Foods Old and New : Who Knew I Was On The Cutting Edge

       I took a jaunt down the frozen food aisle in Meijer’s the other day and discovered one of my favorite vegetables in the case. I have missed these green soybeans we used to grow in the farm garden back in the ‘70’s . They were our favorite way to eat soybeans. It’s pretty hard to find recipes for dried soybeans that are very appetizing. But it’s no wonder I couldn’t find them in the market! They are no longer called green soybeans. They are “edamame” now. They are all the rage in the Whole Foods market produce section now, I understand. Edamame is evidently the Chinese name, and though soybeans have been around the farm scene in the US for 50 years, the Chinese have had the scoop on this vegetable for 3000 years. I’ve noticed cooking magazines like “Cooking Light” and “Eating Well” have featured recipes using edamame with (green soybeans in the explanation line). Hmm. We started eating them way back when because the plants were more prolific than Fordhook limas and much easier to shell. Besides, we lived so far away from whole food suppliers in big cities, we made our own tofu, butter, yogurt, beer kase, farmer, cottage and feta cheese. We even made our own roasted soynuts before they ever came on the market. Organic? Yes, we were!

      Now I find out we were on the cutting edge of food! Jeez, what else did we make and eat at the farm that is now being featured in the cooking magazines. Well, of course we always made our own sauerkraut, and kim chee. I started making salsa then and had to invent recipes for that, as well as grow our own habaneras. Quince or pear liqueurs were featured in one of my cooking magazines this past year as exotic and a real treat for a fancy dinner party, poured over ice cream. At our house homemade ice cream was a regular, as we needed to get rid of tons of cream weekly. Fruit liqueurs HAD to be made from the abundant bush and tree fruits after we had filled all the small jelly and jam jars with preserves and syrups. Somebody always sent us a box of Florida citrus near Christmastime. Peels were carefully taken from the fruit, candied and dipped in dark chocolate. Great gifts for dad and my sister-in-law, both of whom were nuts for that stuff. One time when I felt a bit ambitious, I scooped all the orange pulp, candied the shells and then baked fruit cake in the little candied containers.

      I read the other day that one should always use “non-fat” buttermilk! What are they talking about? The definition of buttermilk is the skimmed soured milk that is left when you churn the cream. After the butter is removed, the clabber is entirely fat free, except for a few delicious flecks of butter that didn’t make the “gathering”. I guess they’re just trying to appear knowledgeable about an old-fashioned commodity. We always had at least a gallon of it in the back of the fridge top shelf. When Gramma came down to stay, she and I could drink that whole gallon in a couple of days (that is if we were sitting on the back porch, stringing beans).

      Friends always made it a point to come over throughout the Christmas break(most of us being teachers) and well into January until the entire two gallons of eggnog was wasted. I found a great recipe that could use another gallon of that Jersey cream and a dozen eggs, a fifth of rum and a pint of brandy, some honey, and a vanilla bean. I think it was supposed to be a recipe that the George Washington family had around during their winter break too. Each week it got a little bit better. The last dregs were drained about January 15^th, at my birthday party. It’s my personal opinion that the liquor kept the cream from spoiling .

      Pound Cake--did you ever wonder why it’s called that? I found that out back then when I would peruse the old cookbooks to find out what to do with all that butter, and those brown eggs that were accumulating in the fridge. One pound butter to a dozen eggs, add a pound of sugar, a pound of flour and delicious cake appears after about an hour of baking. Give it away and make another one. Actually, I could find several recipes for using quantities of dairy in the Shaker cookbooks! Stuff like buttermilk pie, bread or rice pudding, baked custards (which hardly ever got cool enough to refrigerate before they were consumed) and lemon curd. We had to make scones then to put the curd on, currant or raspberry ones, or candied orange peel ones. I often wonder how they get away with charging so much for a single scone at those coffee houses. They really are simple to make and pretty plain fare.

     Now head cheese or souse sells at the deli in the big city for a pretty penny. I guess it’s a highly desired ethnic food. I grew up with it at every corner meat market, and I started making it on the farm after we’d butcher the annual pig. That’s one delicacy you have to develop a taste for unless your family regularly had this dish. It’s not hard to make and is sort of a jellied meat dish made by boiling up the hog’s head and seasoning up the meat and broth. It was of course served with a healthy dollop of homemade horseradish, from the root dug out in the fall. Another delicacy we made was country or Virginia ham. Gramma taught me how to take the hind rump of the pig, cover it with brown sugar, salt, pepper and red pepper, wrap it in brown paper, tied with string and then put in a cloth bag. We hung it in the back of the basement fridge for 4 to 6 months and then slivered off morsels to fry and tuck into Sunday mornng biscuits.

