Picked the popcorn yesterday and have it out to dry now. I had planned to do this much later, but a deer got in that garden and went down the whole row biting the end of each ear off and knocking over many of the stalks. I had let the electric fence get grounded by grass overnight and the deer took advantage of it.
I think there will be enough for winter as Scott and Margo are not popcorn eaters unless it is at a movie at $5 a bucket. At home where it is free, they don't seem to care for it. But I like it!
Dad was the popcorn fan when we were kids, coming in about 9 pm after the evening milking and taking out a cob or two of popcorn, dried upstairs in an onion bag, shelling it, blowing off the chaff, then taking the steel skillet and covering the bottom with kernels. He shook it, sliding it back and forth on the electric stove burner with no oil in it, just rolling the kernels back and forth. The kernels swelled up, started browning, and then a few popped onto the stove before he put on the lid, turned the burner down, and shook it until every kernel popped and the skillet was filled with fresh, crispy, Japanese Hull-less white fluffs.
Then he dumped it into the deep aluminum kettle that was used for the drop-burner on the stove and if we boys were awake, popped a second batch before melting a generous slice of butter off the whole pound block, melting it in the still-hot skillet and then pouring it over the popcorn, adding salt and stirring it all up.
He put his own helping right in the buttery skillet and ate it while reading the local newspaper or the Reader's Digest. You could see his fingerprints in what he read.
Of course, we always grew our own popcorn. It had to dry until nearly Christmas before the new year batch was ready and so some years we went without for a few months, making the first batch of the new crop exciting!
When it was dry, we shelled it, the pointed hard kernels rubbing our hands raw. The shelled popcorn was full of chaff, and so we took it outside to let the wind winnow it. And at just the right moisture content so every kernel popped, we sealed it in fruit jars for the coming year. We boys shelled grandpa and grandma's popcorn for them too. I still remember the raw hands afterward -- as both families had many ears and long rows in the garden or on the field edge rows. Grandma made popcorn balls for Halloween and Christmas and used popcorn and thread to make Christmas tree strings.
For Halloween, we stopped at our much older neighbors, Bert and Hattie Brenizer, and they never had candy on hand for us, but said --" wait a little and we will pop some corn for you." Bert had the old kitchen wood stove cherry red using some coal with his wood as he told us that his grandpa had a coal mine out east once upon a time and he liked that for heat. He popped it in a popcorn shaker, a rectangular metal pan with a screen top and when done, put it in a grocery brown bag, poured in melted lard and sugar and shook it up.
"When we were kids," he told us, "all butter was sold to the store to make money, so we used lard and added sugar to make it better." It was good, the brown paper bag stained with lard and our hands and soon our pants greased up too.
We usually got a few stories along with the popcorn and as we only had a few stops in walking distance of our house, it was special to stay and listen to Hattie tell us about walking to school on the barrens holding on to the big dog so the wolves wouldn't come close.
