Sunday Dinner Etiquette for Heathens
Dr. G. G. Wilkins gives a lecture on 1860s Sabbath table manners, though he has none of his own. He covers Saturday-night beans, the New England boiled dinner, eating off the knife, goose-quill toothpicks and the new 1864 two-cent piece that says IN GOD WE TRUST, and he tells how Barnaby the bear ruined a tax assessor's Sunday dinner. Retired Wilkes County runner Junior Vance tells three new stories: his grandmama feeding a revenue agent while the boys loaded jars out back, a mix-up with jugs at a church homecoming, and running loads on Sunday morning while the law sat in church. Later, Wilkins sets out a still run as a Sabbath dinner in courses, answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in a thump keg, and knocks down the blue-flame spoon test.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby. BARNABY. Settle your hairy carcass down. That is the Sabbath ham you smell, it is not yours, it was never yours, and if you put one more claw through that window sash I will have you tanned and laid in front of the parlor stove so the parson can wipe his boots on your face every Sunday from now until Judgment.
♦ Low, sulky bear grunt; chain settles in the dirt
Wilkins: There. He has sat down. He sits like a deacon who has just been told the sermon runs long.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, you sinners, saints and in-betweeners, and welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, here in the County of Merrimack. I am Doctor George G. Wilkins: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, coin-puncher, keeper of a bear and twice a guest of the county sheriff. Tonight's lecture is Sunday Dinner Etiquette for Heathens. Yes, friends, a lecture on manners from a man who has none. It is like a sermon on chastity from a tomcat. He knows the subject very well, only from the other side.
Wilkins: The usual word before we sit down to eat. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and everything on this program is for historical and educational purposes only. Now tuck your napkin in your collar and keep your elbows to yourself. Here is a quick word from the man who pays for the lamp oil.
♪ Brisk banjo vamp under
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♪ Vamp resolves on a fiddle flourish
♪ Short fiddle sting, segment marker
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. The Sabbath table of New England, and how a heathen survives it.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle; a log settles in the stove
Wilkins: First, the clock. In this valley we take dinner at midday, not in the evening the way the Boston swells do. Dinner is the big meal at noon. Supper is the cold bit you pick at by candlelight before bed. So Sunday dinner lands right after meeting lets out, when every soul in the house has sat two hours on a pine pew hard enough to bend a horseshoe and is starving, ill-tempered and ready to commit a sin with a carving knife.
Wilkins: The Puritan grandfathers fixed it so nobody cooks on the Lord's Day. In the strict old way the Sabbath started at sundown Saturday. So Saturday afternoon the beans go into the crock with salt pork and molasses, the brown bread goes in to steam, and all of it sits in the brick oven overnight. Come Sunday the beans are hot, the bread is soft, and the only thing anybody has worked at is keeping a straight face during the long prayer. Saturday beans are why a New England Sunday afternoon has a certain thunder to it, friends. The Almighty rested on the seventh day. The parlor did not.
♦ Wilkins chuckles; chair creaks
Wilkins: If it is not beans it is the boiled dinner. Corned beef in the big iron kettle with cabbage, turnips, potatoes, carrots and beets, boiled until the whole house smells like a wet dog's prayer meeting. On Monday whatever is left gets chopped and fried, and the beets turn the lot red, and we call it red flannel hash. The boiled dinner comes to the table as corned beef and goes out as hash, the same way a deacon comes to church a saint and goes home a horse trader.
Wilkins: Now, manners. The fine ladies who write etiquette books in Philadelphia, Miss Eliza Leslie at the head of them, have told the whole republic in print that a gentleman shall NOT carry his food to his mouth on the blade of his knife. Well, Miss Leslie never ate at a Pittsfield table where the fork has two steel tines spread wide enough to drive a cow through. Peas fall straight between them. So the country man loads his knife. I say eating peas off a knife is a skill, not a sin. Any man who can carry eleven peas to his mouth on a steel blade without bleeding has the steady hand of a surgeon, and I will hire him to hold my patients' tongues.
