It’s always a pleasure to talk with someone about their Fulton memories or to read the recollections of a lifelong Fultonian. Aside from offering new details about our city, their memories often rekindle mine. That’s what happened when I read Joe Vescio’s collection of stories, which he titled “The Good Old Days.” Among his favorite memories were those about food. I couldn’t agree more.
Joe grew up in Fulton as part of a large Italian family of sharecroppers, and when it came to food his family was a lot like mine. If it wasn’t somebody’s birthday or First Communion or wedding, all we needed to celebrate was a couple pounds of pasta and a pot of simmering spaghetti sauce. Sure, we cousins played backyard ball or explored the woods behind our family homes, but what I most remember were the delicious meals that filled our hungry bellies.
Both of my grandmothers learned how to create mouth-watering feasts growing up in Italy. By the time they immigrated to America, when they were still quite young, both knew just about everything food-related, including how to cook a chicken. I’m not talking about a plastic-wrapped bird from the grocery store. Our poultry meals came straight from the chicken coop, as Joe recalled with his good sense of humor.
“When we wanted to prepare a chicken for dinner, the first thing we had to do was wring its neck. One small jerk from a big jerk. Then we let it hang head down for an hour or so, to let the blood drain.”
Not the prettiest image, I know, but Joe’s family knew what they were doing.
“In the meantime, the pan of hot water had been boiling on the stove. The next move was to pluck the chicken. This was a work of art…and the soft down was dried and saved for later use to stuff pillows. The head, minus the beak, was a delicacy, along with the feet, which were parboiled.
“The toenails and the hard scales were removed, then the casings were cleaned with the chicken feathers. Casings were soaked in salt water and rinsed well. These would be cooked with the gizzard and livers, and either put into a sauce for macaroni or for homemade soup.”
Joe’s memory reminds me of a comment my mother often made about her mother. “She could debone a chicken, stuff it and put it back together like it was all intact. We’d show up at the table to find a perfectly-shaped chicken, cooked to a golden brown.”
Adding flavor to those delicious meals were ingredients from vegetable gardens. Both of my grandmothers had large gardens, and because I grew up next door to one set of grandparents, I learned a lot about raising plants; it’s where I discovered my love of digging in the soil. It looks like Joe was paying attention, too.
“My father had his own version of a rototiller: 3 or 4 kids taking turns with a garden fork or spade. Then we would plant pole beans, sweet peppers, tomatoes and hot peppers. Everything had to be staked and tied to get the most out of the garden.”
Like Joe’s family, my grandmothers were natural-born recyclers. Nothing was discarded, especially when it came to food. “Beans were eaten green, then dried and eaten, with pasta fagoli,” Joe explained. “Tomatoes were eaten when red, and what wasn’t eaten was processed into canned tomatoes or sauce. Green tomatoes were pickled in the crock; hot and sweet peppers were also eaten fresh or processed in jars or in a crock.”
Even non-edible vegetation had a purpose in Joe’s family. “All the leftover foliage from beans, peppers and tomatoes were stacked against the cellar wall. They were held in place with the poles and stakes to keep the winter cold out. We didn’t have freezers,[so we] had to bury carrots, celery and cabbage in the garden, and many a time in winter, we had to shovel snow and uncover it to get to the food.”
Joe’s stories of taking his lunch to school got my mouth watering. “We’d have a half loaf of Italian bread, cut in half, with fried potatoes and a little sprinkle of hot pepper on top. We never had wax paper in those days, but we did have plenty of newspaper that we used to wrap our lunch. We’d tie it with leftover string from the butcher. When I told kids that I only had a sandwich for lunch, they’d feel sorry for me until they saw its size.”
Joe’s unique lunch was also good for bartering. He liked swapping his one-of-a-kind sandwich for something we consider commonplace today. “[My friend], Art Fones, had peanut butter and jam sandwiches on American bread,” Joe recalled. “Those made it seem like I was eating cake, which was a rarity in our house.”
Desserts were scarce in my home, too, but you could make your own treat if you knew where to look, like Joe did during Fulton’s long winters. “First thing you had to do, immediately after a snowstorm, was to look for clean fresh snow, making sure that were no yellow spots. We never had soda or anything like that, but we did have black coffee, so we would sweeten the coffee and pour it on the pan of snow to make it look like slush.”
Joe wrote many other memories for us to “feast on” and I’ll be covering them in a future blog. But, for now, the next time I sit down to a meal of homemade chicken soup with a side of crusty Italian bread, I’ll be sending out thanks to my family for giving me such rich food memories. Then I’ll thank Joe Vescio for sharing his with us.
Joe Vescio (top row, far right), shown with his brothers, wrote his memories of growing up in Fulton, including how his parents provided their family with plenty of food.