She's back.
SWMBO (Judith Taylor) writes today about the food of her childhood:
Produce
When I was growing up in the middle of Indiana we lived on a four acre family compound consisting of my grandparents' house down a long lane toward the creek and our house up by the road.
We grew much of what we ate.
Today, for some reason, I started thinking of all the things we took for granted.
There were many trees that produced cherries, pears, yellow apples, red apples, paw-paws, peaches and persimmons.
There were also Concord grapes on an arbor and blackberries and raspberries in a briar patch.
Asparagus and rhubarb came up spring after spring.
Then the hard work started as soon as the weather warmed a bit.
Huge gardens were planted.
Salads grew in our back yard, consisting of leaf lettuce, green onions, radishes, cucumbers and tomatoes.
We also planted old dependables: yellow onions, green peas, green beans, white potatoes, sweet corn, pumpkins, squash and cabbage.
Although they weren't on our four acres, if we went back into the woods in the spring we could sometimes luck out with a discovery of a big bunch of morel mushrooms which my mother would dip in beaten egg and flour and fry in lard.
It was hard to wait for them to reach the table.
Throughout the summer, as things came ready, we canned everything that could be canned, looking forward to the long winter.
Pears and peaches were preserved in a light sugar syrup and my grandmother would drop a few Red-Hot candies into the jars of pears before they were sealed.
They made the pears slightly pink and yummy looking.
Apples became applesauce before canning.
Grape juice was bottled, but never became wine.
Persimmons were turned into pulp and made into pudding later.
Cucumbers became pickles and were saved in big crocks with heavy lids.
The root cellar at grandmother's house held bushel baskets filled with potatoes, apples and onions.
Bees made all the honey we could consume, right there in the orchard.
And we were considered poor.
I'm lucky to grow a half dozen tomatoes in my garden, i would have starved back on that farm...or became a thief.
ReplyDeleteSimilar to my youth in Oregon. Now most Americans are dependent on big corporations for food.
ReplyDeleteWow, that sounds just about perfect. I can certainly relate to some of these things. We lived in the city where I grew up but, mom still had a small garden and so did my grandmother. We always had fresh tomatoes and lettuce in the summer and grandmother provided green beans and peas and lots of rhubarb. Illinois was/is a big corn growing state so we had lots of sweet corn. There was an apple orchard on the edge of town and we got our apples there along with the best apple cider I've ever had. Food that tastes that good is almost impossible to find these days.
ReplyDeleteAnd it probably all tasted wonderful! I grow a few tomato plants on my roof and the tomatoes are so good!
ReplyDeleteI really miss my grandma's dill pickles, and the sweet corn and tomatoes. Eating was a lot more fun than digging the potatoes. My cousins and I ate the persimmons as soon as they fell off the tree. No pudding for us!
ReplyDeleteWhen my mom canned pears - in a light syrup - she always put in two thin slices of lemon. That became the "prize" in each jar.
ReplyDeleteMy parents had a vegetable garden at the back of the property as I was growing up, for stocking the big basement freezer for winter. Gradually the size of the garden diminished somewhat, as they were more or less just growing stuff that was less likely to be in the grocery stores or at markets.
ReplyDeleteIn the end, when they were living at their retirement home in cottage country, one summer the deer ate all the beans, the only thing they were still growing for themselves. I don't think my dad minded one bit, as he didn't like planting the gardens in the first place.