For a brief time in her life when she was a teenager, Paulette Nance Robinson lost an appreciation for her mother’s home cooking.
“I thought it was terrible we had to eat white beans and cornbread, and chicken and dumplings,” Paulette told me in a phone call Thursday. “We ate everything on the pig but the oink, and if daddy could have caught that we would have eaten it, too. We even ate rabbit.”
After their large family left South Christian and moved into Hopkinsville in 1966, Paulette’s parents, Charles “Bootjack” and Sarah Nance, brought their country ways with them. Her mother rendered lard in a big black pot in the yard, causing some of the new neighbor kids to wonder if she was a witch. Her father skinned rabbits on the side of tree next to the house.
Back then, Paulette wanted what other kids had. Some burgers and fries from McDonald’s.
Today, though, Paulette and her siblings appreciate what came from their mother’s kitchen and they carry on many of her traditions.
“Chicken and dumplings, I make them now. Everything that mother cooked, I love,” she said.