Dear Jan and Bruce,

I'm also surprised, and again pleasantly so, when you tell me about your canning fruit and veggies. Not many people do that anymore. Oh, they may wrap excess provender and stow it in the freezer, but to pick and peel it, cut it up, cook it down, sterilize jars, fill them hot, and seal them, that's just too much effort and most folks wouldn't know how. Nor do I read of any of the food experts advocating home canning. We "put up" and "put down" a goodly stock of vittles when I was growing up, and for the same reasons you do, plus in our case a couple of additional factors. For one, we did not have supermarkets or chain groceries or farmers markets, which should come as no surprise. For another, we had no freezer or refrigerator, just a small icebox and the cold cellar was our larder.

We had in our little town two grocery stores. Mr. Merriman had one on the west side of Franklin Street two doors away from the Brewster & Church Co. where Dad worked, and that's where we traded. A Mr. Greenaway, whose son Spencer, better know as "Frog" was in my brother's school class, had a grocery up on Bell Street. Both were one-man operations. The proprietor was the sole employee and did everything; ordered the stock, stacked the shelves, waited on customers, carried their purchases to their cars when necessary, swept the floor and the sidewalk, and when he went home for dinner at noon or ran across to the bank, he locked the door. They carried a small stock of staples and dry groceries, and usually had a wheel of cheese on the counter covered with a glass dome that was raised by a cord running through a pulley on the ceiling, and perhaps a stalk of bananas hanging nearby. From Mr. Merriman, we purchased sugar and salt, coffee and tea, yeast and baking powder, and so forth, and, yes sometimes a bunch of bananas or a dozen oranges.

Flour we bought at the feed mill on Bell Street in fifty-pound sacks, and pulled them home in a little red wagon. Spices and seasonings and flavorings we purchased from a Mr. Henry Wykoff who concocted them from the raw ingredients, and sold them, in his little manufactory above the florists shop. Mr. Henry Wykoff's brother, Mr. Lute Wykoff, was an optometrist and jeweler, and had his store between Mr. Merriman's grocery and Dad's store. Mr. Henry Wykoff is long departed but I understand that his business is still operating in the same place and in the same way.

There was both a bakery and meat market within a block of our house. Going west from our house there was our next door neighbor, Mrs. Lucy Button, then the combined residence and studio of Mr. Robinson who was a photographer, and then there was a two-story frame building that occupied the corner of East Washington and South Main Streets. The bakery was on Washington Street, the corner space held in the office of Burnett & Parker Real Estate Agents (that being Great-Uncle Joel Burnett and his partner Mr. Harry Parker), and on the Main Street side was Honeywell's Meat Market and Squire's Printing Shop. About the time I entered High School, that building, Mr. Robinson's house, and another house occupied by the Harper family who had four daughters and a small dairy business, were all razed and replaced by a Standard Oil service station where I worked summers while I was in college. Before that, however, there was the bakery, a family-run business where we bought bread: white, rye, wheat, Vienna, and sometimes we bought rolls. Don't know why, but at home we baked only brown bread and occasionally salt rising bread, and of course, pies and cakes and other confections. Mr. George Honeywell's Meat Market was another one-man operation, well, actually, a two-man operation for a couple of years when Grandad Foster worked for Mr. Honeywell peddling meat from a panel truck from farm to farm outside of town. Grandad was living with us at the time and each morning, mother would pack him a lunch, he and Mr. Honeywell would load the truck with meat, ice it down, Grandad would sling a large leather purse over his shoulder and take off on his regular route. When I was small, I loved going to the meat market with Mother or Grandma because the butcher would slip me a wiener or a slice of bologna, a treat that was eaten raw on the spot.

We didn't, in those days, have a refrigerator, that came much later, probably about the time I went to college. We, like most kinfolks, had an ice box. Ours sat in the wood shed just outside the back door. It was a varnished wooden cabinet, maybe five feet high, two feet wide, and a foot-and-a half deep. The top was hinged and opened for access to a corrugated, galvanized steel box that was the ice chest and took up a good third of the whole cabinet. A door on the front opened for access to the food storage space, and a narrow door at the bottom lifted upward to reach the large metal pan that caught the water from the melting ice, and that had to be carried outside and emptied two or three times a day (another chore for the boy). Ice was delivered six days a week by the City Ice & Fuel Co. who, I think must have had a monopoly. The ice was made in Cleveland and trucked to our village icehouse in hundred-pound cakes. Our icehouse was a one-story wooden building with a door and loading dock in front and no windows. The walls and roof were packed with a foot or two of sawdust for insulation. In the morning our local delivery icetrucks would load up and set off on their prescribed route. The City Ice & Fuel Co. provided each house with a white card about a foot square and printed on the four edges with number: 25, 50, 75, 100, sort of like numbers on a clock face. The householder placed his card upright in a front window and rotated it so that the number at the top told the iceman how much ice was wanted today; 25 pounds or 50 pounds, etc. The icemen (cousin Danny McFarland was one) were uniformed in dark blue, long-sleeved, woolen shirts with matching pants and cap, a leather pad like a small saddle was strapped over one shoulder, and a needle-sharp steel icepick was in a holster on his belt. The icetruck stopped in front of each house, the iceman read the card in the window, chipped off the right-sized chunk of ice, grasped it with a pair of steel tongs, slung it over his shoulder, and marched up the driveway. He knew where the icebox was and wasted no time knocking on the door. Meanwhile, we urchins were stalking the icetruck hoping to scrounge a sliver of ice to suck on. We thought it a treat; our mothers were horrified. "You pass up perfectly good food and grab a filthy piece of ice that men have walked on with their dirty boots and spit tobacco juice on and put it in your mouth. You'll catch some terrible disease and die for sure." We scrounged anyway.

