A Treasured Family- and Food-Centered Journal

You can learn a lot about a person by their relationship with food. I think I know a lot about Wilma Joyce “Billie” Simmons, the mother of my friend Tom Stites. I’ve never met her, but I had the privilege of reading a 34-page journal she hand-wrote over several months in 1982 in her neat cursive. The first third of the journal sets the stage with remembrances of ancestors, then describes her birth by caesarean in the State Hospital in Fulton, Missouri, a risky operation back then. As women then gave birth at home, she was the first person born in a hospital in Fulton.

When her father died in a construction accident two years later, she and her mother moved around between relatives for a few years. In Texas, Billie caught a blood stream infection from chiggers at the same time her mother got a job. Her grandfather, J.W. Simmons, took the train there to bring her to his home in Fulton. He was a smart and well-to-do coal mine owner, and so, in mid-1919, she “started my life in the first home I remembered in a town I shall always love and think of as home.”

Memories of growing up

The next third of the journal describes growing up 100 miles west of St. Louis in Fulton, which she describes as “a fine small town in the heart of “Little Dixie,” a cultured town with two women’s colleges. As the seat of Callaway County, its economy was built on coal, farming, and the second-largest fire brick plant in the country.

The next 16 pages – about half the journal – detail her young life growing up in the two Fulton homes where she spent the next several years. She included a photo and diagrammed layout of the house as well as a larger drawing of the surrounding grounds showing the barn, gardens, pasture, summer kitchen, and root cellar. The layout aided me in understanding her description of how the gardens and pasture provided food for them in the 1920s.

“Putting-up month” – tomatoes, catsup, and chili sauce

But to me, the best part of the journal is the last third, which begins with four pages and two recipes dated August 18, 1982 that describe her making chili sauce from tomatoes grown in the backyard garden. As she looked around her kitchen, the familiar cooking smells kindled memories of helping her grandmother whom she called “Mama” in August, or “putting-up month,” canning tomatoes, catsup, and chili sauce from their garden. On this date, she was using the same methods she had learned a half century earlier. “I remember it took me two summers of measuring after her, helping and watching, to get her recipe.”

An epic dinner for her son’s friends

The last and most telling portion is a six-page account of a pleasant evening dinner in August 1982 that she prepared for several newspaper writers. friends of her son Tom. In loving detail, she catalogued how she prepared the menu over two days. The meal included baked Cornish hens with rice-pecan pilaf, zucchini casserole, green beans, sherried onions, slaw in cabbage head, fresh fruit in a melon bowl, popovers, and a Chablis. Dessert was her Plum Good Pie and coffee. “I love to entertain, and although sometimes I get very tired, I forget this as soon as the party begins.” Two pages devoted to cooking those dishes made my mouth water. I could actually taste them, especially the melon bowl.

I can’t wait till next summer to try her chili recipe with some fresh tomatoes from my garden. But I would have loved a conversation with Billie Simmons Stites, especially if we could have held it in that kitchen overlooking the gardens. She left a wonderful legacy in this journal. As such, it was a treasured remembrance to leave for her son.

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