Thanksgiving Without Vinegar Pie
I grew up listening to my Great Grandmother tell stories from a life that stretched almost a hundred years. She was born in 1897 and lived until 1995, long enough to watch electricity come into the hollers, long enough to see her world go from horse and buggy to Amazon delivering books, long enough to hold four generations in her kitchen. But she never talked about time the way most people do. She separated her life into two parts. Life before the Union and life after the Union.
When she said the Union she meant the United Mine Workers of America. My Great Grandfather worked at the coal tipple loading train cars for the Stonega Coal Company. He was not underground, but the work was just as punishing. He came home with coal dust ground into the lines of his hands and a weariness that hung on him like a coat. They lived on a little subsistence farm in Crackers Neck outside Big Stone Gap Virginia. The kind of place where you raised what you ate and hoped the garden made more than the weeds did.
She talked often about those early years. She said money did not trickle, it dripped. You learned to stretch everything. Flour lasted because you made it last. Sugar was precious and expensive. Lemons were something she saw in a store window but never touched. And that is where vinegar pies came in.
The vinegar pie is an old Appalachian answer to a simple problem. Families wanted a dessert that tasted like a lemon pie, but lemons were rare and pricey. Vinegar offered a similar sharpness and cost almost nothing. Mountain women mixed water, butter, eggs, a little flour, sugar if they had it, and a spoon of cider vinegar. The filling thickened on the stove and set in a hand rolled crust. When it came out of the oven it looked humble, but it tasted bright and tart and sweet all at once. For a family scraping by, that was enough to feel like Thanksgiving.