      Back in the days when raisins and prunes were the only dried fruits that weren’t considered exotic, and dried apricots, dates and figs were considered a Christmas treat, we made dried fruits and leathers from the abundant fruits and berries. Food dryers weren’t on the market back then, so Dad made one out from a “muffin” fan and seven light bulbs in a big wooden box stacked with screened shelves. Long before Trail Mix was a commodity at the health food stores, we were making those snacks and storing them in tins and jars in the pantry. Dried cherries and blueberries? Pear and apple leather. My kids thought everybody had those. They really did long for an occasional “hostess twinkie”. Heaven forbid!

      Actually where we lived, we didn’t have a clue that health food stores existed. Food cooperatives were just coming in so I was game for organizing one in our area in our rural area. Now I had access to things like rounds of Jarlsberg cheese and 50 pound sacks of winter wheat berries. My stone grinder regularly worked out, grinding the flour for my weekly bread baking. Hey, I was already an artisan bread maker, as I put tiles in the bottom of the oven and baked on those. I thought my breads were a bit crusty back then, but now I found out I was yet again on the cutting edge.

       We had a couple of geese every few years, and always named them Christmas, and Easter. They were not particularly well-liked pets for the kids and they were glad when the birds were in the freezer. But this enabled me to make foie gras, but only a little bit, enough to say we had it. Our geese lived a happy life pestering the dogs, and never were force fed. Their demise came swiftly. We had plenty of yellowy “smaltz” (chicken fat) for making biscuits and other baking, when we cooked up one of our chicken. Chicken liver pate wasn’t too bad either. I suppose that would be pretty expensive to buy now. Forget it! I’ll just do without now. I had my share of it anyway back then. The occasional ducks allowed us to cook some great Chinese fare.

      Don’t plant too many eggplants in the garden! We found that out the hard way. We had to make all kinds of Italian, Greek, Turkish and Moroccan dishes just to use those buggers up. We ended up making a pickled eggplant that I found out later was an Italian delicacy called Caponata. Who knew? I still make that and keep a quart in the fridge alongside the olives, for a quick antipasto ingredient.

     Do you have a wild food appetite?  We did too, but that's because it was free for the picking.  Things like the black walnuts gathered from the trees at the end of the driveway,  or beechnuts from the giant tree on the pasture fencerow,  painstakenly shelled, and  mixed into a quickbread, were worth every bit of work.  Morel or oak stump mushrooms were seasonally gathered, cleaned and dried.  Asparagus grew wild at the edge of the hay field.  Wild blackberries, strawberries and blueberries were hard to pick but we loved every one.  Folding those into a crepe with a little whipped cream made for  an occasional heaven-sent taste.  Elderflowers and daylily blossoms made fritters to die for, and  elderberries made great wine as did the rhubarb, wild grapes and dandelions.  Someday you'll want to try fresh watercress from our little spring by the edge of the pond.   Watercress and yogurt cream cheese on crusts of whole wheat bread is a treat.   I'm wondering if there's a  specialty store somewhere that carries all those things? 

     Folks who live in large cities have a myriad of ethnic choices of foods to choose from for whatever strikes their fancy. Our local stores only carried standard fare, except for the ethnic foods of our own immigrant ancestors who established certain food tastes for our little towns. For me in this little Michigan town, that meant Polish, German and Scandinavian foods that are still cooked here. But no longer can you get the “blind robins” (salted fish) or the Holland whole herring to make your own pickled herring. Actually I don’t know too many people who make their own anymore. The local Polish church still annually makes the Polish sausage, and the Finns here sell their pasties every Thursday morning from 8-12 noon. I prefer to make my own, as well as some Italian sausage batches every so often. Lots of guys here have their own smoking equipment to smoke up the abundant salmon in the fall. They let me smoke some of my sausages on the off season. Sliver some of that in your next omelet! Cutting edge again.

      One of my children moved from our little town to the big city 20 years ago. She commented that all the foods she found there at the specialty shops were ones she’d grown up with every day on the farm. Each of her friends tried to find things she hadn’t eaten, but she’d not only had tasted most of them, but knew how to make them. Yet another child went to work at an artisan bakery after college. She found Mom’s bread was much the same as theirs, only we ground our own flour just before we made the bread. We really were on the razor’s edge back then!