The little house was fairly bursting with good food
stored away for the long winter. The pantry and the shed and the cellar
were full, and so was the attic.
The attic was a lovely place to play. The large,
round, colored pumpkins made beautiful chairs and tables. The red peppers
and onions dangled overhead. The hams and venison hung in their paper
wrappers, and all the bunches of dried herbs, the spicy herbs for cooking
and the bitter herbs for medicine, gave the place a dusty-spicy smell.
When Ma wanted fresh meat for dinner Pa took the ax
and cut off a chunk of frozen bear meat or pork. But the sausage balls, or
the salt pork, or the smoked hams and the venison, Ma could get for herself
from the shed or the attic.
Often the wind howled outside with a cold and
lonesome sound. But in the attic Laura and Mary played house with the
squashes and the pumpkins, and everything was snug and
cozy.
— From Little House in the Big Woods, by
Laura Ingalls Wilder
Throughout the Wall Street meltdown and
the hand-wringing and finger-pointing and speculation about whether
we’re headed for a recession or depression, experts have agreed that
a crucial factor is psychological: confidence, whether it’s consumer
confidence, investor confidence, or institutional confidence. So I’m
really trying to keep confident. And for the most part, I’m
succeeding, not least because a total collapse of the U.S. and global
economy and the standard of living we’ve enjoyed is simply
inconceivable. Still, a tiny voice keeps niggling in my head: “What
if everything really does go to hell in a handbasket?”
The Wall Street crisis has had a direct impact on our
family: my son-in-law, Ben, worked for Lehman’s. So far he’s
still going to the office every day because his division was immediately
bought by London’s Barclay’s Bank, but he’s now employed
“at will”, meaning that either Ben can quit or Barclay’s
can terminate him at any time without notice. Still, Ben’s not too
worried: the week after Lehman’s failed, he had calls from over 80
headhunters. (Ben is a quantitative analyst with a PhD. in mathematical
logic; truthfully, I don’t have a glimmer of understanding what he
does.)
Thinking of Anne and Ben in their New York apartment
has made me realize that my family is far better prepared than most folks
to be self-sufficient. At a local foods conference last year, the keynote
speakers were Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, who went on a Hundred-Mile
Diet (eating only food that came from within a 100-mile radius of their
home) for a year, and wrote a book, Plenty, about their experience.
The part of their presentation that struck me the
most dealt with the loss of food memory — that the connection between
where food comes from and how it’s grown, stored, preserved and
prepared can be lost in just two generations. For many generations,
families canned their own vegetables and made their own preserves and
condiments. With the advent of cheap and widely available commercial
equivalents, the grown children of those families bought those items
instead of making them themselves, though they still had the memory of
having done it or having seen it done. But the third generation loses even
the memory — the realization — that it’s possible to do
those things themselves, much less have the skills to accomplish them.
The loss of food memory is certainly more widespread
today, but most of my contemporaries when I was growing up in the
’60s had little, if any, of that memory or experience. Many families
had gardens — typically a few tomato and pepper plants and a row or
two of sweet corn; but none of my schoolmates’ (even the farm
kids’) families came close to raising and preserving as much of their
food as my folks did.
My grandparents lived next door. Raising and
preserving much of their own food had been a lifetime habit, especially for
my grandfather, who’d grown up on a produce farm. But it was my
grandmother, a grocer’s daughter, who became passionately committed
to health food, organic farming, and natural medicine long before it became
trendy, let alone mainstream. And so we raised our own chickens for eggs
and meat, and grew and preserved most of our vegetables and fruits.
That was just for starters. My grandfather also
raised partridge, quail, pheasant and rabbit. Most of our other meat came
from like-minded friends. So did the raw milk from which my grandmother
made cottage cheese, and on top of which floated an unbelievably luxurious
layer of rich yellow cream.
Shelling peas for the freezer, peeling tomatoes to
can, cracking walnuts, collecting eggs and dressing chickens were family
activities, and I was expected to participate. As a teenager I thought it
was a major drag. As an adult, however, I appreciated both the knowledge
I’d gained and the memories of family camaraderie. My husband, Peter,
treasures the experience of working with my grandfather during our
engagement and in the early years of our marriage, and we tried to give at
least some of those experiences to our children.
My youngest daughter, Ashley, took them to heart:
this summer, she spent a day making and canning marinara sauce to take to
her Chicago apartment. She also expanded her self-sufficiency skills.
Lincoln University in New Zealand, where she studied winemaking, is an
agricultural college, and her general education requirements included
courses in things such as animal husbandry. She learned more than she ever
wanted to know about raising and slaughtering sheep, and, outside of class,
went hunting with friends.
My neighbor Barbara Lary’s upbringing also gave
her the skills to raise and preserve food. She grows a variety of fruits
and vegetables, and has a beautiful flock of chickens, whose eggs she
generously shares with us. Talking recently about “what if,”
she showed me a book, Preserving The Fruits of
the Earth, written by Stanley and Elizabeth
Schuler. It discusses methods of preservation, from drying, smoking and
curing meat, salting, pickling, freezing and canning, and includes chapters
on how to thresh and mill grain, storage, and even how to make wine. The
last part of the book is an encyclopedia of foods grown and preserved in
the U.S. It really is an encyclopedic list — under ‘S’
not only commonplace strawberries and salmon are listed, but also Snipe (a
bird), Saskatoons (a berry), and Snooks (a fish), each with instructions
for preservation.
I also had a book to share, one I’d inherited
from my grandmother: Stocking Up. There’s some overlap between the two, but while
mine lacked the comprehensive listing of foods, it has instructions on
making hard, semi-hard, and soft cheeses, small-scale harvesting of grains
and seeds, building smokehouses, butchering and even an entire chapter on
different ways to make ice cream. Both books were first published in the
1970s — not surprising, given the back-to-the-earth movement popular
at the time. Stocking Up is still in print in its third edition; Preserving the Fruits of the Earth can
be found used in shops and on Amazon.
So, much as I hope it’s not necessary, if
everything does go to hell in a handbasket, we should be able to cope
relatively well around here. We’ve got the skills and the resources
to produce and preserve our own food. Lary’s husband is a retired
physician, and her sons are pretty good at basic construction. I’ve
got my grandmother’s books on natural medicine, and Peter can handle
the dentistry. Now, if we could only get a plumber into the mix. . . .
Like great home cooks everywhere, Lary doesn’t
use exact measurements for many of her favorite preparations. She’s
given me jars of her delicious homemade salsa that she cans every year, but
when I asked if I could use the recipe for this column, she looked at me
blankly: “I don’t use a recipe, and I couldn’t really
give you one, because it varies a lot from year to year depending on
what’s ripe in the garden. How about my Red Stuff? I don’t use
a recipe for that either, but it’d be easy to describe. I use it
mostly as a side dish, but it’s good for lots of other things, too.
And it only takes about fifteen minutes to fix.”
The name comes from Lary’s four boys who asked
when little, “Can we have that red stuff for supper?”
RED STUFF
Onions
Red Bell peppers
Olive oil
Tomatoes,
fresh or canned
Salt and pepper
Optional flavorings: sliced or minced
garlic, fresh basil, oregano, parsley, etc.
Use equal volume of onions and peppers and about
twice as many tomatoes. For one medium onion and one pepper, you will need
two or three large tomatoes, or about 1 1/2 c. whole or sliced canned
tomatoes, drained.
Slice the onion and cut the peppers into strips. Heat
a little olive oil over medium high heat in a skillet, and add the onion.
Sauté for a few minutes until the onion begins to soften. Add the
pepper strips (and garlic, if using) and sauté a few minutes more.
Add the tomatoes, cut into chunks if necessary, and any dried herbs. Cook
until much of the juice has evaporated from the tomatoes and the peppers
and onions are tender, but not so long that they begin to disintegrate.
Season to taste with salt and pepper, adding any fresh herbs just before
serving.
Besides a vegetable side dish, Lary uses red stuff as
a base for pasta sauces, soups, and in dishes such as jambalaya. Though she
prefers using fresh peppers, sometimes in winter, she uses frozen peppers.
This article appears in Oct 9-15, 2008.
