Thanks for the delicious memories, Loretta

Unlike Loretta Lynn, I was not born a coal miner's daughter. Still, I think the country singer and I grew up around the same supper table.

I say this after picking up a copy of her cookbook, You're Cookin' It Country: My Favorite Recipes and Memories (2004, Rutledge Hill Press). Even though Ms. Lynn grew up in Butcher Holler, Ky., and I came from a slightly less isolated part of Georgia, her recipes and memories could be my own.

For instance, she includes a recipe for "chocolate gravy." Scanning its ingredients (milk, sugar, cocoa and flour among them), I recognized it as the same breakfast fare I grew up with, although in my neck of the woods it was simply called "chocolate."

Whatever its name, this hot and creamy liquid was eaten the same way: poured over a couple of opened biscuits on the plate. It was filling on a winter's morning before we walked down the dirt road to wait for the school bus.

(My wife grew up eating the same dish in Louisiana, and her family also knew it as "chocolate gravy." Maybe she and Loretta are cousins.)

The book has a recipe for "fried bologna sandwiches" (ingredients: 1 slice bologna, 2 slices bread). I remember them well. We fried the bologna, first cutting one edge so it wouldn't buckle up. We put the greasy meat between slices of light bread (that's loaf bread to you city slickers) with mustard. Elvis himself couldn't have done a better job.

"Loretta's wilted lettuce" sounds like a fancier version of something my mother made after the garden had come in. She would tear up leaf lettuce, maybe some watercress from the nearby creek, and green onions, then pour hot grease over it. My father, however, could not tolerate the smell of cooked onions, and the salad would send him bolting out the door without his lunch.

In the winter, Loretta's family made snow cream, which included snow, sugar, vanilla flavoring and raw eggs. Our version omitted the eggs. We ate it like ice cream, which it resembled.

We were careful, though, not to eat the first snow of the season; it was rumored the first snow filtered from the sky the radioactive fallout from atomic bomb tests. There was, after all, a Cold War going on.

Loretta's recipe for "fudge candy" reminds me of the dessert my mother converted from Aunt Jane Lou's oatmeal fudge cookies topped with pecan halves. Short of time and patience, Mama turned it into candy, often with peanut butter, cut into squares. Whether it came out crumbly or sticky, it was always good.

Ms. Lynn learned to cook from women who specified a "pinch of this" and "a smidgen of that." My mother was the same way.

Countless times I asked her to tell me how she made her biscuits, corn bread and candy, but something would get lost in translation. For instance, she would tell me to mix in some flour, and I would ask, "How much flour?"

"Enough, but not too much," Mama would say. "Then pour in just the right amount of milk."

Seeing I was exasperated, but not quite sure how to render "just enough" into tablespoons, she began to make up the amounts. Needless to say, my biscuits never quite matched hers.

As I flipped through You're Cookin' It Country, I recalled my own childhood of milking cows, killing hogs, canning vegetables, picking blackberries, cleaning chickens, curing ham, hunting rabbits and waking up to a hard-candy Christmas.

My stomach relived cream corn, salmon croquettes, mashed potatoes, deviled eggs, chicken and dumplings, banana pudding, country ham and red-eye gravy. And, most of all, "beans and taters," the country staple that was always available when there was no meat, or when the children outnumbered the drumsticks at the table.

Thanks, Loretta.

Reach Glynn Moore at (706) 823-3419 or glynn.moore@augustachronicle.com.