Strawberry Day Part I

Here’s what our house smelled like last Friday:

There are no jam or jelly recipes in Lucie’s collection, even though canning was something she did (for the local school, no less). It’s something us Olmstead women just do, usually following the instructions from the pectin box or the well-worn Ball book, but mostly following the lessons taught to us by our mothers.

In that spirit, you have a window into my Friday at home with the kids, puttering in the kitchen, taking breaks for naps and dipping graham crackers into warm jam, and getting two flats of strawberries processed.

No recipes. But I will entertain you.

Here's where everything starts:

Fresh, picked-ripe, first-of-the-season berries from my husband's farm visit to Grossnickle Farms in Kaleva, MI.

These are the big ones, and easier to hull for processing. The little berries that come in a little later in the season are much sweeter, better than candy. But their size makes them more tedious to process. So these berries are perfect.

A Note on Timing: Sometimes I do fruit a little bit a time, a batch of jam here, some frozen quarts there, but this year everything fell in place to do it all in one day. This happens once a decade. 

Which leads me to. . .

Full disclosure: things do not always get done on time around here.  There have been mushy peaches and moldy cucumbers and don’t tell my Mom that some of the rhubarb she sent home with me two weeks ago is still in the fridge, uncut and unfrozen.

I tell you this so that when I brag that everything was beautiful this year, birds chirping and no sick children, with only one bad berry in the whole 16 quarts, you don’t feel bad.

For the ADD part of me, this was a dream day. I had a million things going on at once and never got bored. While the jam was cooking, 

That's rhubarb in there. Strawberry-rhubarb is a killer combination.
It costs less than straight strawberry jam too.

a sheet of berries was laid out for the freezer. 

Freezing berries on a cookie sheet before bagging them keeps them from becoming a solid brick.

In between measuring sugar,

Racks ready for cooling jars, a small pot for sterilizing lids, and sugar staged for adding to the fruit.

prepping jars, 

This step is only necessary (in my book) if you aren't processing the jars once they're filled.

mashing fruit, feeding children and bagging up frozen berries into quart bags, I was in heaven.

For all of the Type A, born-organized people out there, this might be overwhelming and confusing. But for me it was a nice break from a world where I fight the stigma of scattered and cluttered. 

Multitasking rules! 

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

First, I hull. Does everyone use a spoon? 

The curved edges of a spoon wastes less fruit than a paring knife.

That’s how I was taught.  Bonus: your kids can help without blood mixing in with the berries.

Next up, washing:

Fill a bowlful of berries with water and pour off. Do this a few times.
And, I need a real camera.

If you have a lot of fruit to do, wash and hull them in batches of 4 quarts or less. You might be tempted to wash your fruit as soon as you get home from the market or farm, but don’t do it! They will stay fresh longer if kept dirty. Once they’re washed, the countdown to mushy fruit begins. 

One last tip: canning is a lot like painting walls.

You think it’s all about the actual thing, but you really spend most of your time prepping. Washing jars, measuring ingredients, sanitizing equipment, prepping the fruit-- it's important to get organized before the fruit hits the heat, because the actual cooking of the stuff happens really fast and you don’t want to be hunting for your jar gripper thingy while your jam scorches. 

And once that sugar starts to boil, never, ever stop stirring.

That is all today. 

In Part 2 I will talk about keeping your sanity with kids in the kitchen and, not unrelated, breaking all the rules laid out by the USDA. We will end with Strawberry Pie.  Stay tuned!

Just Cake

Just Cake was "written and made up by Lucie Olmstead". An original!

This one pretty much sums up my Midwestern upbringing. Get it done, make it good, then move on because there's a lot of work to do. When you have 6-7-8 mouths to feed and firewood to get and cows to milk and bills to pay, there is no time to fuss over the food. Be thankful you have some.

So here's your Just Cake: no expensive ingredients, no complicated techniques.  

Ingredients:

1 cup sugar                                                

1 TBL shortening (medium)                        

1 egg                                             

⅔ cup sweet milk                                       

1 ½ cup flour (more or less)                       

1 ½ tsp baking powder                             

Flavoring and salt             

There were no instructions with this one, so I followed the theme and decided to just mix it all together. If you want to get fancy, you can follow the standard cake-mixing routine: cream sugar and fats together, add the egg, then alternately add liquid and dry ingredients until just mixed. Bake in a 9" square or 8" round cake pan at 350° for 30 minutes.

In the printable version I've cleared up some of the random measurements for you.

I can't give you a review yet, but the batter was good. Here it is all baked and ready for the freezer:

Why the freezer, you ask? Because I baked it on Monday in preparation for the Grand Bake Sale this Saturday to benefit Issy Stapleton's treatment. (Read about the Stapleton's here. To donate and for updates on fundraising go here. ) Because stale cake just won't do, I'll be baking all week, freezing, and frosting on Friday night. 

This one's waiting for the Caramel Frosting that I've been dreaming about all week. Next up: Salad Dressing Cake. 

Lunch with the Sisters

Last week Lucie's sisters gathered for lunch at my parents' house. They brought along their stories and answers to many of my questions, and better yet, Aunt Ilene brought a stack of recipes! A couple were Lucie's originals, saved over the decades in my grandmother's original handwriting:

Lucie's Salad Dressing Cake was a family favorite. I also found out that Sunshine Cake, one recipe in the notebook, was always made on childhood birthdays.

An original recipe page with recipes for Molasses Cookies and Noodles. I love the food stains-- proof that they were used over and over again. And note the options for flavoring "based on what you had to use", according to my Aunts.

But the best find of the day was Lucie's chart for everyday baking. It's a simple 5-ingredient cheat sheet for biscuits, shortcake, meat piecrust, and dumplings:

Cool, eh? I need this in my life, and so do you. Here's a printable version.

So thank you Aunt Helen, Aunt Sally, Aunt Ilene, and Mom for your time this afternoon. And Aunt Alice and Aunt Edna, you were missed (but I enjoyed your creamed corn Edna!). Stay tuned for more stories about the women behind the recipes.

Honey Cookies

Mmmm, honey. I could talk about my favorite sweetener all day, but let's just get to the point:

Mary Dexter’s Honey Cookies

Sept. 1, 1949

Best dipped in coffee. These reminded me of a miniature coffee cake, perfect for a quiet morning and a good book.

Ingredients

1 cup honey

½ cup shortening or softened butter

1 egg

2 tsp baking powder

½ tsp baking soda

*Vanilla

*Flour to drop

Cream honey and butter together. Add the egg and vanilla. Sift the remaining ingredients together and add to the mixture. Drop onto cookie sheets and bake for 12 minutes at 350°.

*A Note About the Random

So here's where a 1940's housewife just winged it. She went by feel and didn't treat a recipe like a chemistry experiment.  I am not a 1940's housewife. I am an Instruction Follower, and if something doesn't tell me exactly what to do I get a little panicky. 

Maybe it's just me, but it seems like we need to be told how to do most things these days. We want exact directions and reassurance that we won’t fail.

Or maybe we just don’t spend as much time in the kitchen with our busy modern lives. Maybe we don’t have the experience to just know these things. 

In any event, I went with it and guessed at 1 tsp. vanilla and 2½ cups of flour. It worked out fabulous. This little foray into Not Following Instructions reminded me that I can trust myself. A little bit.

Just the right consistency for drop cookies

                 

Crossing Lines

Reading the Tomato Jam recipe by Irene McFadden, my mom said "The McFadden's were a Black family that lived down the road. My Dad used to hunt squirrel and trade them with Mr. McFadden."

Photo by Eric Eberhard

Squirrel stew anyone?  And what did my grandfather trade for? Hooch, probably. Or maybe some of Mrs. McFadden's fabulous Tomato Jam.

What I wonder is how did racial lines work pre-WWII? Did they all hang out together, or was it strictly squirrel-bartering, recipe sharing business?

I don't know, but either they were friends or Mrs. McFadden was an amazing cook-- her name pops up more than once in Lucie's collection.

A Barrel o' Pickles

Ever wonder how they made those giant barrels of pickles back in the day? Here's a recipe just for you.

This would definitely be a day-long project for more than one person-- imagine harvesting and washing that many cucumbers. And the ingredients are a little vague, so this is one of those "go by feel" recipes. The last line especially made me laugh. Just roll with it.

Dill Pickles

by Sarah & Walter

Put washed cucumbers in layers in barrel with dill and grape leaves. Make 3 layers, putting 5 pounds salt on the bottom, center, and on top, 15 pound in all.

Mix 1.5 pounds mixed spices the same way. Add 2 gallons vinegar and fill barrel with cold water and put top on. Let work. Roll occasionally.

Tomato Jam

This is really more like a chutney, a sweet chunky relish that can accompany meat or be poured over  cream cheese and served with crackers as an appetizer. Unlike true jam it contains no pectin and although it’s thick, it's not meant to set up like jam.

This recipe grabbed my attention the first time I read through Lucie's recipes, but finding 3 hours to string together while it cooked was a challenge. When I spent a fall afternoon cooking my husband’s birthday dinner, it turned out to be the perfect time to try out the Tomato Jam. I could watch it while working on other things-- otherwise I’d put it on the stove, take a nap, and scorch the whole thing. And we had tomatoes left over from canning-- not enough for another batch of quart jars, but too many to eat fresh—so everything sort of fell into place.

The toughest part of this recipe was figuring out how to tie up the spices. I thought I had cheesecloth but couldn't find it (of course, I stumbled over it a week later). Your kitchen MacGyver tip of the day: Teabags. Tear them open, dump out the tea, and tie with a bit of string you find in your junk drawer.

Besides that, it was super simple to make. When the jam was finished cooking I didn’t have time to can it up right away due to the birthday feast. Glenn stole some from the pot for his chicken tandoori, with tabbouleh and baba ganouj on the side. He claimed this accidental addition to the meal pulled it all together, and since then it’s been a staple condiment in our kitchen.

Tomato Jam

by Irene McFadden, friend of Lucie's

Ingredients

5 lbs. ripe tomatoes

5 cups brown sugar

2 ½ cups cider vinegar

1 Tblsp. whole cloves

1 Tblsp. whole allspice

1 Tblsp. stick cinnamon

3 cups seedless raisins, chopped

Blanch, peel, and chop tomatoes into 1” chunks. Tie spices in cheesecloth. Place all ingredients except raisins into a large saucepan and boil slowly for 2 hours. Add raisins and boil 1 hour longer. Remove spices, pour into hot jars, and seal.*

*See the Canning Page for links to food preservation techniques.