Tag Archives: gardening

Shaker Herbs Part Four- Culinary Herbs

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The Shakers served plain food but it was nourishing and, from the recipes I’ve tried, flavorful. There was some overlap of course. Basil, for example, was used as a tea and an aromatic to prevent excessive vomiting. Rosemary was also used as a tea and its oil was made into a liniment.

Some of the other herbs are not so unsurprising. One of my favorites is for a Dandelion salad. (Seriously!) The mixture includes dandelion leaves, simmered until tender and drained, then put into a saucepan with egg yolks, cream, butter and other herbs such as mint, lemon thyme and so on. The mixture is put on slices of stale bread and fried and then seasoned with oil and vinegar and parsley.

Fish was poached with chamomile leaves or covered with chamomile sauce. (Make a roux with butter and flour (2 Tablespoons each), add a Cup of chicken stock, parsley, the chamomile leaves and add salt and pepper to taste,) Marjoram, basil, parsley and basil went into meatloaf, tarragon, summer savory, marjoram, chervil and thyme into chicken fricasee.

Hancock Village served an herb soup made up of chopped sorrel, chopped shallots, chervil, mint and parsley boiled in milk. Butter and salt and pepper are added to taste and the whole mixture poured over squares of toasted bread.

I want to add a note about the Shaker’s recipe for bread which I found in a James Beard bread book. It is so delicious I could eat an entire loaf. But I digress.

Another soup is apple soup, so tasty on a cool fall day. A quartered apple, cored but unpeeled, a quartered onion and a herb mix of marjoram, basil, summer savory and more combined with cinnamon is cooked in the top of a double boiler. The apple is removed when soft and the soup is strained. Cider and cream is added when ready to serve.

Some of these herbs and herb mixes can be purchased in the gift shops of the various museum communities and at Sabbathday Lake. Hancock Village had a mix that includes basil, parsley, marjoram, oregano, tarragon, thyme and more. It has been several years since I purchased my supply so I am not sure it is still available.

Hired men: the Shaker challenge

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Farming is hard work even now with all the modern equipment we use. (Both good and bad don’t you think, but clearly a topic for another time.)   In the 1790s farming was even harder. It remains and was certainly even more so then a very people intensive profession. Lots of help was required, and that is true even now. So hired help was a common feature of early America. Sons and daughters hired themselves out to the neighbors until they had homes and farms of their own. Younger sons, who often never obtained a farm of their own – the older sons inherited – frequently hired on to other farms.  Unattached males traveled from farm to farm exactly as migrant labor does now. This is a long standing practice, continuing right up to modern times. Think of Lennie and George in Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” and the current use of migrant labor. Farms really couldn’t function without this kind of a labor pool.

As usual, I digress.

So Rees and Lydia would have employed help, both inside the farmhouse and outside in the fields. think of Abigail and the boys David took on to help him brng in the harvest.

Even the Shakers employed hired help, primarily men. During the nineteenth century the number of hired men increased as the flow of male converts decreased. (The Shakers always attracted more women than men for a variety of reasons.) The use of hired men within the Shaker community created a number of consequences. Since the men were ‘too much of the World’, they slept in a separate building and were required to eat alone. I would guess that there were still unexpected and forbidden attractions between Sisters and the men. Human biology is very hard to resist and one of the primary sources I read discussed the problems of keeping the boys and girls adopted into the community separate. The attraction the adolescents felt to one another and their efforts to attract attention was a great trial to the Shaker caretakers.

But some of the problems were cultural, if you will. After the Believers had become teetotalers, the Families in Canterbury (New Hampshire), were much exercised over whether to brew beer for the hired men. The community worried that by brewing beer they were risking not only their ideals but also the consequence of drunken men living in the heart of the village. (Described in “The Shakers, Neither Plain nor Simple”. Even though Sisters took on ‘male’ tasks, men were still required.

Winter?

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We are almost into January and the warmth continues. Thus far, even in upstate New York, we have not had a killing frost. I still have beets

beets

and kale

kale

Moreover, my poor dog is suffering. She grew in her winter coat. And now it looks like her April hair; ragged as she sheds. This is her flank one day after brushing.

shelby fur

I, however, am not complaining. Maybe this year I will actually get my peas in to the ground mid-March instead of being held back by snow.

More about salads – and vegetables

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Salad has a long history. One source I read claimed that the Greeks and Romans ate mixed greens with dressing.

I have salad recipes in my Queen Elizabeth I and King Richard cookbooks although they also include things like figs and are sweeter than we normally think of salad, which is now seen as more of a healthy food. The recipes from these renaissance cookbooks read more like dessert.

Besides wild greens and the tops of beets and turnips, early American farmers also grew several varieties of lettuce, cucumbers, radishes. What’s missing from the usual American salad? Why, tomatoes. Although now considered Italian, tomatoes are actually, like potatoes, from South America It was brought to Europe by Spain. And, a member of the nightshade family, it was considered a poison. It was not eaten at all during the Colonial period ( and grown as a decorative plant) but by the early 1800s was popular as a food. One story lists Thomas Jefferson as the who began planting and eating tomatoes. He was a passionate gardener who tried new foods but we don’t really know for sure.

But I digress. Cucumbers were frequently used as a salad and I have found old recipes for cucumber salad which usually consists of chopped cucumbers and vinegar.

Other vegetables: artichokes, onions, garlic, parsnips, asparagus and of course things like cabbage were popular. We think of the diet at this time as meat heavy, and it was, but cheese and diary and grains, as well as the vegetables, were also a big part of the diet.

