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 seeing 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.
The tradition goes back generations. The Urban Appalachian Community Coalition writes about it in their history of Appalachian Thanksgiving here:
Erinn Sweet
According to their research, vinegar pies were common across the mountain South, especially in families who could not afford citrus fruits. Before highways and refrigerated trucks brought lemons to rural stores, people used what they had. Vinegar pies, chess pies, and sugar pies were the workhorses of holiday tables. They filled the same place lemon pies do today, and they were born out of the same creativity that shaped most mountain cooking. Nothing wasted. Everything used. Flavor made from wit and willpower.
My Great Grandmother said vinegar pies belonged to the years before union wages. She told it the same way every time. Before the Union, she said, a pie was something you stretched ingredients to make. After the Union, she could buy enough sugar to fill a jar. She could buy lemons at the store. She could make pumpkin pies and lemon pies and even chocolate pies if she saved enough for cocoa. Vinegar pies faded out of our family not because they were bad, but because times finally improved.
She said the first Thanksgiving after Paw brought home his union paycheck felt different. She made real lemon pie for the first time. She told me it tasted like freedom, and she meant it. After a lifetime of scraping, that pie was proof that life had moved forward by an inch or two. Sometimes that is all a family needs.
When I look back on her stories now, I understand them better. They were not really about pies. They were about the distance between poverty and possibility. They were about the way higher wages changed the way families ate, lived, planned, prayed, and hoped. They were about dignity. They were about the simple truth that when working people earn enough to stand upright, whole communities rise with them.
So as we gather at our tables this Thanksgiving, let us give thanks to the Lord for our blessings. Let us look around at the faces we love and be grateful for all the grace that carried us here. And while we give thanks, let us save a little gratitude for the labor unions that raised wages and lifted the standard of living for working families everywhere. Because of them we can sit down to a holiday feast without vinegar pies.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Be curious, not judgmental.
Till next time, that’s the story from the ‘Back Forty’. — John W. Peace II
Enjoy this conversation between John Peace and The Neighborly founder, Sara June as they recall food traditions from the country:
