The Poor Farmer's Feast

Poor Feast Playlist youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4e4wpjna1vzn_D5t7tBC4Q…

As a poor farmer, I approve of this video and this feast!

My grandfather was born in 1870 and my dad was born in 1923. They farmed in southern West Virginia plowing 13 acres with a mile. They raised goats,cows,pigs,chickens,and ducks. Grandpa blacksmithed and did woodwork on the side. My dad said their days started at 4am and lasted until after dark. They did their homework and read the bible by oil lamp,as well as turning the animals out to feed and water in the mornin

My grandmother grew up on a peanut farm, their house was a cabin with tree bark for siding and a dirt floor. 8 mouths to feed, I imagine they ate anything and everything they could get ahold of and this just makes me think of what a good meal would have looked like for her

I live in a small town and we are SURROUNDED by farms. During certain times of year you can smell onions when you drive out of town and I love it!

Best channel to throw onto your TV and just binge for 4 hours. Why yes, I'd love to learn how to make fricasse the same way people did in the 1700s

As a farmer's daughter, I can tell you that this sort of menu is eternal! It's exactly how a family farm would have been (should be?) run, I believe. Don't forget the herbs that the farmer's wife would almost always have growing by her kitchen door, and in the borders of the big garden, perhaps grown from little packets of seed brought from her home far away. I love that ceramic tabletop butter churn, I've never seen one like that before! Thanks for another great look at our ancestors' way of life. (That plate looks delicious, btw!)

As so many have already commented a meal like this was still a feast for a farmer in the 1900s, especially after the two World Wars and the Depression.

I love your stories about your childhood. My grandparents on both sides were excellent gardeners, but when I was a kid in the 80s, younger people weren't really picking up those skills. I've heard it said that when an old man dies, a library burns to the ground. All 4 of my grandparents have passed away now. Here's to the mysteries of coconut cakes and zinnias as tall as a fence.

Many of those in my parents’ generation went through the Great Depression, they went through WWII and needed a Victory garden to stretch things. My parents taught me to garden and I have a small garden in my backyard so I can relate. I enjoyed this video very much. Thanks!

Looks great! And yes, easy for us modern day folk to glamourise a bucolic setting if we haven't worked on a farm. I did for a season and quickly discovered, I might keep a garden, but that does NOT make me a farmer. I'm grateful for those who are called and persevere to do so. Edited to add: it was a small farm ~35 acres, so much of the work was done by hand.

That actually looks pretty good! After all his hard work, the poor farmer does enjoy a feast worthy for him.

My neighbor and I got hay delivered a couple days ago. The hay farmer is also our mailman. He works constantly delivering mail - can't get a day off even when he's sick because they're short-handed. And at nights and on the weekends he produces hay. This year has been very dry, and he's had 1/2 the yield he'd normally have. My neighbor is a cop. He works 3 jobs, and when he gets home, he's tending to the cattle he raises and sells to market.

That genuinely looks delicious. My grandfather was a coal miner by day but ran his own farm in the evening and after retirement, just like your dad and many others. My dad grew up helping with that farm and when he got an office job he put up a large garden in his backyard to work in the evenings. He's planting a much smaller garden now in his retirement and though my yard is too small for a garden I have raised planters on my porch where I grow tomatoes and peppers. It's not enough to sustain our family but produce allowed to ripen on the vine in the sun tastes so much better than produce that was picked prematurely to survive shipping to your location. Though I'm forever grateful for the food chain that can get all kinds of produce to my location all year round.

Mr Townsend is a rare, classic type of gentleman whose sadly dying out in the modern world. Seeing such old-school traditional charm is quite refreshing

I wonder if butter was discovered carrying cream in a vessel on a long bumpy journey. Suspecting it went bad, the expression of the first man eating it would have been priceless.😅

I grew up in farm country. Many of my classmates were from farms. We had cornfields for neighbors on two sides, used to watch people riding horses down the gravel road in front of our house. We got our milk from a farm up the road, came in big gallon jars. We put it in the fridge to let the cream rise to the top. Eggs were pretty fresh, too, sometimes we got them still warm.

I always go back to the writing of Laura Ingalls Wilder. She showed both the poor farmer's life and table (her childhood) and a rich farmer's life and table (her husband's childhood).

I've been a hobbyist gardener for twenty years. There's a lot to know. For the last five years I've been foraging in my own yard and have been amazed at how people throw away free food from their yard. I started designating areas for certain weeds like lambsquarter, nettles, and Wolf plantain, to grow freely. They take little care, come back every year and are typically very nutritious. I wonder why pioneers chose to ignore crops that are so easy to grow here. I suppose storage is the main reason.

A friend grew up on a small farm in Maine. Both her parents had outside jobs that provided the majority of the family’s income. When her father left and it was just her and her mother, they were on food stamps, and were grateful that food stamps don’t take farm produce into account because that’s the only way they got enough to eat. While her family’s farm wasn’t designed to be the family’s sole support, it’s important to remember how hard farm work is, and how marginal a living it can provide. As bad as megafarms are, there’s a reason people moved away from farming over the last century, and a reason it’s hard to recruit American-born agricultural workers now.