On Thursday Time to re-learn lessons in basic survival
A‘Preserving foods was the way you and your children used to survive winter’
S autumn nights pull in, I’ve been engaging in what’s becoming a favourite seasonal pastime… making fruit ‘leather’. I say favourite, it’s because eating the results is very popular. The idea is that it’ll keep right through the winter and into next year… but in reality, depending on how well I get the ‘mix’, it gets hoovered up as fast as I can make it. As I’m sure I’ve bored you before, the basic process is to pulp the flesh of various hedgerow fruits to watery mush, and then dry thin sheets of the gloop on top of the stove. And once I’m in gear, there’s always a tray on the go.
Popular ingredients include apple and bullace from lower climes, with blackberries and the abundant fruit of the hawthorn hereabouts. Indeed, the rich colour the haws are giving the moorland valleys this autumn is especially pleasing. Regrettably, fruit leather containing too much haw fruit is pretty tasteless. I’d like to try pear and plum, but I haven’t got access to them in my own thickets and hedges.
Anyway, this evening activity gets me thinking about the preservation of seasonal foods. It’s easy to forget that going back much more than 150 years, and such ‘hobbies’ were how you survived, and how your children were raised without rickets or scurvy. Now, we simply pop into Morriscoes, Laldi, or Widdles, and buy a trolley full of the comestibles we recognise…that’s where food comes from isn’t it?
I often ponder on farming matters, and livestock in particular. And I’ve long understood that a ‘house cow’, or even just a goat, was a fabulous thing to own. She could, with a bit of tender care, provide rich nutrition day in day out, fuelled on just the grassy weeds around the mud hut. The same grassy weeds could be dried in the summer sun, and piled in a heap to keep her fed through the winter. Protect her from hunger, extremes of weather, and predation, and your kids would likely survive the winter too. It was that simple.
And from there, I’ve come to see cheese and butter for what they are. They’re a simple way of preserving the flush of summer grass in a form which would, again, allow you to raise a family through the bitterest winter, when you could scarcely keep the milch cow/goat alive, ne’er mind ‘in milk’.
Even better, and you’ll love this.… some clever souls discovered that they could preserve butter indefinitely by burying it in peat bogs. Presumably,
this both stopped it spoiling, and helped avoid detection by thieving hands. It’s been going on for at least 3500 years in Ireland, and stuff dug up now is often still quite edible, albeit with something of an acquired taste. Modern experiments with fresh meat have shown such techniques to be pretty much as effective as freezing it…although there isn’t much evidence the Irish did so. And I’m not sure the gov. hygiene people would approve.
They did sink human bodies in the peat, apparently having sacrificed them first, but seemingly not to eat.
Solzhenitsyn describes Russian political prisoners finding an ancient mammoth carcase frozen in the permafrost, but it couldn’t be examined by scientists….the starving ‘zeks’ fell upon it and ate it. In fact, burying perishable foodstuffs to preserve them has been widely practised. The Chinese, French, Scandinavian, Icelandic, Moroccan, and artic Inuit peoples all buried food, seemingly for much the same reasons. I’ve helped ‘clamp’ teddies and swedes high on Dartmoor.
Pickling perishable vegetables in vinegar has long been another favourite, and before modern poultry management, was the way to preserve eggs out of season. We give it scant thought now, but air tight vessels were an important development for civilisation. The salting or drying of seasonal meat and fish has been staple of human survival, from preagricultural peoples through to modern civilisation. Indeed, what did you think salami is all about? You fattened your pig, then preserved its flesh in bacon, hams, and the bits went into salami. All of these remind me how near the edge we are. Because we’ve learnt to harvest and store vast bulks of dry food stuffs in grain silos, can keep perishables in tins or frozen warehouses, and trade seasonal foods around the globe following the summer, we think we’re the masters of creation. It’s allowed us to spawn uncontrolled across the face of the planet. But the security is tissue thin, much as we would like to forget it.
I’ll wager most of the thousands flying to Glasgow next week – yes, several thousand – give such fundamental matters little thought.