The Local Food Report: Macomber turnips

There is a plaque planted on the side of Main Road in Westport:

For those of you who aren't into squinting, the basic gist is this. A long time ago, back in 1876, two brothers from Westport went to Philadelphia for the Centennial Exposition. It was a huge fair—it went on from May 10th to November 10th and had almost 10 million visitors!—and it showcased everything from art to industry to innovations in farming. The brothers, Aiden and Elihu Macomber, got hung up on a turnip variety descended from Swedish and Russian rutabagas that was called Pure Bristol White. They brought the seeds home, the turnip variety flourished in Westport soil, and people have been crazy for Macomber turnips ever since.

I first tried one the other day, at the Falmouth Farmers' Market. Patricia Gadsby, the market organizer, introduced me to it, and said it's one of her favorite winter treats. She says it has the sweetness of a rutabaga, the crispness of a radish, and the pure white flesh of a turnip. She likes it cooked, mashed up and aerated with a stick blender into an almost mousse-like substance. Or roasted. Or sautéed and served alongside seafood. Or even raw! in a salad!

Patricia found the raw salad recipe the other day, over here in the New York Times. It called for raw turnips, peeled and shaved very, very thin, and tossed with arugula and prosciutto. Patricia recommended it, and I tried it, and I can tell you that it's a revelation. No more cooking-only for turnips. This salad is sweet, crisp, and fresh, everything that winter generally is not. It turns root vegetable rules on their heads, and for that I applaud it.

Have you tried the Macomber, anyone?

The Local Food Report: a cottage comeback

I have always been fascinated by history. I like to know how things were—before we messed with them, originally, in the past. So Deirdre Portnoy had my immediate attention when I found out she was ripping up the front lawn at the Wellfleet Historical Society to put in a 19th century cottage garden in place of the weeds and crabgrass.


Cottage gardens are the old English kind—that distinct style of dense plantings hedged with boxwoods and lined with picket fences and brick pathways in a way that is at once homely, graceful, and charming. Portnoy can't be sure that's what was on the lawn of the old 1860s home that houses the historical society—there are very few pictures of Wellfleet front yards from that period, and even in the ones we do have, it's difficult to make out the varieties and organization of the plants—but she knows that stylized cottage gardens were incredibly popular at the time. In a town like Wellfleet—coastal, busy, prosperous—it's as likely a guess as any.

And so Portnoy ripped up the lawn—pulled out the crabgrass and started turning earth. Locals donated a granite step, and bricks and help to put in a walkway that leads down from the sidewalk to the old millstone that steps up to the front door. Portnoy lined the front with a picket fence, the sides with English boxwoods, and started filling in the middle with flowers and fruits and culinary and medicinal herbs.

She planted all sorts of things—too many to list—but I'll give you the highlights. There's a Seckel pear tree—short, semi-dwarfed, with small, sweet fruit that's good for canning. For medicinals there's bee balm and rue and echinachea, and a particular kind of yarrow known as Achillea millefolium. For cooking herbs there are rosemary and thyme and chives and sage, for fruits a whole bank of strawberries, and plans for heirloom tomatoes come spring. There are callendula flowers and nasturtiums and a beautiful Cape Cod climbing rose twining around the fence.

The biggest surprise, Portnoy says, was how many varieties of herbs and flowers she found from the cottage period are still in use today. Some plants she had to dig around for—it's hard to find specific historic varieties these days, now that many tags don't carry the second Latin name—but between the garden stores and donations, she managed to get the yard pretty well filled in. Next spring, she's hoping to make an educational brochure with the historic uses and plant names, and she left room for walking in curved, ampitheater-style pathways.

If you have a chance, go check it out. It's still a work in progress, and the weather isn't doing much for its looks, but the layout of it, the look, is very inspiring. And just in case you get really inspired, below I've made a list of the books Portnoy used in the project, to help you with your own come spring.

REFERENCE BOOKS:

American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century: For Use or for Delight, by Ann Leighton

For Every House a Garden: A Guide for Reproducing Period Gardens, by Rudy and Joy Favretti

Landscapes and Gardens for Historic Buildings, by Rudy and Joy Favretti

An orchard in our midst

My mother and I found the apple identification worksheet at the Common Ground Fair last week. I was home for a visit, and Fedco was interested in identifying old apple tree varieties. Homeowners with un-named trees were asked to send in any information they had on the fruit.

At the fair, the seed company showcased an entire table of old varieties they’d turned up in American orchards.

Winter Banana: Indiana, c. 1876, one tag read. Coles Quince: Cornish, ME, 19th century. The list went on, with names like Twenty Ounce, and Winthrop Greening. We’d talked about reviving the old apple trees scattered through my parents’ woods before, off-handedly, but the worksheet got us started.

The next afternoon, we ventured beneath the pines with flagging tape and pen to uncover what we could of the orchard. There didn’t seem to be much pattern to the trees—they arced around the property in strange, mangled pairings, making it difficult to discern what the original organization might have been. It was clear there were at least two varieties: a soft, sweet-smelling yellow cooking apple and a tart, green keeper.

As we stumbled through the underbrush tagging the trees, we picked an apple from each and labeled it by number. One, two, three…before long we had circled back to the house with a grand total of twenty-three. All these years, there’d been an orchard at work beneath those pines.

In the morning, we headed to the market. Dick Keyough was there, selling plums and apples from his truck flat when we strode up with the basket. He offered several guesses for the fruit right off: Wealthy for a rogue red striped sweet, translucence or yellow transparent for the soft golden. The tart green, he said, could carry any number of names.

“Go back and plot out the trees,” he advised. “Old orchard patterns are set in 35 foot squares.” Anything outside that grid, he explained, had sprung up from seed, cross-pollinated and wild. These new varieties might be keepers, but they could also be sour. Whether or not we held on to them would depend on our taste.

I went out into the orchard that afternoon to collect a few of the greener fruits for baking. We had a dinner party to attend, and I could think of few things better for a crisp fall evening than a dessert of stuffed baked apples.

Back in the kitchen, I cored the fruit. Out came stem, seeds, and toughened marrow, but the bottom stayed, a last layer of protection for the stuffing to come. While the oven warmed, I mixed together maple syrup, dried cranberries, and a handful of oats, and stuffed the apples full.

It seemed to take ages for the apples to soften. When they finally emerged, wrinkled and tender, I plated them for dessert, topped with a dab of whipped cream and a melting puddle of vanilla ice cream. Perhaps one of these days, with the orchard revived, we’ll bake enough to feed a Friday night supper.

STUFFED BAKED APPLES

Serves 4

Wash and core 4 crisp, sweet apples, making sure not to cut clear through the fruit. In a separate bowl, mix together 1/3 cup maple syrup, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1/2 cup dried, fresh, or frozen Cape Cod cranberries, 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon, a pinch of nutmeg, and (optional) 1/4 cup oats. Pack into apple cavities and place in a shallow baking pan. Bake 1 hour at 375 degrees; serve warm topped with vanilla ice cream.

Of course I can! A glance at the closely intertwined histories of sugar and canning

I have been using what seems to me like an enormous quantity of sugar recently. Between the rhubarb pies, the canned pie filling, and the beets, at least 15 pounds have flown off the cupboard shelves. I have been justifying this by telling myself that my great-grandmother (the Michael Pollan reference point for how to eat) would have used plenty of sugar to preserve things the same way.

But would she? Sugar has never been local to New England, and was a luxury until not so many years ago. She would likely have known how to substitute honey or maple syrup in pies or breads, but not in canning. Over the course of nine months in a mason jar, there's no telling what could go wrong.

Wondering just how much canning she would have done, I did a bit of research. First, I turned up what I already knew, but hadn't really thought about. Sugar was first made affordable in the late 1700s by slave labor; it's no coincidence that Nicholas Appert came up with canning around the same time. But while Appert fed Napoleon's army with the first on-the-go meals at the start of the 19th century, it wasn't until the 1880s that summertime canning became a domestic ritual for American women.

Even so, jars were expensive, and records of canning classes during both World Wars suggest that not every home was well-versed in the preservation method early on. By WW2, however, proficiency had reached a level where home canners were allowed extra ration sugar—up to one pound for every four quarts of finished fruit. The above illustration from the War Food Administration in Washington D.C. encouraged women to put up fruits and vegetables during the summer and fall so that commercially canned goods could be sent to soldiers overseas, an effort seen alongside the Victory Garden as the ultimate in patriotism.

But the World Wars were the era of my grandmother, not my great-grandmother. Recipes in my grandmother's hand-scribbled book from Maw-Maw, my great-grandmother, are few and far between. Nonetheless, I did manage to turn up a few for canned items: Maw-Maw's quince preserve, "strictly southern" watermelon rind preserve, and green tomato pickles. All called for a good amount of sugar, putting me in the safe zone in Michael Pollan's terms.

While that's good enough for now, I'm still curious about we ate before the era of cheap sugar and mason jars. What if sugar prices rise as much as flour already has? Surely, there are other methods of preservation using local ingredients. Thanks to Amazon, answers should be arriving soon. Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning is an exploration of Old World preservation methods compiled by the French gardeners and farmers of Terre Vivant.

As Maine garden guru Eliot Coleman puts it in the introduction, "Food preservation techniques can be divided into two categories: the modern scientific methods that remove the life from food, and the natural 'poetic' methods that maintain or enhance the life in food." I'm hoping to learn a thing or two about the latter.

And in case your hot house tomatoes are greening up:

MAW-MAW'S GREEN TOMATO PICKLES

Slice 1 peck green tomatoes and 12 onions very thinly. Sprinkle with salt and layer on bottom of large pot. Take 1/4 pound ground mustard, 1/4 pound white mustard seed, 1 ounce whole cloves, 1 ounce ground ginger, 1 ounce whole allspice, 1 ounce celery seed, and 1 ounce black pepper grains and mix well. Put in pot in alternate layers with tomatoes and onions. Cover with 1/2 gallon vinegar and cook till tender; about 3 hours. Use sugar to taste—about 3 pounds is good for above recipe. Put spices in cheesecloth bag (allspice, cloves, and whole peppers). Put in sterile jars.