Wilkins: Then there is the American zig-zag. You cut your meat with the knife in your right hand and the fork in your left, then you put the knife down, pass the fork over to the right hand, and eat. Englishmen who come through here watch us like we are a traveling show. They keep the fork in the left hand like the Queen intended. I tell them a Yankee moves his fork back and forth for the same reason he moves his money back and forth: he wants to watch it change hands.
Wilkins: And spitting. Mr. Charles Dickens came over in 1842 and wrote a whole book, American Notes, and a good share of it is him being horrified at our tobacco juice. Spittoons in the parlor, in the courthouse, in the Senate of the United States, and plenty of men who miss them. Mr. Dickens said Americans spit everywhere. I say Mr. Dickens never tried to get through a Merrimack County Sunday sermon without a little help. Heathen's rule number one: at Sunday dinner the plug comes OUT of your cheek before grace. If you leave a brown mark on a deacon's wife's linen you will be talked about from Pittsfield to Gilmanton Iron Works until your grandchildren die.
Wilkins: Heathen's rule number two: the toothpick. I am a dentist, so listen. A gentleman uses a goose quill cut to a point, and a rich man carries one of silver or gold in his waistcoat. You pick your teeth BEHIND your napkin, not at the table like a man digging for a well. A goose-quill toothpick is the only thing in this valley that has been pulled out of a goose and then out of a parson without either one complaining to the county.
Wilkins: Heathen's rule number three: what is in the cup. In my grandfather's day a New England table always had hard cider on it. The baby got it watered and the minister got it straight. Now the temperance people have dried out half the Sunday tables in this state, and you will be offered cold water and a sermon on the evils of rum. My advice is to drink the water, praise the pie, and save your opinions for the walk home, where only the cows can hear you.
♦ Wilkins rises; boots on plank floor; anvil ring of a hammer set down
Wilkins: Last, the collection plate, which is what you pay before Sunday dinner. Last year the Mint put out a brand new coin, the two-cent piece of 1864, and it is the first coin of these United States to say IN GOD WE TRUST right across it. I have one here on my anvil. Watch now.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There. It now says IN GOD WE TRUST on one side and G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. on the other, so the parson can decide which of us to blame. The Treasury does not say who God trusts, and I notice it is not the Treasury.
♪ Fiddle sting, segment marker
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Legends of the Sabbath table, and a guest from the Brushy Mountains.
♦ Wax crackle; distant bear huff
Wilkins: You want to know how bad Sunday dinner can go? Sit down. I will tell you about the Sunday a county tax assessor invited himself to my table. I am not saying his name, because his widow is a fine woman who never did me any harm. Call him Mr. Pratt. He came up Route 28 in a black coat on the Lord's Day, figuring a man who works the other six days would be home on the seventh with his books open and his kettle warm. He knocked, so I let him in. The rule of the house is that any man who knocks gets fed, even the ones who come to count your barrels.
Wilkins: We sat down to a boiled dinner. Mrs. Wilkins asked him to say grace, and he started in. Saying grace at my table lasts exactly as long as it takes Barnaby to smell the ham, which makes it the shortest prayer in the Suncook Valley and the most heartfelt. Mr. Pratt got as far as 'bless this bounty' when the window behind him went black. It was all fur.
♦ Splintering wood, glass tinkling, a chain snapping taut
Wilkins: I had left Barnaby a few links too much chain. He got his head and one shoulder through the window frame, and a bear's head close up is a big thing, friends, as big as a bushel basket and steaming. His breath smelled like a tanyard on a hot day mixed with a pickle barrel that had died. He reached right over Mr. Pratt's shoulder, took the corned beef off the platter with his teeth, five pounds of it, and the brine ran down Mr. Pratt's collar, under his shirt and into places a tax man keeps for himself. Then that bear licked the gravy out of the man's whiskers, slow and thorough, the way you would clean out a churn. Mr. Pratt could hear the tongue scraping. So could I. It sounded like a wood rasp going over a wet saddle.
