Food of our grandparents

Grandma's Butter Cake

I've been thinking about food lately. No, stop. I think about food ALL THE DAMNED TIME! You see it's a security thing for me, as I am sure it is a security thing for many of you. We buy groceries first, before anything else, before bills are paid. Food!

I'm a bit anal about the quality of my food too. If I am going to the effort to eat something, to carry around those calories, it'd best be the best quality food I can buy. We don't eat packaged. That means that I spend a lot of my time cooking. It's a trade off. I cook so that I don't have to eat from a box. I also eat seasonally. I put up preserves when fresh is in season and cheap so that I can eat that good food year round. It was the way we were brought up. And you know what? Eating this way is usually far cheaper.
Now, I realize there are 'food deserts' in the world, there are a lot of them in North America, the land of the free and wealthy...even in Nova Scotia. That's a whole different blog post though, and what I really want to talk about here is grandma's food, how she taught us to cook, and how that is lost to many now.

I just finished making a batch of citrus chutney from the end of season oranges. Normally, at this time of year I make marmalade, but this year I wanted to switch it up a bit. I needed a change. Pierre had been taking oranges in his lunch for the week, and I had been thinking of getting him to save the peels for me, but it turned out I didn't really need them...at any point in history though, they would have been saved and preserved.
The last time I made marmalade, there was too much pith in the mix, that white bit of the orange peel, and it turned out bitter and would not set up! This time around, I was much more careful to peel the rind from the pith and chop that rind finely. To that I added the pulp of the citrus, and then a good large wack of sugar, some cider vinegar, raisins, and a small bit of Pierre's pepper blend. I boiled it up and got it into jars late last week. Then we packed the car and went to Ticonderoga. The jars sat on the counter.

At Ticonderoga, Gibb Zea was doing an experiment with salting pork. He got the salting down pat! In the staff kitchen, in a large glass barrel were the pork bits in the brine and salt. It looked good. He told me that it was an experiment, that he had been reading about salting meat in the period. On the Saturday, he made a stew with the salt pork, to compare with the fresh pork I was braising for the officers. Gibb did freshen the pork, but we all found the stew to be still too salty. I found out later, that while he had changed out the water several times, he had left the freshening part too late and didn't allow enough time.
Remember, he was going from written documents. Written in a time when some things were simply common knowledge. Nobody needs to eat salt meat any more. That knowledge is lost...

Or is it?

In the Maritimes, we eat salt fish to this day! It's one of those comfort foods that we eat when we are home, like grabbing a donair, or fried pepperoni. Fish cakes and eggs, with baked beans and green tomato chow for breakfast is still one of those things many of us crave. Many of us grab breakfast at the Ardmore Diner, but some of us still know how to do this from scratch.
In the Maritimes, there are often fish trucks parked in local parking lots, selling the catch of the day. We buy direct from the fishermen, and we buy what was caught...there's no ordering special, it's what the guy has. One day, on my way home from school, there was a truck parked at the foot of our street, at the old gas station lot. Grandpa had sent me down for some salt cod for Sunday dinner. I came home with a giant fillet of cod. Cod are huge, and the fisherman who caught this one, split it open, cleaned it, salted it, and sent it to Nova Scotia. So I'm walking up the street with a giant, rock hard fish, still with it's skin. Grandpa had expected I would come home with a bag of cod bits, not a whole fish.
Oh, well. The money was spent. Time to deal with the fish. Down in the laundry tub, next to the washing machine went the fish. He filled the tub with cold water. It was Wednesday. Every day the water was changed out for new cold water until the fish was pliable enough to deal with. It was at this point that I understood why the farmers out west used the salt cod we sent them during the depression to shingle their roofs. No, it didn't work out well, but if you've never seen a salted cod before, how would you know how to deal with it?
So when the cod was fresh enough, probably on Friday evening, Grandpa took it back up to the kitchen and skinned the fish, putting the edible bits into a large pot of more cold, fresh water. By Sunday it was fresh enough to cook (boiled in more fresh water until hot and cooked through). We ate it with boiled mashed potatoes and lots of butter. It was still salty.
I thought of this experience when I was talking to Gibb about his salt pork project, and how I could explain that more time was needed, that salt meat takes days to freshen, with the water being changed out daily, or even more often? Then I thought of how a soldier would be able to freshen pork while on the march. He wouldn't be able to do it properly, for sure. I suspect a lot of time they were eating really salty stew, much like we did on Saturday. Boiled potatoes, cooked in the stew would pull out some of the salt, but still.

There are things that we do today, that will be lost knowledge to our grandchildren. I think about those things a lot. Like how to roast a chicken, which chickens are the best to cook. What eggs look like when they are fresh from the chicken. How dirty eggs from the chicken's back end can stay on the counter, but once you wash them, they need to go in the fridge. And how all of that is different from buying food in the store, all sanitized and packaged. What exactly is a chicken nugget? You don't really want to know...

I got home from Ticonderoga and noticed that my chutney hadn't set up, again...No Biggie, back into the saucepan it went, with more sugar, lots more sugar, and more boiling. I don't really have a recipe, I just know that with acidic foods, more sugar is needed to get them to set up. Liquidy fruit is similar in that it also needs more sugar. I finally got the chutney to a good sticky consistency, and reprocessed my jars, new snap lids (the first ones went in the trash, as they'd already been used and the seal won't be good enough a second go around...even for fruit). I got my chutney in the jars again, and processed again. And this time, it worked. I have good, jam-like consistency. I am happy.

When I get back home to Nova Scotia, I will need to start teaching my grandkids how to cook. They will be a good age to start learning. I don't want to leave them all my grandmother's and grandfather's recipes, with no idea how to use them. The 'builder's mug' measurement only works if you know what a builder's mug is.