I always mention food in my books. I’m a gardener myself and clearly a foodie – which regular readers of my blog can surely tell. And I find it fascinating to discover what our forefathers ate and didn’t eat. Sometimes it is surprising.

food in the 1790’s – salad and maple syrup

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Although trading went on, most food eaten was, by necessity, local. The port cities like Salem could import oranges, nuts, figs and more but for the outlying farms these items were exotic luxuries.

Salad (or salat) has been eaten for hundreds of years. Greens such as beet and turnip tops and spinach, cabbage are all greens that might be used. For the early New Englander, wild greens such as dandelion greens or violets would be eaten. (Fiddleheads are still eaten by Mainers, cooked of course, and have a flavor similar to spinach.) Our idea of a salad with lettuce and tomato was not the salad eaten by the early colonists. One of the memoirs from this time expressed a hunger for greens after a winter of salted and smoked food.

Poke weed was also used as a salad green. It is, however, poisonous, although the very young leaves – from accounts I have read – are not. I haven’t tried them. I have also read that the leaves are edible after cooking three or four times, discarding the water in between.

One note: since the native American tribes knew how to tap the sap from maple trees, maple syrup quickly became a staple. It was used as both lightly boiled sap, and the syrup we are more familiar with today.

 

 

rain

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After a very dry summer, we finally had rain. And a lot of it. Overnight close to a foot;

rain

The above pool cover was dry before the rain.

I am glad for my garden. Cucumbers and beans were beginning to wither, despite my watering. And the tomatoes!

tomato cracks

See the cracks? That’s what happens to tomatoes when they suffer stress from irregular watering.

Now we are waiting to see if Joaquin hits. When Sandy hit, I lost power, my library flooded, and nearby towns were awash.

Ah, weather.

making cider

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As everyone who reads this blog knows, I have a fascination with old things: how people lived in the past. So here is my latest project – making cider.

The Shakers were famed for their cider. Just about everyone drank cider – and it was mostly the hard variety.

so here is the saga of my attempt to make cider.

apple trees

we have four apple trees and a peach tree on the property.

cider maker

we bought a cider maker and put in the apples.

apples

Two hours later we had about a cup of juice and all the apples were covered with a fine silvery powder from the grinding mechanism. I tasted the cider, and it was good, but we discarded it. Now we are going to try the food processor.

Let me tell you, some of these techniques are far harder than they look.

Copenhagen and random thoughts

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I love Copenhagen as a city. I suppose its greatest claim to fame is Hans Christian Anderson, the author of such tales as “The Little Mermaid” and “The Ugly Ducking.” As any one who has read these stories will tell you, they are much darker than their Disney versions. There is a statue of the mermaid in the harbor and she is little.

little mermaid

I would have like seeing the museum but it was outside of Copenhagen and we didn’t have the time.

This is also a very green city- and by that I mean it is rapidly attaining full sustainable energy. There are not that many cars = probably because they are so highly taxed. In the harbor, on reclaimed land, there are wind turbines. Here is an idea I thought very cool as a form of tree irrigation.copenhagen irrigation

All the trees have these gigantic bags of water around them as a form of irrigation. They are also working on fresh fruits and veggies grown in the city. As someone who has a large garden every year, I found this fascinating. These igloos dot the city and when you get closer they are full of growing things. Plus, they play music to help the plants grow.

copenhagen greenhouse

So, there has to be something I didn’t like, right? It was cold! We stopped for lunch at a cafe. Note the blankets on the chairs, the jackets everyone was wearing. And there were heaters every few feet. I want to add, this is the beginning of JULY!

copenhage cafe

In all fairness, all of Scandinavia was cold. We’d brought jackets, long pants and sweaters and we still had to buy new sweaters. In Iceland, the tops of the mountains were covered with snow.

iceland snow

So, I loved everything about Scandinavia but the climate.

Shrink Wrap

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If I may vent a moment about shrink wrap. It now seems to be used for everything and a more non-user friendly device was never invented.

Although I stream music to my phone all the time, I listen to CDs in the car. (I drive a very old car. Besides a CD player it has a tape deck – no kidding!) So I tried to listen to the new CD of Fallout Boys. I couldn’t get the plastic off! With Arctic Monkeys, I managed to get my nail in the plastic and peel it off. The cardboard case opened like a book and the CD was in one sleeve. But Fallout Boys I had to take the package inside the house, slit the plastic with a knife and then cut those little sticky things that hold the OTHER case closed.

Really? (she said snarkily.)

Now lets talk about the plants that come swathed in shrink wrap. As most people who know me, and I count the readers of this blog in that number, know, I am a pretty passionate gardener. Why do they come in shrink wrap instead of straw or something like that? There is nothing more frustrating than getting out to a section of the yard and discovering the plant cannot be put into the ground because it is tightly covered with shrink wrap. I have sometimes been reduced to trying to cut the shrink wrap with my teeth. (Not a good plan, by the way.) I now have set up a little tote bag with scissors and gloves. I try never to forget the bag and now I am thinking of adding secaturs – which are like stronger scissors.

I guess the next step is a belt like the medieval housewives used to wear with keys, scissors and everything else they might need.

Spring gardening

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This is a funny year. I always find surprises, partly because many plants reseed themselves. Tomatoes is one. Random plants come up all over the garden and I can never bear to pull them, which may be one reason I end up with 11 plants.

cabbage

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two tomato plants came up here along with what looks like squash. And in the background it looks like cabbage even though the package said broccoli. There are four broccolis in front of the cabbage, planted too close.

This year is odd as well. I have flowers on my peas, because they went in late (snow on the ground) and flowers on the tomatoes (begun in the house). Tomatoes and peas at the same time?

tomato flowers

 

 

 

And finally, just something nice. My weigela – I just missed a butterfly on it. I love spring!

weigela