Wilkins: Mr. Pratt did not scream. He let out a long whistling noise like a teakettle somebody had stepped on, his eyes rolled back, and he fell forward face-first into the mince pie. It was the first time in his life his nose had been anywhere useful. Barnaby ate the turnips off his plate, put his paw on the man's head to steady himself, ate the rest of the pie from around his ears, then backed out of the window with the ham hock and lay down outside to enjoy it, belching like a church organ with a bad bellows.
♦ Satisfied bear grunt, chain rattle
Wilkins: We sat Mr. Pratt up, wiped the mincemeat out of his eyebrows, and Mrs. Wilkins gave him coffee. He never did open his ledger. He left his hat on my hook and never came back for it, and it is on the hook to this day, and Barnaby has chewed the band off. It is the only tax I ever collected.
Wilkins: One more, and this one has blood in it. A man from over the line in Barnstead, a rival in the copper trade, came to Sunday dinner to make peace and steal my methods while he was at it. I served partridge. Now anybody who has eaten a bird somebody shot knows there may be lead shot left in the meat. This fellow bit down hard on a pellet, and I heard his back molar split. It was a wet crack, like stepping on a green walnut. He grabbed his jaw and started cursing on the Lord's Day, in front of my wife, words you would not hear in a Portsmouth sail loft. Well, I am a dentist. I had my forceps in my vest pocket like a good Christian carries his Testament. I put my knee on his chest right there on the dining chair, got the forceps around the two halves, and pulled. It came out with a sucking pop and a root as long as a carpet tack. He bled on my tablecloth in a shape just like the State of Maine. I charged him a dollar and gave him the partridge to take home, and he never spied on my methods again, because he could never hear the name Wilkins without tasting blood.
♦ Wax crackle; chair scrapes
Wilkins: Now, for a guest who knows the other end of the Lord's Day, a man who has come a long and dusty road from Wilkes County, North Carolina. He is a retired runner of mountain liquor and the fastest hand on a mountain road, and he has had more Sunday dinners interrupted than a Methodist circuit rider. Welcome to Fort Wilkins, Junior Vance.
Junior: Thank you, Doc. I'll say this right off. I've been in some rough places, but I never before sat down to talk with a man who's got a bear lookin' in his window like it's waitin' on dessert.
Wilkins: He is waiting on dessert, Junior. He is always waiting on dessert. Keep your fingers off the windowsill. Now, I want Sunday stories out of you. Down in the Brushy Mountains, what did Sunday dinner mean in a family in the liquor trade?
Junior: Doc, Sunday dinner in Wilkes County was church. Hell, it came ahead of church. You could miss the sermon and get forgiven, but you missed my grandmama's table and you'd best be laid out at the funeral home with a lily in your hand. Fried chicken, chicken and dumplin's, butter beans, creamed corn, biscuits big as a mule's hoof, sweet tea so thick the spoon'd stand up in it, and a banana puddin' for after.
Wilkins: That is a better spread than the Governor gets in Concord. Did the law ever sit down at it?
Junior: Once. That's my story. There was a revenue agent, a young feller fresh out, shoes so shiny you could check your teeth in 'em. He come up the holler one Sunday about noon, and he had a fair notion there was a load sittin' in Granddaddy's smokehouse, because there was. My grandmama met him on the porch, and Doc, she never batted an eye. She said, 'Son, you look puny. Come in and eat.' And sat him at the head of the table where Granddaddy sits.
Wilkins: Oh, the cunning of a Christian woman. Go on.
Junior: She made him say grace. He done it. Then she said he'd mumbled it and made him say it over. Two graces. Then she put chicken and dumplin's in front of him, and every time he got near the bottom of the plate she filled it back up, talkin' the whole while about his mama and was he courtin' and did he know Jesus personal. Three helpin's. Meanwhile me and my cousins were goin' out the back of that smokehouse like ants carryin' crumbs, two jars to a hand, down the bank to the creek.
Wilkins: And the banana pudding?
