Poke the groceries in a bag — or bag them in a poke?

Janie Mae Jones McKinley

When Grandpa walked two miles to Maybin’s Grocery, he didn’t always need the paper bags supplied by country grocers. Instead of using paper pokes (as he called them), he brought a neatly folded cotton feed sack in his overalls pocket.

A hundred pounds of cow feed was, by necessity, packaged in heavy-duty cotton sacks. Thrifty mountain folks repurposed them as large, tough, grocery bags.

Grandpa was ahead of his time.

Green living, recycling and utilizing reusable fabric shopping bags aren’t exclusively modern concepts. Country people like Grandpa reused almost everything, and he certainly preferred carrying heavy groceries in a sturdy bag.

Hiking home from the store (uphill in all kinds of weather) was hard enough without worrying about the bottoms falling out of multiple paper bags. Groceries would have spilled beside the railroad tracks, in the creek, and all along the trail on his way back to Bear Mountain.

Between regular shopping trips, Grandpa would tolerate paper bags for just a few items. The mountain name “poke” was so familiar, store owners sometimes joked, “Should I poke these groceries in a bag, or bag them in a poke?”

The end result was the same, because plastic grocery bags hadn’t been invented back then. Nobody had ever heard the modern question, “Would you like paper or plastic?”

Glass bottles were appropriately packaged in durable paper bags at liquor stores, so creative Southerners named them “poke stores.” Such purchases were sometimes “disguised” in those same bags while the alcohol was being consumed. This practice provoked many a country woman to snipe, “Well, I see that you stopped at that ole poke store on the way home!”

Appalachian children considered “a nickel poke of penny candy” to be a special treat. On those exciting occasions, I remember gazing through the thick glass at the candy counter.

From the colorful — and almost overwhelming — display, I carefully chose exactly five pieces: a candy orange slice, one peppermint stick, two chocolate drops and a Tootsie roll. Mr. Maybin, the busy grocer, dutifully filled the five-cent order and graciously handed me the little poke.

Country folks typically lived several miles from the nearest town. So, any visitor from afar who remembered to bring “a poke of penny candy for the young’uns” was welcome indeed.

In fact, the only gifts some mountain families received were “Christmas pokes” distributed at nativity pageants. Those fruit and candy bags guaranteed that the church would be filled the night of the annual play. Men, women and children were generously included in the distribution. As folks were leaving, the deacons always asked, “Did you get a poke?”

Like Grandpa’s cloth feed sacks, paper pokes were recycled as well. Granny found multiple uses for them around the house. They were handy for fire starters, though book covers were once very popular.

During the Great Depression, schools couldn’t afford supplies, so textbooks had to be purchased by parents. Brown paper jackets helped keep expensive books nice enough to be resold the following year to younger students.

Paper bags could also be used to carry mail and store jar lids, garden seeds or dried walnuts. As temporary hothouses, they protected tender garden plants and flowers during late-spring frosts.

Mountain girls learned to cut paper pokes into strips to curl their hair for special occasions.

These free grocery sacks made good writing paper for lists, letters or homework. Rainy day art activities included drawing, coloring or designing paper dolls. Before movie-themed Halloween costumes were popular, a decorated paper bag with eyes, nose and mouth cutouts was quite scary.

Brown poke paper was commonly used for giftwrapping, making homemade Christmas-tree decorations and as package filling (before Styrofoam peanuts). It was not unusual to see brown-bag wallpaper in mountain homes or wadded-paper insulation around door or window frames to protect against winter drafts.

Bureau drawers and kitchen shelves could be lined for free, and instead of modern paper towels, handy pokes absorbed extra grease from country-fried chicken. (After that use, they made excellent fire starters.)

Before school cafeterias or insulated lunch containers, mountain children carried leftover biscuits and fatback to school in pokes or paper sugar bags.

Brown paper was useful to cut a watermelon on, or to set underneath a dripping paint can. Gathering a mess of snap beans from the garden was a snap with a couple of paper pokes.

When hot food needed to be delivered to a neighbor, a few layers of grocery bag paper assured that it would arrive at the desired temperature. After electricity became available, ice was regularly wrapped in multiple brown bags to share with neighbors.

It has been said that “necessity is the mother of invention,” and folks were quite imaginative in finding uses for thick, free poke paper.

In the 1940s and early 1950s, country people still described almost any paper bag as a poke. On those long-ago Saturdays, I remember Grandpa asking Granny what she needed from the store. In addition to other groceries, she’d often include, “a poke of sugar, and a poke of cornmeal.”

Times were changing, though, and the name was becoming outdated.

However, as with many other mountain expressions, the word “poke” came from the old countries. France, Germany, England and Scotland have versions of the term dating back to the 1200s and earlier.

Poki, poket, poque, pokete and pouche were gradually assimilated into the more common English words like pocket, poke and pouch.

Larger pokes, once made of leather (but more often of heavy fabric) were traditionally used for a variety of purposes. They were convenient for transporting pigs to the market, hence the adage, “Don’t buy a pig in a poke.”

Deceitful farmers sometimes substituted cats or puppies for edible rabbits or piglets. So, as early as 1530, honest traders in London were advised, "When ye proffer the pigge, open the poke."

The first paper bag machine was eventually patented in 1852. Then, the centuries-old word “poke” came to describe disposable bags, as well. Even today, candy purchased in Scotland is often carried home in a small paper sack they call a poke bag. The bonny Scots also describe a container of French fries as a poke o’ chips, or a poke of chips.

It is interesting that this colorful Old World term is still used. During my Southern grandparents’ lifetimes, it was becoming archaic, oddly Appalachian—and maybe a little peculiar.

Words brought directly from the old countries would sound different, and expressions sometimes remained unchanged for generations. Now, they can provide insight into our ancestors’ diverse and fascinating cultural backgrounds.

Had you ever heard the old-fashioned saying, “Don’t buy a pig in a poke?” Think about other idioms or unique words that may have come from ancestral homelands.

Even though you may have known it by a different name, can you remember when “a poke of penny candy” was a special treat?

Recall some of the ingenious ways your older relatives reused paper bags or feed sacks — years before recycling became widely accepted.