Bear Grease - Ep. 313: This Country Life - Spam, Onions, Grits, and Butter

Episode Date: April 11, 2025

There's something to be said for doing your own thing, and in this episode, Brent's saying a lot. His brother Tim is literally churning out homegrown goodness from his own kitchen and during a recent visit, he clued Brent in on what he was doing. Brent's also sharing a listener story that's definitely worthy of a second helping. It's a feast for your ears on this week's "This Country Life" podcast. Subscribe to the MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube Connect with Brent and MeatEater MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Youtube Clips MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube Shop This Country Life Merch Shop Bear Grease MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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First Light's new fieldwear gear at firstlight.com. Welcome to this country life. I'm your host, Brent Reeves. From coon hunting to trot lining and just general country living, I want you to stay a while as I share my experiences and life lessons. This country life is presented by Case Nives on Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcasts that Airways have to offer. All right, friends, grab a chair or drop that tailgate. I've got some stories to share.

Spam, onion, grits, and butter. I find it very gratifying to see folks make it at home what they used to buy at the store. I've always said that life is cyclical and eventually we go back to where we started. Radio was first, then movies, TV, and now podcasts are like radio all over again. Watching a podcast is like when radio turned into television. But media isn't our focus today. It's homemade groceries.

One of my favorite subjects, and I'm going to tell you all about some things my brother Tim does, but first, I'm going to tell you a story. This story comes from our friend Avery Settlichick, an aspiring actor living in New York City. Avery's a native of Jacksonville, Florida, and was blessed with a grandfather to make some fond memories with. This story speaks of food, and food is kind of our theme today, so in Avery's work. and my voice. Here we go. As a young boy, I spent much of my time with my papa. My mom, a recent

widow, nurse, and mother of three could certainly use the help, and her dad was one of the many people to answer that call. He was an iron worker, a barber, a gospel singer, a TV cameraman, and even an aerial photographer. He had more jobs than a job fair and was retired by the time I popped up so he had plenty of time and stories to share with me. Papa taught me all of the cool things in life like flea markets and action movies and painting your own initials on all your tools. But of all the things he and I did together, hunting was by far my favor. Each fall, we'd pack up his camper, hauled it up to the club, and set up shop.

Then throughout the season, he would pick me up on Friday and take me to the club where we would run dogs on Saturday before high-tailed it back for church on Sunday morning. I loved every second of it, riding on the toolbox, talking it on the CB, and holding my 4-10 in anticipation of that big buck I just knew was coming my way. But most of all, I love spending time with him in the woods. However much, I loved everything else about these trips, our crowd jewel was always food. specifically our snacks while we were out in the woods. Papa loved food, especially anything fried and salted,

and as a growing boy, so did I. We would stop at the only gas station for miles, and while we filled up on ice for the weekend, we'd get an order of three potato wedges. We only got three because he swore they'd swell up in your stomach. I still wonder if that's true. When we were hunting, though, we were just about always eating. And I'm not sure if that's the way the other guys did it, but that's how we did.

Before the dogs were even barking, we'd break into the vanny sausages and peanut butter and crackers and fritos, not to mention the coveted Yoo-Hu cans. That would be followed with a bologna sandwich for lunch and a cookout for dinner, and that's how it went for us. As much as we loved hunting and took it seriously, the opportunity to eat a, A snack and talk was the main event. One day, Papa and I had the rare occurrence of hunting in a stand together. Running dogs was the perfect high-energy version of hunting I needed as a kid. Lots of commotion and movement.

No major need for being total quiet. Hunting up in a stand meant that I, as a hyperactive eight-year-old, had to be completely still and quiet for multiple hours. It's this exact reason that on this day, my grandfather and I sat in what we called the condo stand. The condo stand was a completely boxed in structure high off the ground with a drawstring wooden flat windows and bolted in swivel chairs, perfect for a kid and his disabled grandfather.

As always, Papa brought a knapsack of snacks, and with the first hour or so, we tried to be good, but the wind was whipping and we were cold and bored. To better enjoy the moment, my Papa declared Chowtown. On this day, however, his provisions were running a little low, and from the bag he procured a sleeve of salting crackers, a can of spam, an onion, and a bottle of hot sauce. Now, I had never had spam.

