Blue Ridge Country - March/April 2019 - 63

F L AV O R S
IMMEDIATE LEFT: Fred's maternal grandmother was known for her stuffed
peppers. He and Jill have kept the tradition going with peppers from their garden.
BELOW LEFT: Season two in the Saucemans' new raised beds will include
more eggplant.
FACING PAGE: This was the look of the raised beds less than a month after
they were built.

late July, the radish seeds we had planted the last day of
June were producing radishes. Their miraculous productivity gave us all the confidence we needed.
The Walker Sisters green bean seeds, saved from the
Great Smoky Mountains National Park and preserved in
our freezer for almost eight years, sprouted quickly. They
eventually reached a height of well over six feet and produced long, wide, meaty beans. Alongside them we grew
Logan Giant green beans, and they were just about as tall.
Those seeds were saved for a year, from the annual Lord's
Acre Sale at Hiltons United Methodist Church in Scott
County, Virginia. Jill's late father grew them often.
And last summer, we began doing exactly what our
parents, grandparents and great-grandparents had done:
figuring out how to make use of the crop. There were lots
of ghosts in our kitchen that memorable summer. I can't
think of a better way to memorialize someone than to
cook from an inherited recipe.
It seemed that my maternal grandmother, Edith Ethel
Koontz Royall, who died in 1971, was right in the kitchen
with us in July, when we made her sausage-stuffed peppers. I remember her always insisting that we save the
water the peppers were parboiled in.
We made "Posh Squash" a few days later, from a casserole recipe given to us over 18 years ago by our friend
Donna Netherland. She was a first-grade teacher in Elizabethton, Tennessee, who died in 2006 at the remarkable
age of 101. As those yellow squash kept coming in, I remembered my late mother bringing home a simple recipe
from a co-worker at Greene Valley Developmental Center
in Greeneville, Tennessee, back in the 1970s. It involved
the cooking of squash and onions in butter and finishing

off the dish with some sour cream.
Those two raised beds were a constant source of delight for us. Every day brought a new surprise-an overlooked zucchini, an eggplant the perfect shade of purple,
and Early Girls nearing tomato sandwich stage.
As fall came on, beans and tomatoes yielded their
space in the mushroom-composted dirt to mustard
greens, our grandmothers' favorite. Those greens kept
their color through a series of frosts and fed us at Thanksgiving. When we dusted off an early December snow, we
discovered that the plants had persisted, as green as ever.
And the cycle continues. Our first seed catalog of the
new season arrived two days before Christmas.
We learned some lessons last summer. Our ancestors
measured their gardens in acres, but we were dealing in
square feet. In our enthusiasm, we overcrowded and overplanted. Some of our plants struggled for sunlight.
We figured out that for a family of two, one cayenne
pepper plant is probably enough. Our picture window in
the kitchen is completely covered with ristras of drying
peppers, strung with needle and thread. We'll eventually
grind them and season our curries with them, for a far
better flavor than we could ever buy.
We have vowed to plant more eggplant. We have saved
more Walker Sisters seeds.
We look ahead, anticipating a new season, a new start.
Even on the darkest days of winter, our modest raised bed
garden plots, in a profound way, connect us to our people. They inspire us to continue their ways, in the hope
that we can, somehow, match their earthly wisdom.
Fred and Jill Sauceman study and celebrate the foodways
of Appalachia and the South from their home base in Johnson
City, Tennessee.

DONNA NETHERLAND'S
POSH SQUASH
2 pounds yellow squash
1 cup mayonnaise
¾ cup Parmesan cheese
1 small onion, chopped
2 eggs, beaten
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon black pepper
½ cup cracker crumbs in 1 tablespoon melted butter
Slice the squash and cook in boiling water until tender. Drain and
combine with remaining ingredients. Top with cracker crumb
mixture. Bake in a greased casserole for about 30 minutes at 350
degrees.

MARCH/APRIL 2019

Blue Ridge Country - March/April 2019

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