For a brief time in her life when she was a teenager, Paulette Nance Robinson lost an appreciation for her mother’s home cooking.
“I thought it was terrible we had to eat white beans and cornbread, and chicken and dumplings,” Paulette told me in a phone call Thursday. “We ate everything on the pig but the oink, and if daddy could have caught that we would have eaten it, too. We even ate rabbit.”
After their large family left South Christian and moved into Hopkinsville in 1966, Paulette’s parents, Charles “Bootjack” and Sarah Nance, brought their country ways with them. Her mother rendered lard in a big black pot in the yard, causing some of the new neighbor kids to wonder if she was a witch. Her father skinned rabbits on the side of tree next to the house.
Back then, Paulette wanted what other kids had. Some burgers and fries from McDonald’s.
Today, though, Paulette and her siblings appreciate what came from their mother’s kitchen and they carry on many of her traditions.
“Chicken and dumplings, I make them now. Everything that mother cooked, I love,” she said.
Charles Nance, whose family was from Newstead, was a sharecropper until he and Sarah moved the family into town. In Hopkinsville he worked for bottling companies and then at R.C. Owen, a lumber and building supply company. Sarah worked for caterers in the old fairgrounds convention center and helped one of her daughters cook at a restaurant they called Nance’s on Walnut Street.
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Paulette’s father died at age 89 in 2012, and her mother died the following year when she was 88. Paulette credits their longevity in part to their gardens and home cooking. They made meals mostly from scratch, so their diets weren’t full of the kind of processed foods that are prevalent today.
“Our mother cooked three meals a day, seven days a week,” said Paulette.
If you want to know more about the Nance family’s kitchen traditions, you can meet them and taste some of the recipes they learned from their mother during “The Supper Club: Soul Food,” a program at 6 p.m. Thursday at Grace Episcopal Church’s All Saints Hall, 216 E. Sixth St.
Paulette and four of her siblings — Thelma Nance Moore, Shirley Nance Shelton, Desma Renea Nance Blount and Delmar Nance — will lead the presentation. Guests will be able to sample some of the food they prepare, including chicken and dumplings, white beans, cornbread, possibly salmon croquettes, and more.
The Supper Club is part of an ongoing series that the Museums of Historic Hopkinsville-Christian County and the Human Rights Commission offer to inspire cultural and culinary conversations. The series is devoted to foods of different cultures, and the soul food program is for Black History Month.
Tickets are $10 and need to be purchased in advance.
This story was updated to reflect a change in the event location.
Jennifer P. Brown is co-founder, publisher and editor of Hoptown Chronicle. You can reach her at editor@hoptownchronicle.org. She spent 30 years as a reporter and editor at the Kentucky New Era. She is a co-chair of the national advisory board to the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, governing board president for the Kentucky Historical Society, and co-founder of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition.
