Working at Home, Part Two

I sort and pull stems off green beans. A Mennonite farmer ran across her yard in her bare feet to get this bucket of newly picked beans for me. They are sleek and long. I leave them whole and toss them into my dented graniteware canner for a brief blanch in boiling water. Afterward, I plunge the steaming greens into icy water, pat the tender flesh dry with a flour sack towel, and stuff them into one-pound freezer bags. The remainders are a savory side to warm sliced tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, and spinach on wheat toast—midsummer’s lunch.

My last bag of cresthaven peaches, from a farm stand just north of Carbondale, near Dix, Illinois—yes, peaches in Illinois, and pecans, and cypress trees—is for the 58^th wedding anniversary of my father- and mother-in-law. I peel and cut up six cups of the soft fragrant fruit, mix them with sugar, a little flour, and freshly-zested nutmeg. The amber juices begin to flow as I slide the mass into the piecrust. As it bakes, if you close your eyes and breathe, it is summer and you are in the orchard.

It is late when I pull out the entire section of Pickles and Relishes. There is a sweet crock recipe where you put an unweighted plate on top of the cucumber-vinegar mixture. It has a note at the end:  The pickles will be crisp the Spring following.  There are two recipes for Dill Pickles. One calls for:  2 quarts of rain water and grape leaves in each jar. On the other, Aunt Elsie writes: This is good. The final pickle recipe follows. Sit down to read it.

Soda Sweet Pickles

 Copied from Prairie Farmer

Cut & wash 2 gal. cucumbers & pour over them 1 gal. water & 1 pt. salt. Let

stand for one week & then pour off liquid. Pour on clear boiling water to

cover. Let stand 24 hours & drain off. Pour over boiling water with lump of

alum size of walnut. Let stand 24 hours. Drain off & cover with boiling mixtures

as follows. 2-1/2 qts vinegar 8 c sugar 2 tbsp celery seed stick cinnamon.

Pour this mixture over pickles & let stand 24 hours. Drain off & heat 4 mornings.

Pickles will keep without sealing as long as covered with mixture.

My day seems a primer. Dear women of the nineteenth century, how amazing and powerful you were in the kitchen with vinegar and cucumbers, a hot stove, and a good supply of alum.

Working at Home, Part One

Most of the day I wash, cut, manage vegetables and fruit, and think about Aunt Elsie. My first task is a sink full of cucumbers from my mother-in-law's garden.  I slice them thin, chop up an onion and three six-inch Giant Marconi green peppers from my garden, and mix them all together with about half a cup, or a bit more, of kosher salt. The vegetables need to macerate for a while so I reach for Aunt Elsie's recipe file. My fingers are antsy. The Pickles and Relishes section is extensive.  The first ingredient of the first recipe I read is one-hundred cucumbers. Aunt Elsie was not dabbling in canning. I rifle the section; many of the recipes call for a piece of alum the size of a walnut or hickory nut. Huh? A chunk of alum? I fetch my red and white two-ounce metal can of the white powder from the bathroom cupboard. It is handy there for use (and this is my sole use of the product) on canker sores. The pink price sticker is still on the lid of the can—thirty-seven cents. On the front of the can in parenthesis under the large printed word, ALUM, in much smaller print, is the word ammonium. Now I run upstairs for the “A” volume of the 1962 World Book Encyclopedia; its entry on alum will remain valid fifty years hence. There is a one-paragraph (and I can’t help but note the entry is credited to George L. Bush) description: a group of double salts made up of two metals and one acid group. . .common alum is potash alum. .  .other alums are ammonium. . .used to stop bleeding, check excessive perspiration, treating canker sores, size paper, purify water. . . .Wow, but nothing about using it in food, wait—I look at the back of my can—alum gives a firmer, crisper product. Use as indicated in recipe. Is that last sentence a warning?

I fill four one-quart jars with the softened juicy cucumber-pepper mixture, heat up a vinegar-sugar solution on the stove, and pour it over the cucumber mix. The jars go into the refrigerator and will stay there until all the kids and grandkids come home. In December, we will pop off the canning lids, fork a mass of pickles into our mouths, and crunch down on a summer day.

Cleaning House, more RECIPES from Aunt Elsie

I have been away from my home the past five weekends and every other for the month previous. In the basement today I wash what I need for yet another week absent. The limestone walls and wide boards around me shift and crack; they are like the last child retrieved long after play practice's end.

Summer’s promise of heat has been fulfilled and I select all the minimal clothing I own to put in my black duffel. It rests comfortably within its rectangle of dust beside my bed—the bag is half unpacked from last weekend, no, from all summer.

