Persimmon Pudding,
Beer and Brandy
And Zeb Vance
By YELL JOSLIY STYROY
cral had yokes of oxen with which they
plowed their fields. They grew com
and other vegetables, and some had
bees which made pure, clear sourwood
honey. The families on top of the
mountain generally had a cane patch
from which they made molasses, as
that was all they had to sweeten any¬
thing with in those days, except some
brown sugar once in a great while.
We rested a while with the people on
top of the mountain, started down, and
came to a high ridge where we could
look straight down to the bottom of the
mountain. We could sec a house down
below in a place which looked like a
hole with mountains all the way around
it. We wanted very much to go down
there, so this girl said her oldest
brother lived there and she would take
us to his home. Only a narrow path led
straight down the side of the mountain
— the only way to get in and out to
their home. When we got down we
found a one room log cabin near a
spring. There was about an acre of
level ground around this little stream.
The house was surrounded by lots of
peach trees which were budded and
ready to bloom. We were invited in¬
side. where we found a very clean floor
with two beds in the back of the room,
a homemade table, and a few chairs.
Invited to Lunch
The woman was cooking lunch on an
open fire, but what amazed us was a
pen built about five feet square in the
comer of the room, not more than
three feet from where the woman was
cooking her lunch. The floor of this pen
was covered with a thick layer of dry
leaves and on these leaves slept a nice,
fat pig. where it had lived all of its life.
There was no odor at all in the room, so
they must have cleaned out the leaves
every little while. They invited us to
stay for lunch, but we decided we
didn't want to cat with a pig. though we
were hungry.
We went back up the long path to the
girl’s house on the mountain, and when
we got to her house she invited us to go
in and eat lunch, or dinner as they
called it. As we were about starved
after our long walk we decided to go in
and cat. What they had on the table
was a cake of combread made from
com meal and water, a few slices of
fatback meat, half fried and floating in
a bowl of pure, clear grease, and-a few
dried, stewed blackberries with no
sweetening of any kind. As well as I
remember, we ate a few bites while a
crowd of hungry children stood at the
(Continued on page 46)
Possums like persimmons plain so.
but people mostly prefer their persim¬
mons in persimmon pudding, bread,
brandy and beer.
The late naturalist. Euell Gibbons,
famous for his hickory nut TV com¬
mercials. advocated equal parts sugar
and persimmon pulp, twice as much
flour with as many eggs as cups of
flour, margarine, touch of soda and
hickory nut meats for an utterly deli¬
cious Persimmon Hickory Nut Bread.
This he said should bake an hour. N.C.
State University Extension Depart¬
ment recipes go along with Gibbons
proportions, though some add spices
and buttermilk but none of them re¬
quire hickory nuts. Modern day
methods haven't discovered an easy
way to pick those stubborn nut treats,
nor have they found a way to crack
those granite hard shells without a
sledge hammer.
Persimmon brandy was made fa¬
mous by a story told by North Caro¬
lina's Zeb Vance. He was talking about
when he ran for governor back in 1864
when grain was scarce and "folks had
to And something else to make their
peartning juice out of." He made a
speech under the refreshment of per¬
simmon brandy and his constituents
said it was the best speech he had ever
made, because the puckering drink had
influenced him to shut up sooner than
usual.
At that point Vance told his audi¬
ence that Congress could do worse
than to purchase a quantity of persim¬
mon brandy for its own use.
However, since everybody knows
what happens to your mouth when you
bite into one that isn't dead ripe,
mostly they shy away from persimmon
brandy because folks always a’rushing
things would pick the persimmons
green and would whip up a drink that
would yank your insides right out.
But persimmon beer is a tad more
palatable and not so hard to bring oft'.
John Parris in "Mountain Cooking"
gives the directions:
"The way to make it is to beat the
persimmons into a pulp, mix in some
locust pods. Then you take a barrel and
put in a layer of this mixture, then a
layer of straw, another layer of the
mixture and so on until the barrel is
about two-thirds full. Then you dump
in com meal on the top layer and All the
barrel with water.
"Then you cover the barrel and let
nature take its course for about two or
three weeks."
This North Carolina persimmon
beer recipe is a lot simpler than the
Gel 'em when they're squoshy ond messy
before mentioned Euell Gibbons' in¬
structions. He makes his process
sound like work. He says to mix 10
pounds of the wheat bran usually fed to
cattle with one gallon of persimmon
pulp from very ripe persimmons and
bake this mixture like cornbread
pones. Then break the pones in pieces
and dump the mixture into a 5 gallon
(Continued on page 47 1
THE STATE. OCTOBER 197fl
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