French Dressing and Three Bean Salad: Recipes for the harvest

Remembering those who work the fields.

septemberbeansalads 023French Dressing: Grandma Smith’s box, 1940s.

  • 1 cup yellow salad oil
  • ½ cups sugar
  • ½ cup white vinegar
  • ½ cup catsup
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • Juice of ½ lemon.

Put in a quart jar and beat or shake well. This will keep for some time in the refrigerator. It is best with lettuce, tomatoes or beets and is too sweet for fish. Use over hot beets or string beans.

Note on typed recipe card reads: Lake Co.

Baking Hints: After using the oven, leave the door open until oven is cool, so that moisture will not condense and rust the metal. Do not grease the side of cake pans. How would you like to climb a greased pole? An apple cut in half and placed in the cake box will keep the cake fresh for several days. Russian Ladies Auxiliary, 1963

septemberbeansalads 021Sweet Bean Mix, Kate, 1960

  • 1 can kidney beans
  • 1 can string beans (green beans)
  • 1 can wax beans
  • 1 bellpepper (chopped or sliced)
  • Drain and mix together in bowl.

Add:

  • ¾ cup sugar (reduce to1/4-1/2 cup if desired)
  • ½ cup salad oil
  • 2/3 cup wine vinegar
  • Pinch of salt

Mix together and pour over beans. Cover and chill in refrigerator overnight.

Ideas from other recipes:

  • Add 1 red onion, sliced or chopped.
  • 1 teaspoon pepper
  • Add one can garbanzo beans or substitute
  • 1 can black olives
  •  

Keeping fruits and vegetables directly on ice is an invitation to spoilage, and a waste of money. Mix all kinds of greens for salads.-inexpensive cabbage, dandelions, spinach leaves, tender beet tops. Crisp and cold, and tossed with good French dressing, they are delicious and nutritious. 1003 Household Hints and Work Savers, Johnstown Bank and Trust Company, 1948.

Woody Guthrie’s Deportees: Now rest with their names. On September 2, 2013,  five hundred people gathered around a cemetery plot in the Holy Cross Cemetery in Fresno, California where 28 Mexican farm workers were buried in 1948. They were buried in a mass grave without names on the grave marker. These were the farm workers, killed in a plane crash over Los Gatos Canyon, near the oil town of Coalinga. The workers, three crew members and an immigration officer had just left Oakland and were returning the migrants to Mexico; the harvesting season was finished and through a special work program, they were returning to Mexico.  The statement from the radio announcer, “They were just Deportees,” was the basis of Guthrie’s poem, Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos). Martin Hoffman later put the music to the poem.

A combined effort by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Fresno, Carlos Rascon, the cemetery director, and, Tim Z. Hernandez, author and poet, lead to the placement of a memorial unveiled on September 2, which lists each person’s name on the grave marker.

The cause of the accident? Two identical planes were on the same tamarack that day. One plane had just landed and needed fuel and service; the other was ready to take off. The pilot boarded the wrong plane. The others followed.

Plane Wreck at Los Gatos
(also known as “Deportee”)
Words by Woody Guthrie, Music by Martin Hoffman

The crops are all in and the peaches are rott’ning,
The oranges piled in their creosote dumps;
They’re flying ’em back to the Mexican border
To pay all their money to wade back again

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be “deportees”

My father’s own father, he waded that river,
They took all the money he made in his life;
My brothers and sisters come working the fruit trees,
And they rode the truck till they took down and died.

Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,
Our work contract’s out and we have to move on;
Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.

We died in your hills, we died in your deserts,
We died in your valleys and died on your plains.
We died ‘neath your trees and we died in your bushes,
Both sides of the river, we died just the same.

The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, “They are just deportees”

Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil
And be called by no name except “deportees”?