Happy Halloween!

I feel a day late and a dollar short as it is now Halloween night. Despite its joys and excitement, I am glad to see the month end. October is one of the busiest times of the year for my family, in a good way, and I'm ready to hunker in and focus on all things domestic: my house (and Chickabiddy Cottage), my writing, and preparations for the (simple, joyful) holidays.

This is also the beginning of my 50th year. I can't quite believe it. 49 feels good but it also is providing the impetus for change in many ways: better health habits, setting good boundaries, and asking myself, what is it that I want to do with the next 50 years, God willing? Those are just personal goals–there are many that I have for my family, too, but those are shared. We've settled into our Kentucky lives fairly well and now it's time to micromanage the details and the dreams. The realization is also here that no longer can I idle away any goals by saying, "some day" because, let's face it, I was saying some of those same things twenty-five years ago, half my lifetime to this point.

Yesterday I read the eulogy that novelist Mona Simpson wrote about her brother Steve Jobs that appeared in the October 30th edition of The New York Times. Perhaps you have read it, too. If not, do yourself a favor and stop reading this post now and read it. I wept throughout because her words were lovely but also because of what she was sharing. Here is a man, not much older than myself, who has changed the way we communicate with the world. His life was a series of extraordinary accomplishments and a few setbacks. While he was known for his perfectionism, his sister portrayed him as a romantic who also knew all of the names of the English roses. What especially got me were his last words, as he looked beyond his wife and children on his death bed in that most intimate and sorrowful of moments that some of us are privy to share with someone we love.

His sister writes:

"But with that will, that work ethic, that strength, there was also sweet Steve's capacity for wonderment, the artist's belief in the ideal, the still more beautiful later.

Steve's final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times.

Before embarking, he'd looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them.

Steve's final words were:  

OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW."

I want to continue to live, and eventually die, with that feeling of "OH WOW."

You come back when you're ready!

Catherine

Homemade Catsup

I have been canning like a crazy woman. I've always canned a slew of fruits and vegetables each year since we've been married, or a few items, but never to this extent. It's almost as if an instinct for provision has kicked in: line your shelves, stuff your freezers, feed your young, winter's coming. It makes me think of a passage from one of my favorite Anne Sexton poems, "I have found the warm caves in the woods, filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks, innumerable goods..." 

I'm just here filling our cave.

The fruits of our labor: 80 plus jars of various things and 12 hours later...

So busy, I forgot: yesterday was
 Farmwife Monday. Here she is!

I haven't done a cost analysis of this process and I don't dare. I'm already an expert sale shopper and it's likely I'd save more that way for most products. But here's the thing about putting your own food by: you know what's in it, it's (usually) locally grown or right from your own garden, you will have to shop less in winter months, you can hunker in for a while if necessary. Besides, it is immensely therapeutic whether solo or with a friend or family member. The process is its own reward.

The makings of ketchup  simmering in a big old kettle on the stove.

This is a catsup recipe I've made now in two batches. The first was not quite as thick so I wanted to tweak it the second time before posting. You may just never buy bottled ketchup again (or 'catsup': it's how my grandparents would have spelled it.)

Homemade Ketchup

• 8 quarts tomatoes, chopped
• 1 Tbsp. pickling spice
• 4 cups sugar (I used 2-3 cups)
• 1 tsp. pepper (or more to taste)
• 2 Tbsp. salt
• 1 tsp. ground clove (you could also use allspice or ginger)
• 2 tsp. dry mustard
• 1 Tbsp. cinnamon
• 2 large onions, chopped
• 24 Tbsp. Perm-Flo**
• 2-3 cups vinegar

Cook together the first nine ingredients for 1 hour, uncovered, in a large kettle. Press through colander or Foley Food Mill (the Victorio Food Strainer works like a charm, too, and I'm finally overcoming my fear of all of those parts). 

Return mixture to kettle and bring to a boil. Add the Perm-Flo to vinegar, stir, Add slowly to hot mixture while stirring. It will start to thicken almost immediately. Boil 20 minutes, stirring constantly. Pour into hot, sterilized pint or quart jars and boil sealed jars in hot water canner for 15 minutes [I time it for 15 minutes at the boil; then I turn off the kettle and let it rest, covered, for 15 more minutes. This avoids pressure release of the hot juice. If the mixture has cooled you need to pack it in hot sterilized jars but put jars in cold water and bring them to a boil to avoid breakage.]

