The Barefoot Café originated in Metcalf County, Kentucky somewhere around 1975. With it's red checkered tablecloths and curtains it boasted of the best home cooked meals and friendliest service for miles around where it sat on the main road of the Town Square.
It had a happy atmosphere for the little "hole in the wall" type operation it was and served the local Town Folk, tobacco growers and workers and an occasional traveler who had wandered off the main thoroughfare. Nestled between the Woolworth's Five and Dime, the Shoe Repair Shop and facing the Courthouse that stood sentry in the center of the Town Square it quickly became the "meeting place" for everyone.
Around it's tables and counters business deals were made, teenagers professed their undying love for the week, marriage proposals went forth, ladies met for hot gossip sessions or if you had a mind to you could just look out the windows and watch the passersby to relax and unwind.
Although The Barefoot Café was one of the more successful "Mom and Pop" style business ventures of it's time the owner closed its doors two years later. Rumor has it that it's closing occurred on the same day that a strange old hermit woman from the hills was brought down after being found to have "passed over".
Following the usual closure of three days to show respect for the deceased, The Barefoot Café never again reopened to the public. It's closing and the disappearance of its owner still remains one of the many unsolved mysteries in Metcalf County today.
The original building that housed The Barefoot Café still stands having hosted many other business enterprises over the past several decades but there are those who still remember the quality, pride and tradition of it's food and service (“So's that you kin almost lick yer lips an still taste it”) that have been lost over the years to an automated society and fast food industry that can only be found if you're fortunate enough to know the right person or to have been given possession of this Treasured Book and very few of them will ever exist.
If by chance you ever find yourself in Metcalf County at the only traffic light on the Town Square take the Main Road out of town for about seven miles and if you look hard enough you'll see an old dirt road, follow it up for a few miles to the top of the ridge. Get out of your car and look down into the "Holler" for an old stone hearth chimney sticking out of a collapsed shack. There you'll see all that remains of the training school for The Barefoot Café; where one fine day, somewhere in the backwoods of Kentucky an Old Hills Woman, too old to remember just exactly how old she was, nearly blind and barely able to get around had a chance meeting with a shy, lonely child picking flowers, wearing pigtails and overalls, who, had not yet come of "sensible age" and was hardly able to see over a stove top.
Together they formed an unusual bond that unknown to them was to begin the legacy and foundation for The Barefoot Café. So named because the first rule of thumb taught by the Old Hills Woman was that few dishes would come out right if you cooked them with your shoes on.
Many of the recipes in this book were actual menu items at The Barefoot Café but came from a time farther back when life moved at a simpler pace and were originally prepared on wood burning cook stoves, crude stone fireplaces or on open campfires. I have modified them as minimally as possible for today’s cooking standards and equipment.
A few have been copied in their original form of dialect to preserve the "flavor" in which the hills women shared their recipes with each other, perhaps while hanging clothes on a fence or line after scrubbing them on washboards in a tub or at the creek. Maybe while resting at the "Gossip Fence" as this was how news traveled back then, at a "Quilting Bee" or while cooking at a "Barn Raising” while the men folk gathered to build a neighbors or newcomers barn.
A forgotten fact of the "Hills Code" is that when a young man was seeking a prospective spouse it was often determined by how well the intended young lady's mother cooked and cleaned as it was the mother's of those days who trained and taught their brood in the ways of running their household.
In the rush and excitement of today's fast paced schedules and busy agendas there is rarely time for the old fashioned home cooked meals that many of us were fortunate to know as children, while this form of cooking is quickly becoming a lost art.
It is my desire that by chance on those infrequent occasions that you find time to try a recipe or two that the aromas that beckoned families to the dinner tables back then will call your family as well in the same spirit and sense of harmony that were cherished moments in the pioneer households and nourished not only the bodies but strengthened the element of family unity as well.
Having reached what is now considered to be "sensible age” I am privileged to share with you my fondest memories and legacy of love in the same simple tradition and manner in which this heirloom was handed down to me by the Old Hills Woman so many, many years ago.
"'Tis an ill cook who cannot lick his own fingers"
~William Shakespeare
