Stew: From the Corners of the Earth to Your Bowl

(This was my February article for the magazine Two Lane Livin'. It's surprising to realize I've been writing a monthly column for them for almost five years. Check out their website.)

What is so homely and comforting on a winter’s day as a bowl of hearty stew? Its tasty blend of meat, vegetables and seasonings bring back memories of summer’s gardens. If you are a hunter, the autumn hunt for venison provides the meat, and if a farmer, the annual fall butchering and freezer-filling comes to mind as you fill your bowl with rich broth and tender chunks.  As the poet Robert Burns observed,

"Some hae meat and cannot eat,
And some would eat that want it;
But we hae meat, and we can eat,
Sae let the Lord be thankit."

While we may know the source of the meat in our stew, what about the other ingredients? Where did they originate? The storyteller in me is always interested in the story behind traditions, superstitions and the everyday things we take for granted, so I decided to find out just where my stew came from. 

Surprisingly, none of the things I use in my recipe  are native to North America. Potatoes, for example, were originally from South America, discovered first by Pizarro  and later brought to England by Sir Walter Raleigh in the early 1600’s. For some time many people refused to eat potatoes, believing they caused leprosy, among other things. Ireland quickly adopted the potato and it became the mainstay of the Irish diet. This had terrible consequences when a blight struck the Irish potato crop in the mid 1800’s, causing widespread starvation and death—and a huge migration to the United States and other countries.

Carrots came to us from Afghanistan. The Greeks believed it made people more ardent, so used it as a love potion. The carrot made its way to Europe in the Middle Ages, and it was in Holland that the variously colored carrots were hybridized to become the orange carrot we know today. Carrots were grown in England by the 16^th century, as this early  gardening manual tells: "Sowe Carrets in your Gardens, and humbly praise God for them, as for a singular and great blessing"  --Richard Gardiner (1599 gardening book)

The shores of the Mediterranean Sea are the homeplace of celery, known to the Romans as sedano. The celery seed often used in pickles and other recipes comes from the small native plant called smallage that is still grown just for the strongly flavored seeds, while the stalks we generally think of as celery were first recorded as being grown in France in the 1600’s.

CELERY
Celery, raw,
Develops the jaw,
But celery, stewed,
Is more easily chewed.
--Ogden Nash (1902-1971)

Stew isn’t stew without onions. Onions came from the regions of Israel and India and have been grown in gardens since before the time of Christ. In the fifth century BC, slaves building a pyramid for Herodotus held a sit-down strike until they got their onions. Folklore has it that Columbus planted onions during his visit to the Caribbean islands, and the first settlers in the US also brought onion seed with them and Grant refused to move his troops during the Civil War unless he got onions to feed them.

Stew must have its seasonings. Salt has been used as a preservative since early civilizations, bay originated in the Mediterranean and has been used both medicinally and as a culinary flavoring since before recorded history.  Black peppercorns are native to India, while the red, green, hot, mild and other peppers grown for their flesh instead of their seed derive from the southern Americas. 

So there we have it: our humble beef or venison stew is truly a cosmopolitan dish, coming to our stewpot from all the corners of the world.

For more history of the foods we eat, check out these websites:

http://www.foodtimeline.org/

http://whatscookingamerica.net/History/HistoryIndex.htm

http://www.soupsong.com/ifoodta.html

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/food.cfm

Linking today to Joy at A Vintage Green, to The Rustic Pig, The Self-Sufficient Home Acre, and Silver Pennies.

Copyright 2012 Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

Aprons: Last Month's Articel in Two Lane Livin'

I thought I should start sharing the articles I write monthly for Two Lane Livin' on this blog. I hope you enjoy the most recent one

Aprons

How many women wear an apron in the kitchen today, I wonder? My mother’s apron was part of her morning getting-dressed routine. The apron went on as soon as she buttoned her dress, and it stayed on until late afternoon. Then she would get dinner started and go upstairs to brush her hair, put on makeup and take off her apron in preparation for my father’s homecoming from work.

I wore an apron regularly as a young wife but over the years the apron and the housedress went to the wayside and jeans, flannel shirts and tee-shirts became my daily wear. I suppose it was a sensible change; I was outside a lot as we built our house and got our small farm going. I worked beside my husband in those days as we gathered wood, cleared brush and built fences and outbuildings. Housework became secondary to the necessity of the outside chores.

My daily uniform changed again when I started working and going to college in my mid-thirties. I was still wearing jeans but they were in a lot better shape than my “work” jeans, and the shirts became a little dressier. Sometimes I even wore a skirt, a sure sign that I was leaving the farm work behind. As our sons grew up and moved out, we farmed less and less. The tobacco, cattle, sorghum and hay all became part of our past and we moved into a new era. I was home infrequently so the gardens became small patches and our flock of hens was the only livestock on the place. My extensive herb gardens slowly died out while I was too busy to pay attention. 

A gradual shift began about ten years ago. I began to miss the things I used to do. Slowly I added some of our former activities back to the daily routine. The gardens expanded, a new herb garden was added, we built a turkey house and added turkeys to the bird flock. Bees came next. 

Then the apron came back into my life. Raising more gardens meant more cooking and canning and that meant more time in the kitchen. The practicality of the apron was immediately apparent and I was fortunate enough to find a few at yard sales. When my granddaughters came to visit, they wanted to wear an apron in the kitchen too as they helped with cooking and baking. At the annual gathering with my sisters to make fruitcake, everyone began showing up with aprons as part of the supplies they carried in for baking day.

