Bena Mae’s Kitchen: How far is a piece?

If you are not native to this area, you might shake your head at some of the colloquialisms we mountain people have built into our everyday speech.
But having grown up hearing them all our lives, we don’t even notice them.
They have become part and parcel of the way we express ourselves. Call us provincial, if you will, but that’s just the way we are.
That is not to say that our regional dialect can’t eventually be understood by non-natives or ‘furriners’ as they are still portrayed by some of our older inhabitants. Given time, maybe… but it might take awhile.
Which brings me to the point of this little saga:
As it happened, one day while I was reorganizing some books in a bookshelf, I ran across an old volume of articles written by Allen Trout called, “Greetings from old Kentucky.” Now, if you are from Kentucky and if you were born before 1945, you may remember that Allen was a popular columnist with the Louisville Courier-Journal around that time. He wrote mostly about ordinary people-folksy human-interest stuff with a good dose of common sense thrown in for good measure.
Allen’s dry wit and wry sense of humor clearly showed through in his writings. His dedication in the front of the book to “the bass drummer who didn’t make very good music but drowned out a lot of the bad” aroused my interest immediately and before long, I found myself laughing at amusing stories with just as amusing titles such as: “How Square is a Square Meal?” and “Homemade Sin is the Ugliest Sin of All.”
But the real clincher was an article called, “How Far is a Piece? Oh, Not Far.” It was a term I had heard expressed many times as I was growing up in the hills of Kentucky. It also demonstrated my belief that in our little corner of Appalachia, we do indeed speak a language all our own.
The article was inspired by a newcomer to the area. He had been raised up North and was having trouble interpreting the local jargon. The newcomer wrote:
“I don’t want to appear dumb, but tell me, how far is a piece? When I ask people how far it is to So and So’s house, they say, ‘Oh, it’s only a little piece.’ Then when I have walked about two miles, I ask somebody else.
Again I get the answer, ‘just a little piece.’ I usually find the house in another hundred yards or so.”
Allen replied with the following:
“I believe I can help you. A ‘far piece’ is the ultimate in distance. It might stretch to the moon… or, to the ends of the earth. A ‘right smart piece’ is not as far as a ‘far piece’ but it’s durned far all right.
Now a ‘little piece’ is just about as far as a man can walk without giving out. A ‘little piece’ is just about as far as ‘two whoops and a holler.’ But ‘no piece at all’ is even farther than that and can fool you nine times out of ten. Let me illustrate it this way:
Say you take a chew of tobacco when you start out somewhere. When you have walked far enough to have chewed and spit all the flavor out, you have come ‘no piece at all.”

Vanilla Wafer Cake

2 cups sugar
2 sticks butter or margarine
6 eggs
1 (12 oz.) box vanilla wagers, crushed
1/2 cup milk
7 oz. shredded coconut
1 cup chopped pecans or walnuts

Cream sugar and butter or margarine. Add eggs, one at a time; beat well. Stir in with spoon remaining ingredients, stirring in one ingredient at a time. Bake until brown at 300 degrees for 1.5 to 2 hours in greased and floured tube pan. (Approx. 1.5 hours in greased and floured sheat cake pan.) Cool. Frost with favorite frosting. Cream cheese frosting is good.