Tomato soup to pork chops: Fall calls for heartier meals

Patricia Lawhorn
Special to The News Leader

Sweater weather is upon us. The time of year when it’s too cold for shirt sleeves, yet too hot for a coat. The days are getting shorter, especially after Daylight Saving Time ended, and we fell back one hour to standard time, and there is a constant chill in the air. This is the time people start transitioning from their light summer meals to heartier, stick-to-your ribs meals.

Tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwich.

Meals like pork chops and fried potatoes, ham and macaroni and cheese or meatloaf and scalloped potatoes. It’s also the time of year for soup and sandwiches. I remember when I was a child and loved it when mom would make Campbell’s Tomato Soup. We didn’t have an electric can opener at that time. We had a sliver hand-cranked opener. Today the soup has a pop top on it. No opener required. Sometimes mom would add milk to the soup and made cream of tomato for my dad. Campbell’s soup was only 10 cents a can. She would make grilled cheese sandwiches to go with the soup, the bread was crisp and beautifully browned, with a little almost burnt area around the crust. Mom always cut mine in half, corner to corner and the cheese would ooze out the side of the bread, I didn’t like it cut down the middle. Yes, I guess you might say I was a little spoiled after all. I was the baby of the family.

Another favorite mom would make during the fall and winter was cubed steak with brown gravy. She would flour then brown the steak off, then make homemade gravy in it; sometimes she added a little Kitchen Bouquet to make the color a richer. Then she put it in the oven to finish cooking, and get cut with your fork tender. The gravy was wonderful over the potatoes she had mashed, and she served it with coleslaw made from cabbage, some grated carrots, and a sweet dressing made from mayonnaise, sugar, vinegar, salt and pepper every now and then she would add a little celery seed to it.

Campbell's Tomato Soup and grilled cheese sandwich.

She would cook dried pinto beans, seasoned with a ham hock, or a chunk of fat back over low heat almost all day. They cooked down and made a wonderful thick broth, then she would make fried potatoes by thinly slicing potatoes and frying them in a pan. I liked them when they stuck to the bottom of the pan and got brown and crispy. She always made homemade cornbread. She would use 2 cups of yellow cornmeal, 1 cup of self- rising flour, 1 beaten egg, 2 tbsp. sugar and enough milk to make a pourable batter. Then she would take her cast iron frying pan she had been heating in the oven with a stick melted butter in it and she would pour the batter into the pan. The hot butter made the sides of the mixture start to curl over and cook. She baked it for 25 minutes at 450 degrees. After it finished baking she would turn it out onto a plate. It would be brown and crispy on the outside, and yellow and coarse on the inside, with just the slightest hint of sweetness. We had these blue melamine bowls we used for beans, and soup. I would love to find some like them today. My sister and I liked to crumble our cornbread up into the bowl and put the beans over it, making sure we got plenty of the bean broth. My brother and my dad would take leftover cornbread, break it up into a glass and pour milk over it. I never liked it like that, but I sure would love to have some of mom’s beans and cornbread again.

Pinto beans and homemade cornbread.

Have you ever had fried streaky meat? Mom would fry streaky meat, which was a piece of fresh bacon, and dad and I would put it on white bread and eat it as a sandwich. I liked to squish my bread up around it before I ate it. Then mom would take the grease and pour it over leaf lettuce with green onions cut up in it, and make a wilted salad and serve it with a dollop of Kraft mayonnaise, artery clogging goodness!

Fried bologna sandwiches would make their rounds with the beans from time to time. Mom always cut four little slits in the sides of the bologna so it wouldn’t curl up when she was frying it. I thought the slits made it look like a flower when it was cooked. I liked it on plain white bread with mayonnaise, sometimes I would add mustard and onion. I still like them that way.

When mom made homemade vegetable soup the house would fill with a variety of smells wafting down the hallway from the kitchen: potatoes, carrots, onion, celery, tomatoes, green beans, or whatever leftover vegetables we had in the refrigerator. It tasted good on a cold night, with Zesta saltine crackers. They came in four individual sleeves in a red box, crumbled up in it.

Homemade cornbread cooked on an iron skillet.

Breakfasts would often consist of homemade biscuits, sausage gravy, and fried eggs, with grape jelly mom had canned during the summer. My sister and I liked to crumble our biscuit up on the plate and mix everything up together over top of it. Even the grape jelly turned an awful gray color, but it tasted wonderful. Other breakfast favorites that would summon us to get out of bed in the morning were pancakes and sausage or french toast and bacon with Aunt Jemima’s or Log Cabin syrup, streaming down the sides. Sometimes mom would cook strawberries or apples she had frozen during the summer to serve over them instead of syrup. Scrambled or fried eggs with the yolks runny with oven toast was another one of our favorites. We would dot the bread with three or four pieces of butter then place it under the broiler to toast. The spots where the butter was got soft and gooey, while the outside edges toasted up nice and crispy and the bottom of the bread remained white and soft. It is so much better than toast out of a toaster. However, you had to watch it real close to keep it from burning. Sometimes we would make cinnamon toast by sprinkling cinnamon and brown sugars over it before broiling, this was always good as a bedtime snack.

French toast with syrup.

We always bought frozen concentrated orange juice and mixed it up for breakfast. The small can cost 39 cents and the large one was 89 cents. I have no idea why the cost of certain things has stuck in my memory all these years, when nothing else seems to stick there anymore. Sometimes instead of white milk we would have Nestles Quick at breakfast, my cousin Scotty would bring a big jar of Ovaltine every now and then and we would have it instead. Oh, yeah, I can’t forget the Tang. My sister loved and still loves Tang. It was all the rage back then, after all it went into space with the astronauts.

So, with the cold weather coming back, it is time to start making heartier meals and to stock the pantry for those days when we might be snowed in, and try out some of the foods my mom used to make.

Patricia Lawhorn grew up in Staunton, worked in area nursing homes as a foodservice director and loves reminiscing with family and friends. She finds joy in simple things, and says a good ride in the country is a mini vacation. Contact her at