THE MENU MY GRANDMOTHER MISSISSIPPI CHURCH PIANIST AND COOK

She was fat because she was the best cook I knew, growing up. She liked her own cooking a lot. She made the best fried chicken, and I grew up with other good Southern cooks. 

Her biscuits were as good or better than my mother's, and she made really good biscuits. Very good cornbread, and my mother and other grandmother also made good cornbread. My other grandmother ate my mother's rather than make it herself. I won't even get into my grandmother's desserts. 

I think that being a minister's wife, where they were all real good at it, you had to be up there with the flock, and they had church functions and things where people brought what they had cooked.....back then, for stuff like that, they didn't buy anything, and most of them were poor by national standards.  The photo was probably taken in the depression. 

My grandfather, a minister his whole career, was also an outdoorsman, hunted for pleasure, kept a kennel of hunting dogs, but also hunted for food. He had a substantial garden, including rows of corn, etc., as I recall, at the back of the yard in their last home. He was assigned as pastor over the decades to different congregations in different towns, which was the way they did it.