Oh, and here's the best part: I got 14 pints of nice, fairly thick catsuppy goodness out of this recipe. I also made another batch before this last week that is not quite as thick but that will be great in meatloaf, chili or whatever.

**Or 10 Tbsp. Clear Jell. I used that in my salsa last year and it gives a somewhat chalky taste. Perm-Flo does not and it also works well when canning and freezing. Both are corn starch products and natural thickeners. Surprisingly there isn't much on-line about these products. I get them at our local Old Order Mennonite bulk foods store, Sunny Valley Country Store in Liberty, Kentucky. 

Actually from a 1950s ad for aluminum. But yeah, she can make it,  too.

The above recipe was modified from one found in the Community Collection Cookbook published by the Evona Volunteer Fire Department in Casey County, Kentucky. It is attributed to Mrs. Aaron N. Hoover.

You come back when you're ready!

Catherine

More from the Chickabiddy Canning Kitchen: I love this website: Canning Across America. Canning has become this cool foodie thing, not that it ever died out, really, in rural areas. But it is a great thing to be doing and promoting, even more self-sustaining and benevolent than knitting. But I figure the more I put up now, the more I can knit, read and write in the winter. Right?

Can-o-Rama!

So I missed 'Farmwife Monday' this week––that's OK, I never seem to keep any routine so she may be more of an occasional addition. I have included some vintage images of women canning here today so they can fill the void. I've also been canning like crazy. I've got the fever after six full and part days spent canning and freezing. So much so that I have vertigo today and I'm taking a needed break and puttering with some paperwork and blogging. [Ha! Or maybe my body was just sensing the oncoming 5.8 earthquake in Virginia today––even though we did not feel it here in south-central Kentucky.]

I enjoy sorting and inventorying things and I love to make lists even more. I see this blog as an expression to the world as much as it is a scrapbook of our lives here on the farm. So I will be referring back to my canning list, below, on occasion to update it with amounts and other information I wish to record from year to year. You are welcome to check, too. In the coming days I will be posting about specific recipes and techniques that I have learned or shared with my friend Anna.

Canning can be a hard, but gratifying job, and always with a positive outcome. Writing does not have quite the same reward for me unless I've posted a blog or published an article (and holding my book, The Pantry, for the first time was almost as amazing as holding each of my children after they were born). When work does not produce tangible results it can be harder to justify and more nebulous. However, an array of canning jars with different creations in them, whether cooling on the table or sitting on the shelf of your pantry or cupboard––now that's a job well done. Creating something you can hold, feel, use or eat, there's just something quite remarkable about it.

This is my 'to do' list for the rest of the season. I have a friend here in Kentucky who calls it a food psychosis, food obsession or food hoarding, depending on the day. She has it and I suppose that I do, too. Another friend in New Hampshire has stocked her cellar full of grains and beans and other things for her family. Providing good nourishing food for one's family is a good thing to be obsessed about, I suppose. I don't want to go to the store much this winter if I can help it, for many reasons: budget, gas prices, not wanting to buy produce that isn't local if we can help it, and often bad roads. And, I'm a squirrel that likes to hibernate in her nest. [I do need to state here that I am not this bad, yet: this recent episode was the worst case of hoarding that I've seen on the program Hoarders to date.]

My goal is to better plan our meals for the week in advance, perhaps on Sundays, so to free me up more for other things, like writing. Our canned food stores will also supplement our freezers full of our own beef, pork, chicken, sale items from various places, and our own fresh eggs. If we lose power for several weeks because of an ice storm and our freezers thaw (which has happened here on the ridge in the past), we have plenty to share with the neighbors. We have food to use up now and there's no reason to shop unless for something unusual or something I need for a recipe. Putting food by is also something we can all do together on occasion and there is comfort in that, too: just like when we all put up cords of wood in the woodshed together. It's also a kind of therapy for me: working with my hands and lining those shelves with jars and jars of foodstuffs.