Junior: She served the puddin' right when the last jar went down the hill. Like she had a watch on it, Doc. By the time that boy got to the smokehouse he was so full he had to undo his belt, and there was nothin' in there but hams and a dirt-dauber nest. He shook her hand and thanked her for the meal. She told him to come back any Sunday. He never did.
Wilkins: She made him say grace twice. That is more praying than any revenue man has done since the tax was invented. Junior, that is the best use of a dumpling I ever heard of in my life. Now, did you ever sin AT church?
Junior: [laughs] Doc, have you heard of homecoming? Once a year the whole church has dinner on the grounds. Sawhorses and planks under the oak trees, every woman in the county tryin' to beat the others with her deviled eggs. One year my uncle had a gallon jug of white liquor he needed to hand off to a fella from Statesville after the service. He hid it in a washtub of ice under the sweet tea jugs, figurin' nobody'd dig past the tea.
Wilkins: I can see the trouble coming from here. Go on.
Junior: Well, the preacher's wife was makin' the punch. Ginger ale and pineapple juice and some sherbet floatin' on it, big glass bowl. She runs low, reaches in the tub, and grabs the wrong jug. All of it went in the bowl, Doc. A gallon of hundred-and-ten proof on top of a little Baptist punch.
Wilkins: Mother of mercy.
Junior: Doc, that choir got up to sing for the afternoon service, and they never sounded like that before or since. Four-part harmony. The bass section hittin' notes way down in the cellar. Old Miz Hattie, who hadn't sung above a whisper since Roosevelt, took a solo and held the last note so long a dog on the next ridge joined in. Then the deacons got to arguin' over who'd had the most punch and somebody got slapped with a pie. The preacher said it was the Holy Spirit movin'. My uncle stood at the back of the room lookin' at his empty tub like a man watchin' his house burn.
Wilkins: Junior, I have been to a great many church suppers, and I would have walked to Carolina on my knees to see that one. Now tell me. Your trade worked Saturday night, I'd wager. What about the Lord's Day itself?
Junior: Sunday mornin' was the best hour in the whole week to run, Doc. Eleven o'clock service. Every lawman in Wilkes County was in a pew with his hat in his lap and his wife's elbow in his side. Wasn't nobody watchin' the roads. I'd go down the mountain empty Saturday night, load before daylight, and run it Sunday mornin' with the church bells ringin' in every valley like they were wavin' me through.
Wilkins: The bells waving you through. That is poetry, Junior. Did it ever go sour?
Junior: Just once. One Sunday I come round a bend on the Boomer road, loaded heavy enough the back end was near draggin', and there's a car comin' the other way. It's the sheriff's own wife with her two girls, all in their Easter hats. And she knew me, Doc. Everybody knew everybody. We passed so close I could've took a biscuit off her dashboard. And she smiled and waved at me, sweet as you please.
Wilkins: Did she tell the sheriff?
Junior: I never found out. But that Wednesday the sheriff stopped me in town, put his hand on my shoulder and said, 'Junior, my wife says you looked mighty dressed up Sunday for a boy who wasn't in church.' Then he walked off. Never said another word. I went to church every Sunday for a month after that and drove the load on Monday.
Wilkins: The fear of a sheriff's wife is a holier thing than any sermon. Junior, before I let you go, you were brought up in that house. Who taught you your manners?
Junior: Same feller taught me to drive, an old runner name of Pap Shumate. He said manners at the table and manners on a mountain road are the same rule. Never reach across another man's plate, and never pass on a blind curve. You'll lose a hand doin' one and your whole head doin' the other.
Wilkins: Ha! Never reach across another man's plate, and never pass on a blind curve. I am carving that over my door. Junior Vance, of North Wilkesboro and the Brushy Mountains, you are a gentleman, God help you, and you may sit at my table any Sunday you like. Just keep clear of the window.
Junior: I'm obliged, Doc. And tell that bear I said hey from a safe distance.
♦ Bear grunts in reply; chain clinks
Wilkins: He says hey back, and he says your fingers smell of fried chicken. We will be right back after this.