I was a fan of viny sausages, and I looked at him with a look that said, Papa, what is this about? He looked back at me equally dumbfounded, with the options we had and shrugged his shoulders with the mischievous, well, we might as well, and he smiled. With a fancy flourish, he opened that can of spam and began to prepare our hors d'oeuvres. With his pocket knife, he peeled back the onion and began cutting small pieces to lay on what he'd

created before us. Finally, he topped that cracker off with spam, onion, and tobasco, and with a slightly worried look, he handed me one to try. He got one and we toasted the two together and then sent him down the hatch. Then the strangest thing happened. To our surprise and delight, it was good. It was like a Michelin Star restaurant in our very own hunt stand. We started laughing out loud together, not caring a lick about the hunt and eventually ate the whole can of spam one cracker at a time.

We laughed the whole way home and for weeks left recounting that story. to others. Over the years, we laughed about that day saying, man, we must have been starving or something. As I grew up, Papa's health got worse, and although we still spent lots of time together, we weren't able to hunt anymore. Now, I'm an adult living world's way in New York City, pursuing my dreams, and I think back on those days often. I were spent with my grandfather in the woods, eating food, swapping stories, and sometimes hunting a deer. There my grandfather taught me about life. I asked him things I was too afraid to ask my mom and I learned how a man should view the world.

But most importantly, I had someone to listen to me, someone who told me he was proud of me and let me know how much he enjoyed spending time with me and how much he loved me. My grandfather has dementia now and it can be difficult to have conversations because he will always ask me things like, where do you live repeatedly? But one thing he always remembers with ease is our hunting trips. If I bring up the spam to him, big smile lights across his face and he says, boy, we sure were hungry, wouldn't we? And according to Avery said Lecheck of New York City, that's just how that happened.

Avery, I appreciate you sending in that story. I liked it. from the first time I read it, and I've been saving it for just the right time. That's a story that fills my heart thinking about y'all, filling your bellies with a spam and onion cracker. Thanks, buddy. On Blood Trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker.

I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bag, and there was a full of blood. Oh, my God, he doesn't have a hit. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors, where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence.

Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper, from cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwoods. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments, and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest.

Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. We were having breakfast at Joe's Diner and Sheridan, in Arkansas, just me and my brother Tim. It's a spot that's about halfway between where each of us live and the spot closest to that point where a man can get a platter of eggs, sausage, biscuits, gravy, and a bowl of grits that'll feel your crawl well enough so that your next meal will be called supper. The waitress calls us honey, laughs at our dumb jokes, and keeps the coffee smoking hot while we entertain ourselves with whatever the meeting has been called for. Normally, just an excuse to share a meal together and laugh. We were having an in-depth discussion on timeless topics that are important to us and should be important to everyone that cares about the quality of their lives and their pursuit of happiness in America.

And that topic was grits. Historians agree that folks have been grinding corn as long as 8700 years before the reason we have Christmas. The evidence comes from Central America and Native American tribes in the southeastern portion of this nation that were grinding. and corn down to a coarse powder that we now call cornmeal. Contrary to the beliefs of a few folks from New Jersey who were blatantly lied to by an Arkansas duck guide over 30 years ago, there's no such thing as grit fields or grit bushes. If that reference is too obscure for you, slip back to episode 173 of this country life entitled Grits, Rhinos, Monkeys, and Ducks. That should clear that right.

But grits have been a staple in our diets forever. I don't remember a time when they weren't available at home or just about any place we judged worthy of sitting down to have a meal that served breakfast. The waitress brought out our food accompanied by two bowls of grits that were still bubbling hot from the stove, and we looked at one another and simultaneously said they'll thicken up in a minute. To eat their own, but it's customary in our family to eat grits with a fork. And runny grits, they just want to eat grits. to fill the bill. So while we waited on the grits to thicken, we dove into our breakfast and our conversation.

I need to bring you some of the grits I've been making. Hold on there, Timmy. You've been making your own grits? Oh yeah, butter too. And for the next hour, we talked about all the stuff he was doing at home that was better than going to the store and it opened up a whole new list of questions I had for how he was doing it. Now, obviously to everyone now, even the duck hunters from New Jersey, grits are made from ground corn, but not just any corn. There are six major types of corn grown in the U.S.