All of this produce is from local produce, with the exception of 'Baby Gold' peaches that I've ordered from Pennsylvania and Concord grapes from New York state. I will come back and periodically check my list off and add quantities––as if I put them on a slip of paper, it will likely get lost or shoved into a cookbook:

I'm not sure the origin of this image but believe it is from a current illustrator.

Canning/Freezing √Done and 'To Do' List:

• √Strawberry Jam                          
• 20 pints/half-pints: May
• √Strawberries, freezer                    
• 24 quarts: May
• √Corn, freezer                                
• 16 quarts: 8-17
• 15 quarts: 8-26
• √Tomatoes, whole Roma               
• 45 quarts: 8-18
• √Tomatoes, quartered
• 9 quarts: 8-29
• √Tomato Catsup                           
• 12 pints: 8-18
• 14 pints: 8-29
• √Tomato Juice                              
• 35 quarts: 8-19
• 24 quarts: 8-29
• √"V-9" Juice                                 
• 13 quarts:  8-26
• √Cream of Tomato Soup
• 25+ pints: 8-29
• √Bread and Butter Pickles              
• 25 pints: 8-26
• √Chunk Sweet Pickles                    
• 14 pints: 8-20
• √Mixed Sweet Peppers, freezer      
• 12 quarts: 8-21
• √Stuffed Peppers, freezer              
• 20 peppers: " "
• √Zucchini Relish
• 13 pints: 8-29 
• 9-day Gherkin Pickles
• Banana Peppers
• Mexican Peppers
• Nectarine Jam
• Pickled Beets
• Beets, freezer (if possible)
• Peaches
• Peach Butter
• Peach Jam
• Sauerkraut
• Grape Juice
• Grape Jam
• Apple Butter
• Applesauce
• Pumpkin
• Butternut Squash, freezer (pre-seasoned)

And anything else that might become available to can or freeze or pickle or preserve!

You come back when you're ready!

Catherine

Farmwife Monday: Canning

A demure 'farmwife' from the late 1940s, probably in The Farmer's Wife or another farm magazine.
I've styled a few pantries in my day for photo shoots but have never seen one as colorful.

It is full-gear canning season here: almost everyone I know is canning something, has been canning, will be canning. This week I will be doing sweet corn on Wednesday (for the freezer), along with some corn relish (canned) and some tomatoes, also canned, on Thursday.

My canning and freezing list for the rest of the season includes, in no particular order:

• Bread and butter pickles
• Tomato juice (Lois Bromfield's recipe, just discovered in a cookbook)
• Tomato catsup
• Corn, frozen
• Corn relish
• Beets, pickled, and also for the freezer (researching that one)
• Sauerkraut
• Peaches, pickled
• Peaches, canned (some––we still have some from last year)
• Peaches, frozen
• Peach jam
• Applesauce
• Apple butter
• Grape jam
• Grape juice
• Butternut squash (freezer)

I'm probably forgetting something but I do need to start my 'canning plan' for the next few months. My friend Anna and I are doing corn and tomatoes this week (our husbands will shuck the corn!) and in September we will probably go down to a community in Tennessee where her brother lives. They raise muscadine grapes, among other things, and she wants some for wine and jelly.

It's easy to get squirrelly when the cooler days start to come, which they seem to be, a bit. I like to fill the cupboards and the pantry and the freezers for the fall and winter months. And I'm determined to do as little grocery shopping as possible in the next few months. We still have some applesauce, canned peaches and grape juice from last year––and plenty of salsa––so I may not can these items. But the squirrel in me will likely prevail!

Happy canning, everyone! What do you like to put up for your pantries?

Modern day 'war' poster!

World War II era poster for the homefront.

You come back
when you're ready!

Catherine

Farmwife Monday: Mrs. Miller

Canning beans, farm near Bristol, Vermont  © Louise Rosskam, 1940
"Four-square, high beamed, solid, (the farmhouse) has plain useful furnishings, 
it gives off a certain set, purposeful, stubbornness. 'I am here,' it seems to say. 
'You may take me or leave me. I have work to do. I shall do it. Try and move me.'"