♪ Rousing patent-medicine-show brass and banjo fanfare
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♪ Fanfare button; cymbal crash
♪ Fiddle sting, segment marker
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the Craft. A distilling run served as a Sabbath dinner, course by course.
♦ Copper pot lid lifted, rings softly; wax crackle
Wilkins: Again, so the law hears it plainly: making spirits to drink without a federal permit is illegal, and this is history and instruction, the same as a lecture on how the Romans built roads. Now, a distilling run is a Sunday dinner, and it has courses, and a heathen with no manners will gobble them in the wrong order and end up blind, buried or both.
Wilkins: First, you set the table, meaning the wash. Your mash, grain or fruit, is fermented first into a weak beer. Put it in the pot, but NOT to the brim. Leave a good part of the pot empty, a quarter to a third. A pot filled too full will foam up and puke into the vapor pipe, and then you have fouled your worm and spoiled your run, and you look like a man who heaped his plate so high the gravy ran into his lap. Leave room at the table.
Wilkins: Second, the fire. Low and slow, the way a woman sets the beans on Saturday night. A roaring fire under a pot still sends foam up the pipe, scorches the bottom and drives the run too hard to make clean cuts. And this is gospel: alcohol vapor burns, and it burns quicker than a Barnstead man's temper. Every joint must be tight. No open flame near any place vapor might leak. You never, ever leave a running still alone, not to eat, not to pray, not to argue with a bear. Keep the still-house aired out, and keep a bucket of water and a sack of sand close by. More still-houses in this county have been lost to a careless lamp than to the sheriff.
Wilkins: Third, the cousin from Barnstead. The first spirit that drips from the worm is the foreshots, a small cup at the start of the run. It smells sharp, like solvent or nail polish, and it carries the methanol, which is wood alcohol and will blind you and then kill you. The foreshots, friends, are the cousin from Barnstead: they show up early, they smell of something, and you put them out of the house before they ruin the meal. You throw the foreshots away. You do not drink them, rub them on your gums, give them to the hired man or sell them to a revenue agent, however much he deserves it.
Wilkins: Fourth, the long grace, meaning the heads. After the foreshots come the heads. They are still harsh and still carry the volatile stuff that gives you a skull-splitting morning, and on a fruit run they carry more methanol than on grain. Here is why: fruit, apples especially, is full of pectin in the skin and the pulp, and the fermenting breaks pectin down into methanol. So any man running apple brandy in this valley must be twice as careful with his heads as a corn man down south. Collect the heads in small jars, one after another, and smell each one. When the sharp edge fades and something sweet and clean comes up, you have reached dinner.
Wilkins: Fifth, the roast, which is the hearts. This is the middle of the run, the clean part, smooth and sweet, the part a distiller keeps. You take it in small jars too, so you can tell exactly where it begins to turn.
Wilkins: Sixth, the guest who will not leave, which is the tails. Toward the end of the run the spirit turns oily and cloudy and smells like wet cardboard and old dog. The tails are the guest who stays after the pie, gets oily, and starts telling you about his kidneys. Set them aside. Some men run them again with the next batch. Nobody puts them in a good bottle.
Wilkins: Now the alchemy, and why the copper is the honored guest at this table. The mash gives off sulfur-bearing fumes when it is heated, the rotten-egg and stewed-cabbage stink. Copper grabs onto them and holds them. But mark this, because it is the part men forget: the copper does most of that work where it touches the hot VAPOR, up in the helmet, the lyne arm and the worm. Copper in the bottom of the pot is under the liquid and does far less. A man who builds a copper pot and then runs his vapor through an iron pipe is like a man who wears his Sunday coat over a tobacco-stained shirt: shiny where it does not count. Copper in the vapor path, friends. Write it on your heart.
♦ Wilkins raps the copper helmet with a knuckle; a clear, bell-like ring
Wilkins: Hear that? That is pure metal. No lead in the solder, never, not a speck, because lead is a poison and it goes where you cannot get it out. Clean copper, honest joints, low fire and honest cuts. That is the whole religion, and it is a shorter catechism than the Congregationalists have.