Dent corn is primarily used for livestock feed, fuel, and corn starch. Pod corn is a wild variety and the corn that modern day corn was derived from. Sweet corn is what we mostly eat when it's prepared on the cob, and flour corn for making corn flour, popcorn for popping, and flint corn, which is what works best for making grits hominy and cornmeal. But before the corn police issue a warrant for my arrest, what I just stated isn't the exact law of the land. There are just the major types of corn, and there are varieties within those types that cross over for each type of use. Tim's favorite corn to use to make his cornmeal and grits is a variety.

called Butcher Red, which is a dent corn. It has a beautiful, deep red color. Some even refer to it as bloody Butcher Red. Regardless of what you call it, he showed me a picture after picture of the process he uses and the grist wheel he does it with. It's an electric stone grinder he bought off the interwebs, and when he first told me he bought it online,

I thought that kind of took some of the nostalgia out of it, but I quickly realized that the Google search of today is no different really than posting up in the country store and asking the proprietor for something they didn't have, but they could order it for you. Tim's raising his own corn, too, from seed to cob. It keeps him busy in what could be more rewarding than growing your own cornbread. I dare say nothing. But as good as those grits were that had finally cooled to the point of a few degrees south of molten lava, Tim said the grits he made at home were ten times better. And it turns out they're better for you.

Consuming fresh stone ground corn in any form preserves the vitamins, the minerals, and the nutrients that are lost over time to degradation. Here's the process that Tim uses. Now, once he picks the corn, he dries it out for about a month. There are several ways to do that from just hanging the corn in the shuck out in the sun to removing the shucks and drying the cobs in a controlled environment, which is what he does. He said he can keep the bugs out of it and allow for the fish.

for proper drying without the chance of it getting mold by using his designated corn drying room. Corn drying room. You built a corn drying room? No, dummy. I keep it in the guest bedroom with the ceiling fan set on hurricane. I put all the cobs in the laundry basket and stir them around every few days, so I know that they're all getting there. Ah, okay, I got you now. After about four weeks of pampering in the guest's bedroom, he'll take the corn that's sufficiently dried and run it through a hornsheller. Now, his is an old, antiquated, hand-powered apparatus that he has mounted on a wooden box to catch the kernels once the shell are removed it. It's pretty sporty to watch for anyone that's ever wondered how that process works, and you can see it demonstrated about a million times

on the University of YouTube, just by searching it up. The cob is fed down through the top, and a gear that with exposed teeth knocks the kernels off and fall into the bottom of the box, while the cob is eventually turned and run out the back to fall on the outside. Mr. Lester E. Denison, the Connecticut, got the first patent on a corn sheller in August of 1839. The one Tim has is a David Bradley brand. It's made out of cast iron and was manufactured from around 1900 to 1949. Sears and Roebuck bought the company in 1910 and eventually started churning out garden tractors instead of corn shellers.

You can find them on the internet, yard sales, and flea markets in perfect working order should you decide to grow, dry, and grind your own corn. Now, if gardening is your limiting factor, you can buy corn that's ready to grind that someone else has already drived and removed from the cob by the sackful. Now, if you're wondering what the yield is, Tim said that he averaged about four cobs to the pound of shelled corn.

His gristmill is electric and has two options. for making the cornmeal. The wheels that grind the corn are called burrs, and he has stone burrs and steel burrs. Stone birds are said to be slower because they aren't uniformly smooth like polished steel is. And most commercially ground corn is done with steel birds because it's faster, more efficient,

and can produce a finer grind. Traditionally, stone ground corn retains the nutrients of flavor and the steel birds may literally squeeze it plumb out of it. And after adjusting the space between the birds and multiple trips between them, Tim finally got his setting that he prefers, but the ground corn is still not 100% uniform. And what he did next was pretty cool. He took an old tea strainer and poured the ground corn in it

and shook it back and forth, sifting the smaller grind into another container while keeping the larger ones in the strainer. The small ones he uses for his cornmeal, and the larger one he uses for grits. Tim said that when he makes cornbread from that cornmeal and takes it out of the oven, it has a blue or a purplish tint. I looked that up when I got home.

It's not that I don't trust my brother. It's just like President Reagan said, a good policy to have is to trust, but verify. Turns out he wasn't kidding. Turning purple is from the presence of what's called anthocyanans, which change color with heat. Now, what's an anthocyanin? I'm glad you asked.