Here is Mrs. Elizabeth E. Miller (aka Grammy Miller), who was 90 years old at the time this photo was taken in 1940 (she was born in 1850 if you can imagine that). She was of Scotch-Yankee ancestry, lived on Mountain and Lake View Farm in West Newbury, Vermont and had four boys: Clarence, John, James, George and one daughter who died in infancy.

She was interviewed in 1938 by Rebecca M. Halley (see above quote or entire manuscript here), and later photographed, above, as part of the Federal Writers' Project under the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Created as part of the New Deal in 1935, the WPA was responsible for employing people to build highways, public buildings, and some infrastructure. They also sent unemployed photographers, writers, artists and even musicians across the country––and paid them, too––to document, or enhance, rural life during the Great Depression. Of note is that many of these writers and photographers were women, such as Louise Rosskam, Dorothea Lange and Marion Post Wolcott. This may explain the abundance of interior kitchen scenes and portrayals of rural farm women across the country from this initiative.

Here is an excerpt from that interview:

One fall we had a five hundred and fifty pound dressed hog hanging in the yard. The men went off to Wells River to take up another hog they had dressed at the same time and left it hanging there and the caldron kettle half full of water. They aimed to get back and take the hog down to cellar before it froze. It would never do to let pork that was going to be salted freeze. I was all alone with the children and I waited until almost twelve. My husband didn't come and so I took a lantern and a saw and a knife and went out to fetch in that hog...I cut up that hog and loaded it piecemeal onto the sled. The worst part was getting it through the front door, but I managed. I had it all done before my husband got home. He asked who had brought the hog in. I said, 'I did.' He asked who helped and I said, 'Alone.' I wasn't wasting many words on him. He was struck dumb.

You can also hear Mrs. Miller speaking here. [I so enjoy listening to older accents: you can detect some Scotch dialect and also some Yankee accent in her voice.]

The online archive of the Library of Congress––our national library in Washington, DC that you own it––is tremendous. There are many images and audio archives available on the Internet. Here is a link to their "American Memory" archive where you can do a more refined search on many documents, images and audios, including the WPA collection.

There are numerous books on the WPA photography from this era but another more recent book I highly recommend is The Food of a Younger Land––A Portrait of American Food from the Lost WPA Files by Mark Kurlansky. Drawing on the unpublished writings that drew from the WPA interviews and photographs depicting farm life around 1940, the book documents the pre-War period of time in America when life was still largely agrarian for many and food was truly local.

You come back when you're ready!

Catherine

Farmwife Monday: Mammy and her Chickens

This photo shows Elizabeth (Lizzie) Sweeney Wells, c. 1924, with her flock of chickens. Lizzie was the grandmother of Joberta Wells, who submitted this photograph. Joberta lives on her grandmother's farm, just outside of Yosemite, in nearby Casey County, and in recent years recreated the classic three-gabled farmhouse from the foundation up. [Joberta is a friend and also a columnist at The Casey County News.]

Farm women were often photographed with their chickens and it is one of the most common scenes depicted in old farm photographs. Women tended the flocks on small amounts of land around the farmhouse or yard and gathered the eggs. Their 'egg money' was a valuable asset to farm income and their flock would have been a source of personal pride. Tending chickens was also an area where younger children could assist, including feeding and egg-gathering.

In an excellent paper on The Contemporary Farm Woman: 1860 to the Present, published by the Central New York Resource Conservation and Development, Inc. [Isn't the Internet amazing?] Stephanie Fisher writes:

"Women could exercise complete control over the production and income of their chickens. However, women often chose to spend the money to assist the farm or farm home. During hard economic times, the egg money, known as ‘pin-money,’ often saved the farm when their husband’s commodities failed to provide income...Women’s participation in chicken farming and the production of eggs continued until around the 1940s."

[World War II changed society and farming practices, after which factory-farming became more prevalent. However, in many rural areas, such as Casey County and throughout much of Kentucky, sustenance farming continued, much as it does today with household gardens, chickens and other livestock to support the family.]

Do you have a photo of a farmwife in your family to share on this blog? If you do we are happy to publish it or post a link to your blog.

NOTE: For two excellent first-hand period accounts of life with chickens, read Betty MacDonald's classic The Egg and I, written in 1945 and made into a movie (that launched the popular Ma and Pa Kettle films) or Mildred Armstrong's recent best-selling account of Midwestern farm life in the 1930s, Little Heathens–Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression

+   +   +

Thanks to Joberta Wells for her contribution to this entry.


