● Fried "farm" chicken: a chicken that was born free and raised in the back yard on potato peelings and table scraps fried in lard, served with cream gravy, garden-fresh green beans and mashed potatoes with fresh-picked corn on the cob and hot biscuits. Ambrosia!

● Sausage seasoned in a washtub on butchering day, finally ready to be stuffed into cloth sacks that were made out of used flour sacks. We didn’t know there was any reason to not taste the raw sausage, and everyone tried it.

● Summer’s firsts: first sweet corn, first new potatoes, first new peas with new potatoes, first wild blackberries, first strawberries.

● Snow ice cream: new fallen, fluffy snow, with real cream, sugar and vanilla or lemon flavoring.

● Apples from our own tree, buried in a pile of loose earth in the fall and retrieved in winter by groping in the dirt pile when the earth thaws deep down in spring. Cabbage keeps that way, too.

● Raw potatoes, peeled chunk by chunk, by a mom who’s slicing them for frying; sometimes my mom fried onions and green peppers with the potatoes.

● Open kettle tomatoes from the garden, salted and simmering, before being "canned" in quart-size glass Mason jars. Then, homemade tomato soup in winter.

● Fresh black walnuts, hulled by stomping and cracked by smashing between two rocks. Eating too many would make the mouth sore.

● Warm watermelon in the patch, opened by smashing it, then served by digging out the seedless heart with dirty little hands.

● Homemade ice cream at Christmas time: three beaten eggs per gallon, a cup of cow’s cream, 2 cups sugar and vanilla. Pour into a White Mountain freezer can, add the dasher and enough milk to fill the can two-thirds full. Cover. Cut ice from the pond, pack ice and stock salt around and on top of the can. Serve with Mom’s blackberry jam or grape jelly or cake.

● A single, big, soft-ripe blackberry, juicy, warmed by early-morning sun, picked from the briars and eaten in the patch.

● Mom’s White Mountain cake, four tiers with filling between, held together with toothpicks under a fluffy divinity icing.

● Chicken soup, simmered, bones and all - kids get to suck the bones when they’re removed from the pot - with leftover vegetables, plus onions, garlic, sage and other seasonings added before serving on cold winter nights.

● Hot, buttered homemade bread.

● Soft-boiled eggs with crackers crushed in them: kids’ supper on bath night before being sent to bed early in clean pajamas.

● Baked possum with candied sweet potatoes: One time each winter, men in Mom’s Sunday school class hunted and dressed enough possums for the entire group. Mom cooked them on wire racks to eliminate the grease. Girls in the class brought covered dishes for the possum feast.

In addition to these great remembered tastes, there were some not-so-delightful ones. I never had my mouth washed out with homemade lye soap for telling a fib, but it was absolutely terrible, claimed the kids who suffered through the ordeal.

And a not-quite-ripe persimmon - one was enough!

The worst was something given for curative purposes. The one time I was given this medicine I ran outdoors, clung to the wire fence and vomited. Mom never gave me that stuff again! What was it? Castor oil!