Food for the Time
Gerald: I remember we used to have to go around pick up boilers of soup and this kind of stuff. Then we’d say “The last boiler see, you had to have a mug up, yourself see, on the side of the road somewhere.”
Interviewer: Did ye steal the beef out of the boiler?
Gerald: Oh, yes, steal the beef out of the boiler. Have to cut an alder off stick it down in the boiler and get the beef.
Interviewer: Ray Guy said that they used to put their mitt on and shove their mitt overboard , and you know the icy water would kind of freeze up the mitt so it’d be cold. Then they would shove it down in the boiler and grab the beef. Right.
Sharon: Good old days, Charlene.
Lizzie: Best days …
Grace: My brother telling me he’s 74. He said that, one time, when they’d have the soup suppers, no the concerts and they would have soup and that after. He said, this … Tom Smith, his name was, … he’d take his quarter of meat on the slide and go to every house and say “you making boiler of soup” . “Oh, yes” so he would cut off the junk of meat and give them to make the soup and go onto the next house. That’s how they use to do it.
Elizabeth: That’s what I remember in Jean De Baie about I use to live with a woman up there and they came and brought the piece of meat for her to cook. She had a 2 year old boy and he was crying for a little bit off it, you knows how good that smelled in the house and you didn’t have any. He was crying for a little bit and she took the knife and she cut a little sliver off, well you could almost see through it what she give the little boy. She said “I s’pose the blessed priest won’t be mad with me for stealing that little bit of meat.”
Lizzie: We used to have all mutton soup in Oderin, all sheep [no moose there.] No everything was mutton, all mutton soup. [Some good, too.] You kill the sheep in the fall of the year and that’s when you’d have your soup suppers. Have a dance and soup supper and you go round like you said and share the mutton like you were just saying, make your soup, come to the hall, have a big time, dance all night from ten o’clock til six in the morning.