That's also the southern method of cooking vegetables.

For all I know, it might have been that way in the north 150 years ago too. It's definitely held on as the traditoinal way to cook veggies in the south though.

I think to a certain extent a lot of veggies had to be cooked that way if you wanted them to be edible - which has to do with the whole waste not/want not way of life. You picked the oldest green beans first, and if the pods had gotten old and tough and the bean had gotten big and really starchy, then you had to cook those things until they were soft enough to eat with whatever teeth you still had left in your head. And don't forget to cook them with a ham hock or some salt pork so they'd actually have some flavor after all that boiling.

My mother never cooked like that (she hated anything that she considered to be "greasy") - she cooked all vegetables in a pressure cooker, so the veggies were steamed under pressure. But they also weren't cooked completely to death, only about half-dead. And Dad always picked the beans when they were very young and tender, with very small, very green beans in the pod, so there was no need to cook them completely to mush.

Quoting from your quote:


When Dad had cattle (we didn't move away from that farm until I was 12), mom also made all our butter. True that at least some of the cream was several days old by the time she had enough to make butter, but I don't recall it having any kind of fermented taste to it at all - but then she pasteurized the milk and immediately chilled it, and as soon as she'd skimmed the cream off, she put the milk and cream back in the fridge to keep it cold, so if there was any fermentation at all, it was only very slight due to it being kept cold.

Still, the homemade butter did taste more buttery than the regular butter from the grocery stores, so maybe it was simply due to the "aging" of the cream (in the fridge) over the course of several days before mom made butter again. Or perhaps the flavor was more influenced by the fact that the cattle were pastured most of the time. (of course during the winter even when there was no snow on the ground, pasture growth halted, so they had to supplement with hay, alfalfa, and grains. In the milking stalls, they were fed silage to relax them so they'd let down their milk more readily)

Living in Amish country, I had occasion several decades ago to try some Amish butter (I'm trying to recall what they called it at that little Amish health food store - I don't think it was labeled as cultured, but the name implied that it was cultured or fermented), thinking that the Amish butter would taste closer to Mom's homemade butter than the store-bought butter did... NOPE! I actually couldn't bring myself to eat that butter - just tasted so completely WRONG to me, compared to what I had as a child. However, I'm also pretty sure that the Amish weren't adding any kind of specific fermenting culture to their cream - I'm pretty sure they were just letting it sour before making it into butter. (Maybe one day I'll go back to that store and see what they have in the way of butter, to find out what they're calling it)