Foodways in Winter By Tom Kinsella

This past January 31st, a good friend of mine was speaking to a group of Stockton University students about her college degree, which is from Stockton, and the ways that it prepared her for a career as craftswoman and breeder of sheep on her local farm. That morning, she said to the students, in the eight-degree cold snap, the first of her sheep gave birth to its lambs.

“One day early,” I thought, remembering back to an older, pastoral time, when the Celtic festival of Imbolc, later St. Brigid’s Day, February 1st, celebrated the arrival of lambs and thus spring.

Two thousand years ago, or even five hundred years ago, winter stores consisted of dry foodstuffs (grains), milk products turned into cheese, and meat products preserved by smoking, salting, or processing into cured sausages. In some places, you could preserve foods by submerging it in bogs (400-year old butter has been found in Irish boglands), but such food surely tasted a bit off. Even with skill, food storage over a long, cold, hard winter was unpredictable, and historical records suggest that late in January, food often became very scarce indeed. Families and communities might be on the edge of starvation, sharing out decreasing amounts of crumbling cheese or what few remaining oats survived the depredations of rodents. But then, as the situation became dire, as if by miracle, the sheep lambed. And the community could share life-giving sheep’s milk, high in milk fat, with the newborns.

Food and folkways of people are closely intertwined. Let me skip centuries to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many years ago, Mom collected recipes from her family and from Dad’s family. There were cookie and pie recipes that I recognized from holidays at Grandma’s. But there were dozens of other recipes that I had never seen on the table or tasted. These were older recipes not just from my grandparents, but some from my great grandparents, and perhaps older still. When I first read these recipes, I kept seeing “green,” “grind” (in a cast-iron hand crank grinder that I knew Mom still owned), and “can.” We had a fruit cellar in the family home and as a young’un I had spent hours peeling tomatoes (badly) that soaked in hot tubs in the basement, preparing them for canning. But all of this green, ground stuff? I had to talk with Ma about it.

Mary Elizabeth Oakes Ferguson

 

Pepper Relish

From Mary Elizabeth (Oakes) Ferguson, my great grandmother

12 green peppers

12 red peppers

5 onions

Chop fine, pour boiling water over all. Let stand 15 minutes (drain).

3 cups vinegar

2 tablespoons salt

1 ½ cups sugar

Bring to boiling point, put in peppers. Cook 10 minutes.

Can.

Green Tomato Mince Meat

Also from Mary Elizabeth (Oakes) Ferguson, my great grandmother

Chop 1 peck green tomatoes. Drain off juice. Let come to boil after adding as much water as juice. Let come to boil three times each time draining then adding as much water again to the tomatoes. Add:

1 peck apples, chopped

1 pint vinegar

3 lbs. seedless raisins

1 tablespoon salt

½ tablespoon cloves

1 tablespoon cinnamon

¼ lb. citron

¼ lb. orange peel

¼ lb. lemon peel

6 lbs. brown sugar.

Cook slowly two hours. Put tomatoes and apples through grinder.

Can.

Higdon

From Margaret (Ferguson) Kinsella, My Grandmother’s Recipe:

1 peck green tomatoes, grind and drain. Cook 20 minutes in salt water. Drain well. Grind 8 onions, 6 green peppers. Add:

2 tablespoons mustard seed

1 tablespoon celery seed

2 ½ pounds brown sugar

Cook 2 hours slowly.

Can.

Editor:

Curious minds ask, what IS ‘Higdon’? We googled; it was not easy to find. But, it IS a relish. One helpful writer wrote: “Green tomatoes and mustard seeds are the key! My friend's family has been in Indiana for years but never heard of anyone else who made Higdon relish.”

She found references to it in 1863 in Pennsylvania. That recipe used cucumbers instead of green tomatoes.

An 1866 Ohio farmer used melons:

“Higdon is made of green melons, cucumbers and onions. Take off the rinds, and slice and chop them fine; green peppers are also used. Then add mustard seed and spices. Press it into a jar and cover with vinegar. In a week or two it will be ready for use. If onions are not agreeable, leave them out. It is a nice pickle.” The Ohio Farmer’s family really liked higdon—“We all liked it so well that I will send you the recipe, believing if it was better known, it would be far more generally used.”

Closer to home, a Rochester NY cookbook also had a recipe for Higdon relish.

Pickled Beans

From Emily (Carr) Taylor, my step-great grandmother

1 peck string beans cut and cooked in salt water, as for table use, and drain.

3 lbs. white sugar

½ C. flour

½ C. dry mustard

1 T. turmeric

1 T. celery seed

2 quarts vinegar

Put dry ingredients in small container; mix with a little vinegar to a smooth paste. Add the rest of heated vinegar and cook until thick. Pour over green beans and can, or use now.

When I asked about these recipes, mom smiled and said, “Times change.” At the turn of the century, she explained, and certainly throughout the Depression, there was little refrigeration. The iceman made his rounds, but the icebox was small and for cooling milk. In summer and through harvest time in fall, there were plenty of greens on the table, “But if we wanted a bit of green at the family dinner in January or February, it had to be canned months before.” So the family canned peppers, and green tomatoes, and string beans (and of course peaches, pears, cherries, pickles, red tomatoes, jellies and jams).

I still have a canning setup in my basement. All I need is a fresh batch of mason jars and some lids. Perhaps this growing season I’ll can some peppers or green tomatoes and think about Mom and Dad, and their parents, and their parents. Or perhaps I’ll visit my friend’s farm and stand by the sheep pen, thinking even further back into our food and folkways.