you know, and whatever he—they thought they could make [rooster crows] m-- more money at, you know, they would do it, during that time. So he sharecropped part of the time, and worked in the ho-- a, cotton mill; my mother worked [rooster crows] in the hosiery mill.

Okay, okay.

An’ um, I was, I was about six years old when we moved there. An’ wasn’t too long after then, my daddy, he a, had ta, have an operation, an’ a, he took pneumonia, [rooster crows] and died.

[Tisks] Oh I’m sorry

He was twenty-nine.

Oh!

My mother was twenty-nine at the time too. An’ she had us five kids, to raise. [Rooster crows] An’ um, my granddaddy lived here in Carroll County. Out on a Horsley Mill Road if you know where that’s at. He had a farm out there an’ he had two houses out there. Two had a small farm, he was a, rentin’. [Rooster crows] He was rentin’ to buy is what it—he was paying the tax on it you know, an’ a, an’ tryin’ to buy it too you know, both of the little farm, well—one farm was fifty, about fifty-five acres. And the other one was a, [rooster crows] twenty-six

Okay.

And he had them two houses out there and my granddaddy most of the time had some kind of an old car, that would run you know coz, T Model, or somethin’ like that. And after my daddy died, course he come up there to get us. Bring us out to his place, out in the country. Where we’d have a place to stay. An’ a, he had, he drove that old car up there, to pick up, my mother, and a, I just had a, my youngest sister was born at, at that time she was…five months old, I be—seven months old, at that time.

[Quietly tisks] Oh, my gosh.

And he come up there an’ a, to carry a, my mother, my older sis-- older sister, and my youngest sister. And I had a brother just four years younger than me, and a, carry them, back in the car. My uncle come in a, two-horse wagon to move us. From Carroll County back down there. And um, next morning, got up an’ put everything on the a, old wagon. An’ a, my granddaddy and my mother, sister, older sister, younger sister, and my younger brother, they got in the car with [clock plays musical number] my granddaddy, and they, drove back. Me and my older brother, which was two years older than me—he was eight, I was six at that time, and, we went back on the wagon. Course we had a cow, we had to tie the cow on the back of the, to the back of the wagon, and a, cow, just walked along, tied to the back of the wagon.

Mmhmm.

And um, it’s a pretty long trip from there you know back to a…Carrollton. Let’s see it’s about twenty, it’s twenty-two miles from Carrollton to Newnan, and we was about six or eight miles, out of Newnan.

Right.

Out there. About thirty miles. That’s a long ways to a, carry a, a cow behind a wagon, and move you know. But we, we got to the river, now we, we crossed the river where there was a bridge, at that time, big steel sides and everything, but a wood, floor you know?

Mmhmm.

An’ a, I don’t know, how many times we had to stop before we got there, but, a, we was getting’ hungry, an’ my momma had, cooked some biscuits, fried some strickiline—[chuckles] you know what that is?

No sir.

It’s [laughs heartily] it’s about the cheapest meat you can buy I guess! [AS and RG laugh] But you know what fat, fatback is--

I sure do.

Well all right you’ve seen this, the meat there with the fatback’s got streaks in it?

Mmhmm.

That’s what it is; we called that strickiline.

Gotcha.

An’ a, we had som-- and some scrambled eggs, an’ a some biscuits in a sack. An’ we was gettin’ pretty hungry, an’ all we had to drink was water. An’ a, my uncle said somethin’ about milkin’ that cow. And, he, wha—[laughs] he got off of the wagon, went back there an’ a, we didn’t have nothing to milk the milk in [laughs] so he got down there, down there close and milked that milk into his mou-- in his mouth from the cow you know [laughs]

Mmhmm.

And we had to have some of it too. It was warm [laughs] but it was wet [AS and RG laugh] and so I don-- I, I think it was way at—I know it was, it was way in the night when we got home. Because, you can’t travel about—with a team of horses—

Mmhmm.

‘Bout two or three miles an hour.

Right.

Yeah. You can count that to about three, three miles an hour, then stop an’ then rest, you get to rest some while

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Yeah. And, and we called it the red house. And a, we started farmin’ there. And course, we would help my granddaddy and them with his crop, they would help us. But a, my granddaddy gave my mother everything that we raised on that farm. To her you know, for us.

Mmhmm.

But times was pretty hard. An’ a, talkin’ about somethin’ to eat…we didn’t have good stuff you know like a lot of people did, to eat. I remember a lot of times we’d give out a flour. When havin’ a biscuit. But my granddaddy owned a little mill he-- of his own down there where he ground corn

Oohh!

Mmhmm. An’ a, we had plenty of mill all times. But a, we’d give out a flour. And momma would make what she would call flitters. Those flitter cakes you know that you’d call ‘em. Mix up a, the meal you know an’, an’ fry ‘em in little thin, ‘bout like this, [forms a circle with his hands] ‘bout that big—that’s what we’d take for dinner at school. Might have, I’d take two of ‘em together and put some eggs in between ‘em. And I tell you something else we’d ha-- a, had to go, a carry to school a lot of times to survive too. A biscuit, with gravy—you know what gravy is?

Mmhmm.

They’d put that gravy in that biscuit, sprinkle a little sugar in there, make it a little better you know.

Mmhmm.

And that’s, we’d eat that a lot of times. And sometimes, she’d put a little, little hole in there you know like they would these doughnuts or honey-filled doughnuts? Pour syr-- sar-- sarghum syrup in there.

Mmhmm.

But we thought it was good

Mmhmm.

We had to eat it anyway.

[laughs] Well um, you mentioned biscuits.

Right

Um, what um, what other types of breads besides the couple others that—cornbread for example? Is that something you would have? A lot?

Right. We had, mhmm, we ate a lot of cornbread.

You did?

Yes.

Okay.

An’ a, course we had our garden there you know, a pretty close to the house, but a, you know back then we raised cotton—more cotton than anything else. We raised some corn, but, a, cotton was the main thang. If you didn’t have a place to raise cotton out in the country, you couldn’t make it.

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All right, we were talking about um, the cornbread, the biscuits—so when typically did you eat these breads? Did you eat them at certain times of day? Certain times of the day?

Well lunchtime the people called, we called it dinner, dinnertime. And a lot of pe-people says dinner, at our suppertime.

Mmhmm.

See I was raised up out in the country, get there you know and they had these dinner bells you know that you’d ring. They’d ring them bells you know. You could hear ‘em for miles you know. There was a dinner bell. Great big bell, hung up you know, and they’d ring it and about eleven o’clock. That was to let people know, it was time to start slowing down, gettin' ready to, come home for dinner.

Mmhmm.

And so that’s where, where we got dinner, I mean a, yeah dinner. At twelve o’clock, in the daytime [laughs] not at night. And that was my, nighttime, that was our supper. But these, the dinner, you could a, you could a tell which bell, whose bell it was because they had different sizes of bells

Mmhmm, oh!

They had different sounds. And you’d learn them different sounds you know, whose bell it was. You knew it right in the country.

Yeah. [long pause] Okay.

The cornbread, yeah we would eat that, we would eat it at dinner, and at supper. See what we would do back then, a, you didn’t cook three meals a day

Okay.

You cooked a big dinner, coz I’ll tell you most everybody was in the fields workin’ and a, a they would have to leave the field say about ten o’clock go home and prepare dinner, see? That’s what momma would have to do. And a, [long pause] They’d ring them bells. Them people would a, start toward they’d finish one end you know, they ‘d get to the other end of the row you know and then they’d start unhitchin’ them mules, from the plow stocks, or whatever they was doin’ you know the and a get on them backs and ride ‘em, on. That’s what we done [laughs].

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To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.