It's just the pigment that causes colors to be colors, and in this case, it's what makes butcher red corn red. Grits are just boiled corn until you add salt, black pepper, and butter. I could do without pepper if I had to. I wouldn't like it, and the more peppers the better for me, but the other two, man, they are mandatory. Not letting Tim's comment if I'm making my own butter slip, I ask him what critter he was milking to churn since he didn't have a cow. He ignored that question and showed me a picture.

It was a 1950s Jim Dandy electric churn that he bought at an online auction. I don't know what I'd ever seen one. I've seen regular churns and I even participated in the churning with my maternal great-grandmother, Lizzie Juanita Beard-Plair, who we called Mama Plare. She was born in 1893 and might have stretched a five feet tall, but it would have been a pretty good stretch to get her there. I can remember thinking I was grown standing beside her, and she died when I was seven.

She never broke a hundred pounds her whole life. I don't remember her ever wearing anything except cotton dresses and apron and those little faded blue kid's shoes, unless, of course, it was Sunday. And it was a fancier dress and leather shoes. But she had a porcelain-stone-wear churn that sat on the back porch, the handle, and dasher was worn,

thinner around the middle by the countless trips up and down by years and years of churning. It was an arduous process, but one that was both necessary and part of farm life. By the time I hit the ground, In 1966, my mama Plare had an electric churn, but she kept the old one around and let me take a turn at it when I was just a pup. We would feed the chickens from the feed she toted in her apron, holding the bottom edge up to form a pocket. Then we gathered eggs and hid it back to the house.

She'd already milked the cow by the time I made muster, and it had been set long enough for the cream to rise to the top. That's where that saying comes from, if you did not. already know. The cream is then skimmed off the top and poured in a churn, and then a dasher or handle is brought up and down into that cream, agitating the cream until a portion of it solidifies and turns into butter. And the liquid that's left, well, that's buttermilk. I catch a lot of grief from my Yankee friends at me, eater, when I referred to whole milk as sweet milk. But if you've ever tasted buttermilk, you'll know where that comes from. I didn't make it up. It's a label for whole milk that I've heard all my life.

My daddy hated it, but he would drink buttermilk right out of the icebox. Pretty sure I told you all about that in episode 129, hauling, hey, it's a good one you should listen to if you haven't. But I've seen him come in from the barn that we just filled with square bells in the blister and heat and chugged buttermilk straight from the jug while I was gulping water from the kitchen sink as fast as it would run out of the spigot. It gives me the eby-jeebies just thinking about it. But if you didn't know how all of that went down and where butter milk and butter comes from, consider yourself educated. Tim said he wasn't using a churn. He was using a big upright kitchen-aid mixer.

But he's also minus a cow, so he buys whole heavy whipping cream from the store raw if he can find it. Starting out with two cups of cream and you'll wind up. with about three sticks of butter and a cup of fresh buttermilk. The process is fairly simple by letting the large whisk do all the churning for you, allowing you to concentrate on other things, but don't stray too far. You can literally have all that done in less time than it took me to tell you about it. I watched the lady on YouTube, knock it out in about 15 minutes. Just search for making homemade butter, and you'll get all the kinds of recipes and instructional videos. Now, to me, the neat thing about making your own grits and making your own butter isn't limited to just the production of healthier foods and the satisfaction of providing something better for your family.

It's the education that I got from doing just a minimal amount of research into something that's now obscure that was once commonplace in almost every home. These things are simple, but they're important to pass on to the folks who are going to be picking out our knowledge. nursing homes one day. Now, you add a child or a grandchild into the mix when you're doing these projects, and who knows? Y'all just might find your own, spam and onion salmon. As always, thank you for listening to us here on the Bear Gris Channel, and I have an update about this country life merchandise from our gal on the prowl, Reva Hanson.

Folks, we're not months away as I reported in air last week. We're supposed to have the first ones this very month. I'll be sure and keep you posting. And who to blame if it don't happen. But until next week, this is Brent Reeves. Signing off. Y'all be careful. On Blood Trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over.

They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bag. And there was a pool of blood. Oh, my God, he doesn't have a hit. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the Outwe. doors. Where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going

deeper, from cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwoods. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments, and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.