♪ Fiddle sting, segment marker
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Myths, slang and a voice from the hills. We have had a message recorded on the cylinder from a gentleman in the Carolina country. Let us hear it.
♦ Cylinder machine cranks; needle drops; thin, distant hiss
Cletus: Alchemist, my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?
♦ Needle lifts; cylinder winds down
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, a neighbor of our friend Junior, God help the county. Rabbit, it is a fine question, and your uncle is half right and half swamp. Let me take the ashes first, because every New England farmer knows what ash is good for. Hardwood ash is mostly potash, and potash is strong alkali. Up here our grandfathers soaked ashes in barrels of water, drew off the lye and boiled it down for soap and for potash to sell in Boston and over the ocean. So when your uncle dumps hickory ash into his thump keg, he is pouring lye-water into it. It may change how sour the charge is. What it will NOT do is pull out the methanol. Methanol comes up early in the run and goes out with the foreshots and the heads, and the only thing that saves you is the man throwing those away. Rabbit, your uncle's ash bucket will make you good soap. Wash with it, but don't drink what it was tossed into.
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Oak is what gives a whiskey its color, its tannin and its vanilla-sweetness, but that happens over months and years sitting in a barrel. A handful of shavings in a hot thump keg for an afternoon will give you a little color and a pucker like a green persimmon. It does not age anything, and it does nothing to fix a bad head. If you have a bad head, nothing in the keg will save you. You save yourself at the jar, by cutting early and cutting honest. Rabbit, tell your uncle he is welcome at Fort Wilkins any time, and to leave the ash bucket at home.
♦ Wilkins sets a coin on the anvil; lifts the hammer
Wilkins: While I am knocking down myths, here is the worst of them: the blue flame. Old men all over this country pour a little spirit in a spoon, light it, and squint. 'Blue flame, she's safe. Red flame, there's lead. Yellow, there's sugar.' They even make a rhyme of it. Well, Mr. Rabbit and all of you:
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Methanol burns blue as well! Pale blue, and in daylight you can hardly see it, same as good spirit. The flame will show you a fine little parlor trick, and it will not tell you one thing about whether your jar will blind you. Testing spirit with a blue flame is like judging a girl's virtue by the color of her bonnet: pretty, traditional, and it proves nothing whatsoever. And a man striking matches over a spoon of high-proof spirit next to a working still is a man who wants his name read out in church sooner than he planned. Make your cuts and throw out your foreshots and heads. That is the only test there is.
♦ Second punch strike; coin rings and rolls on the plank
Wilkins: This coin is going in the mail to Wilkesboro: one two-cent piece, IN GOD WE TRUST on the front and G. G. WILKINS PITTSFIELD N.H. on the back, for Mr. Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller, for asking an honest question on a Sunday.
Wilkins: And a little slang for the heathens before we go. When a fellow says he is 'going to see the parson' on a Sunday afternoon and comes home wobbling, in this valley we say he 'took the long sermon.' When a woman sets out the good china for company she 'opens the vault,' and when the company breaks a cup she 'calls in the debt.' And a man who reaches across the table, Junior's sin, is said here to be 'fishing in another man's pond,' and folks have been shot for that in more ways than one.
♪ Short banjo vamp under
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♪ Vamp resolves
♪ Theme returns softly, banjo and fiddle, slow
Wilkins: Well, friends, the ham is gone, the bear has eaten the gravy boat, and Mrs. Wilkins says the tablecloth will never come clean. If tonight made you curious about the honest way of the old craft, the history, the metal and the cuts, look into the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. It is everything I know about copper, fire and judgment, laid out plain and lawful, so you can learn the real art and not your uncle's swamp medicine. Thank you to Junior Vance of the Brushy Mountains, to Mr. Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, and to every heathen who sat up with us tonight. I have had two arrests, one bear and no table manners, and only the bear has ever been asked back to the parson's house. Say your grace, keep your knife out of your mouth, and never pass on a blind curve.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♦ Wax cylinder crackle fades to silence