food

Looking back at life on the farm it has struck me that a great deal of the women's time and effort was spent in the preparation of food. Of course, everyone worked hard, especiallly in the summer, so we could eat large quantities of food withoout it damaging our waistlines. In fact, large quantities of nourishment were necessary in order to provide the energy we needed to go about our daily tasks. Think of all the calories that went into the work of haying!

In my growing up days most of our food was grown right on the farm. Even the meat, or perhaps I should say especially the meat, because it has only been in recent years that I have changed my meal-planning from building meals around meat to thinking of other forms of protein in our diet. We always had chicken, In the summer Dad, with the help of the boys, raised broilers for market and we ate our share. Sometime during the summer our family would host a big chicken barbecue with the chicken cooked over a specially dug pit and all sorts of other goodies to go with the chicken. We also canned chicken for consumption during the winter. Of course, no freezers in those days. We raised our own beef, and some of that was canned. Dad made great dried beef, now known as chipped beef. We raised pork and lamb, as well. We kids never wanted to know which of our pets we might be eating. However, I have to say that it didn't seem to spoil our appetites if by chance we did know which animal had been offered up to the table. We once had a pet goat which eventually found his way to our table. Sister Marion, who liked to stir up controversy, inquired suspiciously while consuming the goat meat if that was Goatie. I don't remember who replied to her question, nor what was said, but anyway Marion got the message, threw down her fork, and refused to eat another mouthful. Meat and its preservation made an awful mess in the kitchen. When I was in college, home for spring vacation, two boys came to visit me unannounced. Dad happened to be cutting up beef on the kitchen table. When the visitors knocked on the door, he opened the door with a large butcher knife in hand and clothes which were quite bloody. The kitchen also had the trappings of maple sugaring, which was a very sticky business. I wonder what my visitors thought, but they were too polite to show much emotion.

We also canned hundreds of quarts of vegetables and fruit. Much of that was the job of the women, although the men sometimes helped to harvest the produce. Garden produce has to be preserved when it is at a certain stage of ripeness, rather than when we had the time to take care of it. Moreover, things have a way of coming in large bunches, so that for several weeks in the summer large portions of many days were spent in canning. No freezers, of course. Often we had to process the jars of canned produce on the wood stove, sometimes far into the evening. We ate well all year round, but not without considerable effort. Maybe that is why the so-called great depression of the 30's made so little impression on us as kids. We didn't know anything about selling apples on the streets of the big cities.

Ruth became a proficient baker from a very early age, a skill at which she excels to this day. At the age of 11 she could bake anything: bread, pies, cakes, doughnuts. Because she was so good at it, the task of preparing the rest of the meal often fell to Marion and me. So did the clean-up until Marion and I lodged a complaint with Mom at the unfairness of our having to spend half the afternoon cleaning up after the main meal of the day, as well as Ruthy's baking. As a result, Ruth was directed to do her baking dishes. The summer that I was 16, Ruth 15, Marion 13, and the boys younger, Mother had a mastectomy followed by radiation therapy at what was then Mary Hitchcock in Hanover. In those days that was a much bigger deal than it is now and she was not well throughout that whole summer. We girls ran the household, with help from Dad when it came to grocery shopping, of which there was not a great deal. We did the cooking, the cleaning, the laundry, the ironing, the whole deal. Don't forget that there were many mouths to feed in the summer, what with the extra help and the visiting relatives.

As an adult I have had to prepare my share of meals for family and visitors. I didn't especially like doing that, but neither did I especially dislike it. I have never considered myself very creative nor capable as a cook, but we always managed to eat. Now I am somewhat of a klutz in the kitchen. Ruth on the other hand is both creative and capable, and just seems to get better at it with age, and to really enjoy it.