This blog post also appeared recently in the 'Farm Attic' section of GROW Casey County, a blog about local produce and agricultural happenings––as well as our local Old Order Mennonite community––in Casey County, Kentucky. Here's a 'Part Two' to the blog: Farm Attic: Part 2 on Chicken Farming.

You come back when you're ready!

Catherine

Farmwife Monday: Longing

Photo source unknown––my apologies. It is in a computer file of mine.

This woman reminds me of Mrs. Waty Taylor, who lived most of her life in the old Cape––painted pink to suit her––across from our New Hampshire farmhouse. She baked pies each week and the best New England style baked beans, and brought them to my grandmother, and later to us, and she always wore an old feed sack bib apron. For many years she was a cook at the Woodbound Inn down on the lake.

There was a kindness in Mrs. Taylor's face but also the weariness of many years and inevitable sorrows. She awoke with the rising sun and was in bed by the time it set: many winter mornings she had her lights blazing early but rarely would you see them on of an evening. We liked to check on her or visit and she was so good to our oldest daughter when she was a young girl. Mrs. Taylor liked her house and you rarely saw her out of it: she would visit, briefly, on our farm and always seemed to want to return to her own home.

Every woman has a time of longing: perhaps for another time or favorite people or past memories. So much of our lives are spent in the day-to-day, whatever it is, that sometimes we just forget to pause and look out the window. Maybe this woman sees something or maybe she is lost in thought.

What do you see in this photograph?

You come back when you're ready!

Catherine

Farmwife Monday

The winsome cover of Favorite Recipes for Country Kitchens.
The cookbook features many images throughout and great recipes.

One of my pastimes is trolling the internet for interesting images and collecting vintage cookbooks. When I was doing research for my book, The Pantry, a few years ago, I enjoyed searching the Library of Congress archive, and so many others, for pantry and kitchen images. Invariably they would include farmwives.

Monday on a farm or in a household was often known as "blue Monday" because this was traditionally the day that wash was done. Does it come from the "bluing" that was used or how women felt when they did their laundry? I'm not certain. I do know that my Old Order Mennonite friends do laundry with the old washtubs and wringers and I really don't feel I can complain. It's one of the chores I like to do, actually, but around here it gets done when it needs to.

So in honor of "Blue Monday" I want to inaugurate "Farmwife Monday" when I will (try to remember to) share different images that I have found here and there. Some of these may or may not be in the public domain so I like to give credit when I can.

Here is the entire image on the front and back cover.

This charming image graces the cover of Favorite Recipes for Country Kitchens, written in 1945 and published by General Foods (there is another similar version published in 1943 for Calumet). It is nostalgic for what many of us idealize about farm living: a well-coiffed, apron-clad mother ringing the dinner bell, in a white farmhouse––complete with picket fence––overlooking rolling hills, a well-kept valley farm and garden, and surrounded by a smiling family and farmhands. We know that farming is really hard work, dirty and sweaty but one can't help but be enamored with this kind of winsome image, even those who know the reality of farm life. I also like this image because I have some hollyhocks around my farm cottage and the rolling, open landscape is evocative of our own valley farm. [I also like that 1945 is the same year that my grandparents––along with my mother and her siblings––moved from New Jersey to a farm in New Hampshire. I have often written about that farm on my other blog, In the Pantry, and it will always be a source of happy memory and occasional pangs of nostalgic longing.]

A few months ago I came across the blog, Midlife Farmwife. It is written by Donna O'Shaughnessy who lives on an organic pork and beef farm in Illinois. I immediately contacted her because I felt badly for using a similar blog name, only in reverse. She was extremely kind about it, and most forgiving, and even gave me a nod. Since then I enjoy checking out her blog regularly. There are so many wonderful farm blogs out there and so little time! And so many farmwives of all kinds, on farms of all types or even those who have farm life in their soul somehow. The internet is such a blessing for connection in what can be an isolating life at times: it's like a modern day party line.

Thank you so much for visiting my blog and happy Monday!

You come back when you're ready!

Catherine