Chicken-and-Dumplings and Stuff Such as That for Thanksgiving

Living in upper South Carolina farm country as a child in the 1950s, I learned lots about chickens, fried chicken and chicken and dumplings.

My mother, father, sister and I usually ate Sunday dinner – city folk called it “lunch” – at my paternal grandparents’ home. My dad’s only sibling, Uncle Fred, and his wife, Frances, usually joined us. We all attended the same rural church.

If his sermon ran a little long and people appeared restless, a preacher in those days might say, “Y’all stay with me, now. That fried chicken will wait.” That elicited chuckles from some Sunday morning pew-dwellers who would later pucker up to poultry. Nobody I knew back then ate “out” on Sundays; they all headed home for Sunday dinner, which was usually the largest meal of the week.

When I was old enough to feed myself, Mama let me choose my Sunday piece of chicken. I always chose a leg, because other parts seemed too prone to hide bones that might get stuck in my throat.

Most farms kept chickens, and Southern fried chicken was a staple. I’ve seen my grandfather chop off a chicken’s head and seen my mother wring one’s neck. I have visual memories that help me understand the meaning of that old expression: “running around like a chicken with its head cut off.”

Martha Brown, a friend and a retired nurse, told me she was eight years old when her mother let her try her hand at “wringing.”

“We lived in town [Greer, S.C.] but had chickens,” Martha said. “After spinning the chicken's neck around several times, I threw down the chicken. She was alive, but quite drunk, and ran to the street. A car hit her on busy Cannon Avenue. I can still see that car and that chicken. That was my first and last attempt at wringing a chicken's neck.”

Martha's family ate that chicken, despite the miserable creature’s mode of demise. A hen or rooster’s death by vehicular chicken-side probably doesn’t rate much lower than that of a chicken meeting its expiration date by “wringing.”

My mother’s side of our family was known for chicken and dumplings. Mama was one of nine children, and I guess an old chicken (or chickens) had to go a lot further when served as the main course at a meal for that crowd. My maternal grandmother put lots of dumplings (cooked balls of dough) with the chicken. Those dumplings were good enough to eat by themselves. Maybe that’s what Grandma counted on.

I’ve seen Grandma cook chicken and dumplings in a huge dishpan. Chicken and dumplings seemed to satisfy the hunger of Grandma’s offspring, who tended to look more like dumplings than some people on my father’s side of our family.

I can’t think about chicken and dumplings without remembering a Thanksgiving Day I, as a child, spent with my paternal grandparents. We gathered at the home of my grandfather’s brother, Jay, and his wife, Nell. Their small house, sided with asbestos shingles which were painted a pale, foliage-green color, sat beside a flat, paved road in rural Taylors, S.C.

During the previous summer, I had wandered into Great Uncle Jay’s sugarcane field, cut a section of a plant and sucked sweetness from that fibrous stalk. The ancients defined sugarcane as “reeds that produce honey without bees.”

Sugarcane stubs dotted that gray-hued field by Thanksgiving morning, when my grandfather, Uncle Jay and a few other male relatives, wearing faded coats and hats or caps, cradled shotguns and traipsed over sprawling acres of Southern landscape. They returned mid-morning with their harvested game – rabbits. Their wives prepared the main course for our Thanksgiving meal: rabbit and dumplings.

I’d never hesitated in dining on Chicken Little or Henny Penny, but putting a fork into Peter Cottontail didn’t appeal to me. That day, I dabbled at the dumplings. Who wants food that has a hare in it, anyway?