My home waits in chaos to become a haven I desire, a place of restorative meals and solace. My hand reaches for a card in Aunt Elsie’s box filed under Old Fashioned Remedy—

For Washing down walls

From Martha Ruege

1 bar of naphtha soap

1 cup of Clorax

1 quart of water

melt all together

keep warm so it don’t harden

while using

—I need some old fashioned remedy and I wonder if this was the first chore of spring cleaning in the barely above freezing days of northern Illinois’ early spring. Aunt Elsie’s tradition of spring cleaning has been lost to me and my contemporaries. If I had a bar of that scratchy naphtha soap that my mother made us wash with—in cold water after running through the poison oak with my brothers—and mixed up the recipe, would I dare to put my sponge in the bucket? To breathe as I lathered my walls? Would it send me straight to the emergency room, my chest aching? Or would it instead pull me up taller, straight as my whitened walls would be, beaming?

Probably, after laving in the Clorox naphtha mix, I would need to prepare another Remedy:

Mrs. Deams recipe for chapped hands

                December 7, 1937

2 oz. glycerine

20 drops of carbolic acid

Use 8 ounce bottle and fill up

with rain water                

The bathing of raw hands in glycerine and rain water would be a soothing luxury. I can see Aunt Elsie rubbing her disinfected and sweet-smelling hands together, her dining room wafting recent rain. She is looking out the front window on to Winslow’s main street. She is waiting for callers; waiting to relish a meal together.

We've Turned the Corner Now

I wake in the night having dreams of words. When I get up they fall on to the sheet, slide to the floor, and pass through the pine boards. They were something like, but much better than, these:

Walk outdoors. 

Listen

and watch for bulbs and seeds cracking, 

for banners on green poles rushing 

toward sky and sun. 

Breathe

and taste lilac, poppies, asparagus.

Emerge from winter squinting

and sniffing the air.

RECIPES from Aunt Elsie

In 1887 Miss Elsie Busjahn was born. Sister to Frank Busjahn, my husband’s grandfather, she became Winslow, Illinois’ telephone operator. Over the years the stories of her white fudge and the enormous size of the pieces she cut, have made my mouth water. Over the years I have talked with my mother-in-law about her and her famous baking, cooking, and canning. Her green steel recipe file painted with black Wiener Werkstatte graphics and lettering, is now my treasure. Thank you, Mom.

Filed under:

Dried Meats

Mrs Greenfield’s Dried Beef

Salt brine strong enough

to hold an egg.

Leave in this two weeks.

Hang up

and smoke a little.

An Uncommon Dream

I dreamed an uncommon dream last night. I held a newborn baby close to my chest. He was wrapped in a blanket with only his face and tufted head visible. His toddler-sister sat beside me patting his head, her face and lips quivering in joy. A dream, short and straightforward, of such clarity that I woke wondering; why this? And then I remembered—the article I read yesterday—a clinic in the city of brotherly love busted by the FBI and DEA. Beyond the pre-signed prescription pads, the illegal delivery of oxycontin and other pain-killers; the law enforcement officers found revulsion beyond any they had ever encountered—women in varying states of consciousness and childbirth, wee feet in jars, infant bodies in refrigerators, freezers, and garbage bags, and blood, so much blood. I don’t want to look, no, no, but I feel I ought, and I do. Human flesh born alive and cut into with scissors in the hand of a doctor or his untrained assistants—they called it ensuring fetal demise—cutting into the neck and snipping the babys’ spinal columns.

The Grand Jury Report provides battering rams for both sides of this issue. But, please, please, in this one moment, let us lay down the weaponry and step aside from the ammunition, close our eyes and remember the dream; remember the last time you touched or held a baby newly born, scented yet of that other world. Hold this love and wonder in one hand, and with the other turn the pages as you read the Overview of the Grand Jury Report, First Judicial District of Pennsylvania. And if you want to look, and I really don’t want to encourage you, but if you feel you must, if you feel you ought, you may proceed beyond the Overview to the images—to have your eyes opened. Here is the link: www.lifeissues.org                      

January Acedia, Or Why All the Remainder

pencils from my three children’s thirteen years each of school that were left in desk drawers and book bags are sharpened, but touch no paper save the squares of crossword puzzles; why pens are poised useless in cups with ink steadily drying; why my arms, my wrists, my hands and fingers grind and make coffee, carry laundry and shovel snow, open my laptop and slide the mouse over to Facebook, the BBC, or your blog, but cannot open Microsoft Word or the cover of a black moleskin.