Moore: The Secret Ingredient
Folks raised in the South learned early that life didn’t hand you much, but if you were observant and hardworking, it could give you everything you necessitate. Most of us needed the same things, but it was each group’s secret ingredients that made them special for their branch of the family tree.
Land, water, and the people around you held knowledge. You just needed to listen, learn, and apply.
A cousin might show you where to find crawdads. Your dad explained how to read deer tracks. Those lessons were not hobbies. They were part of survival. They became the mold that shaped you.
Today, you can buy large quantities of crawfish at the grocery store. But 60 years ago, May through early June, if you searched the bar ditches of Ashdown, Arkansas, crawdads were everywhere and free for the taking.
You didn’t need fancy gear. A piece of string, a bit of salt pork or leftover meat, and you were in the crawdad catching business. Feeling the gradual tug, you’d pull one up and add it to the bucket of fresh water. Enough crawdads meant supper.
Deer hunting taught patience on a different level. Long hours. Cold mornings. Learning the wind, the trails, the habits. But the time with your dad, uncles, and grandfather at deer camp was memorable and valuable. You learned to bring home the bacon, as they say.
When you brought one home, it was weeks or months of meals. Nothing was wasted. And in my family, we were taught respect. Not just for the animal, but for the process.
Cooking tied it all together, and bacon grease was a food group unto itself. We called them “drippings,” and we always had plenty from the bacon fried at breakfast. Drippings were used for everything from frying potatoes to adding flavor to pinto beans.
When I was young, Depression-era shortcuts were still alive in everyday life. You fixed things instead of replacing them. You wore hand-me-downs, shared tools with neighbors, and planted gardens. Because buying everything from a store wasn’t always possible.
Flour, beans and rice were staples because they lasted and stretched. If you had a little meat, you made it travel a long way. If you did not, you still found a way to eat.
It wasn’t loud or flashy. It didn’t come from spending money. It came from knowing you could seize care of yourself and your people. From working with your hands and seeing a result. From sitting at a table where the food had a story behind it. From community, shared knowledge, and from the understanding that you were part of something bigger than yourself.
Today, a lot of that has been set aside. It is easier to buy than to make. Faster to replace than to repair. But the old ways aren’t gone. They’re just waiting.
You can still catch crawdads with a string and salt pork. You can still learn to hunt and how to fix something broken instead of throwing it away.
Bringing those things back doesn’t mean going backward. It means remembering what worked.
For Southerners, those lessons aren’t philosophy. They’re just life. The simple ways carried people through hard times, fed families, and built a kind of contentment that money just can’t buy. And they still can.
— John Moore is a Whitehouse resident. Email him at John@TheCountryWriter.com. To buy his book, “Write of Passage: A Southerner’s View of Then and Now Vol. 1 and Vol. 2,” visit www.TheCountryWriter.com.
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