The humble garment has made a comeback in my family. I now have an apron for every day of the week and then some. I have small ones for granddaughters and manly ones for grandsons. I have pretty spring ones and holiday ones. Each time I tie an apron around my waist, I think of my mother, busy in her kitchen as she cooked for thirteen children. I wonder how many other women have rediscovered the pleasure of wearing a pretty flowered apron as they cook for their families today?

Recent Reading

My reading the past few days has been a bit eclectic. Besides reviewing ghost stories for this week's programs, the following have been on my table:

This stack kep me occupied for several hours. These are entries in the local library's Fall writing contest. I am one of the judges so I've enjoyed reading a wide variety of stories and poems.

The pile eventually narrowed down to this, but there is still more reviewing to do and decisions to make with the other judges. It's fun, I have to say.

This little cookbook fell out of the cabinet when I was looking for something else. It's full of old-tim-y recipes, like this one:

That last line would give a cook pause, wouldn't it?

And then there's this, my favorite monthly publication: 

Of course, one reason it's my favorite is because I write my column, Granny's Front Porch, for them. Last month's column was about persimmons and included folklore, a story, and other ruminations. Click here to read it. You can subscribe online to Two Lane Livin' too; it's full of articles for those of us who live beyond the interstates.

That's what I've been reading. How about you? Anything interesting on your reading table this week?

A Saturday Ramble; or The Monster Festival that Wasn't

September is a slow storytelling month for me this year; only one gig, and that is next Saturday at the Appalachian Heritage Festival at Frostburg State University in Frostburg, Maryland. So our September weekends are for the most part free. This feels odd after a summer of making engagements or canning food every open weekend. When we got up yesterday the question was, what to do?

Now there is always plenty to do around here: things that have to be done like laundry and cutting firewood, for example. Then there are the things that need to be done: weeding gardens, freezing the celery from the garden and drying basil, working on the edits for my CD. Then there are the things we'd like to do: going to festivals, visiting friends, taking road trips. This weekend we opted for #3--doing the things we like to do.

We started the weekend with a bonfire and music with friends on Friday night. Saturday morning we listed our options: go to the Southeast Ohio Storytelling Festival, the Flatwoods Monster Festival, go to St. Albans to hear John Lilly play, go to Culturefest at Pipestem, or to the blues and brews event in Charleston. Plenty to choose from on a pretty day!

We opted for the Flatwoods Monster Festival. This festival is based on events that happened in 1952 when what appeared to be a UFO landed on a farm in a remote area of West Virginia. The story is fascinating and the events have never been fully explained to anyone's satisfaction. We'd never been to the festival and I've always wanted to so off we went, with an understanding that we would stop at interesting yard sales and anything else that intrigued us along the way. The route to Flatwoods took us east on our favorite road, US Route 33. When we came to our turnoff on Route16, we noticed the Calhoun County Farmer's Market at the corner. And who did I see there?

"Stop," I yelled to Larry. Car came to a screeching halt. "There's Sue Cosgrove!"

And indeed, there was fellow Two Lane Livin' columnist and organic grower Sue, beaming behind her stand of plants and vegetables.

We had a good gab, a great hug, and the blue bowl of little tomatoes went with me for road food.

We stopped at several yard sales along the way too; I'll write about them later this week.

When we arrived in Flatwoods, the small community was strangely quite for a place hosting a festival. Where were the booths, events, people in costume or whatever else they did for a festival celebrating alien lifeforms? We stopped to ask and learned some disappointing news: the festival was held last weekend. Hunh? September 12th was the date of the occurrence, and this was September 12th!

I suppose the reasoning of the festival planners was that traffic was heavier on Labor Day, people were looking for something to do, and there were already quite a few festivals for the 12th. We decided to meander around town anyway, and saw this sign:

That, of course, enticed us further, and I'll have more about this interesting place later this week.

We left Flatwoods and headed north to Bulltown State Park, site of a Civil War battle over a covered bridge on the Weston to Gauley Bridge turnpike, a major route in central West Virginia in the mid-1800's. There are still trenches visible, and Larry decided to follow the interpretive trail through the battlefield. I was more interested in the historic Cunningham farmstead on the property and spent my time exploring the buildings, creek, cave and the remnants of the turnpike that were still visible. Again, more pics later this week.

The Cunningham homestead, and below a peek through the kitchen window.

When we left Bulltown we decided to head north and west toward home on Route 5; although we've been along most portions of this road, there are sections we don't know, and the piece between Heaters and Burnsville was one of them. The road offered spectacular rural scenes, like this one below. I didn't take many photos because the light was fading, so you know what that means--another trip in the future.

We had hoped to get back in time to go to the evening storytelling concert in Chillicothe, but that was not to be. It was almost seven when we arrived home. A friend came to visit and the day ended was another fire in the firepit and good conversation.

Today, it was back to business as usual. The laundry is caught up, dishes done, the celery chopped and frozen with the help of a friend, basil is drying, wood has been cut and split and now it is evening again and time to prepare for another work week. But we have our weekend memories of friends, places, and history...oh, and five more wineglasses, a set of tractor chains and...but all that is for the yard sale post.