In due course, we got a bigger icebox which was installed in the dining room next to the back door, and Dad ran a drain pipe through the wall of the house, which was a blessing. The old icebox we took to our cottage on the Little Farm and used it for food storage. We rarely had ice in it though, the icetrucks didn't run out into the country. Oh, you could buy ice right at the icehouse, and some folks did, wheeling it home in a child's wagon covered with rug or blanket. The other way to transport it was by wedging it firmly on the rear bumper of your car and driving home as rapidly as possible.

There wasn't much storage space for food in the kitchen cabinets, either, so the cold cellar was our larder. Dad had partitioned about one-fourth of the area to provide maximum wall space for shelves, and during the summer the shelves began to fill with canned vegetables from our garden and fruit and berries from a dozen sources. Everybody had fruit trees. We had an apple tree and a peach tree. Mrs. Lucy Button, next door, had a pear tree that each year bore an abundant crop, far more than she could use. Lowe's Greenhouse and Nursery, next door to our Little Farm, had strawberries and cherries and an apple orchard. Uncle Charlie Burnett, across the road, had peaches and pears and apples. About a mile north on Chillicothe Road, Cousin Alfred Marion Wilbur owned and operated a fruit farm. Cousin Alfred Marion Wilber was also our piano teacher and a gifted musician and composer. The farmers had no market for their excess produce closer than Cleveland twenty miles away, so they sold it off their front porch, on the honor system. A sign hung out by the road listed what was available - beans, eggs, honey, etc. - and a candy box by the porch post accepted your money.

Somebody always knew who had a good crop of whatever we were looking for, and so we picked and purchased strawberries, peaches, currants, cherries both sweet and sour, quinces, pears, and sometimes gooseberries which made delicious jam but were a pain to process. You've probably never seen gooseberries. They are colorless, about the size of a playing marble and covered with prickers about an eighth-inch long. The first step was to grasp each berry carefully and with a small pair of scissors snip off each pricker; like I said, a pain. Crabapples made very tasty jelly but they were small and we didn't often bother with them. Apples? Well, my goodness, it was just a case of what varieties do you like and how many baskets do you want. The best apples we stored in wooden bins in the cold cellar, the next best were turned into apple butter and apple sauce and canned, those with bruises or rotten spots or worm holes we took to the cider mill. I kid you not; everyone knew that cider tasted better with a few apple worms mashed in it. So we had a keg or two of cider. With a wooden spile tapped into the bung hole and carefully laid on its side on a crate, it was handy for whenever we happened to be down in the cold cellar and felt the need of a jelly glassful or so. As the winter wore on, the cider "worked" i.e. fermented, and by spring what was left was essentially vinegar. We used the vinegar for pickling and as a condiment. Blackberries and elderberries grew wild on our Little Farm and alongside most country roads, and were so plentiful we picked only from our favorite patches where they were largest and sweetest.

All of these good things flowed through the kitchen and, as with the vegetables, some was eaten fresh and the rest was "put up" for the winter. All was what would be called today "organically grown" that is, none of it was ever sprayed or treated with chemicals of any kind, didn't need it, and if fertilized at all it was with good horse or cow manure from right there on the farm. You could just pick fruit and pop it in your mouth, and we did.

Other edibles were gathered, too. Lots of folks kept chickens; Mrs. Emma Button next door, family friends Casius and Stella Clay who lived further up on Washington Street above the railroad tracks, Uncle Howard Foster who lived way up on Washington Street almost to the Fairgrounds, and more. So we "put down" three or four dozen eggs, placed carefully in an earthenware crock and covered with "water glass" (sodium silicate) to preserve them. The Clays kept bees and so did Cousin Alfred Wilbur so we would lay in a few combs of new honey. Watermelon rinds were washed, diced, and pickled. Orange and grapefruit peels were candied and turned up later in cookies and fruitcakes.

As the year wore on, berries and fruit petered out, and the frost killed any that was still unpicked, and it was time to gather nuts. We gathered hickory nuts and butternuts at the Little Farm or up behind the Fairgrounds, and carried them home in flour sacks. The native chestnuts were just about all gone, lost to the blight, and beechnuts were too small to bother with. A black walnut tree on the west side of our house always had a good crop of nuts, and if it didn't, there were friends that had a grove of walnut trees and were glad to share. Gathering was easy, shucking was not. Both walnut and butternut hulls exuded oil that indelibly stained your hands and everything else with which they came in contact. How badly did they stain? We had a couple of black kids among the village lads and at walnut shucking time their hands were stained as badly as ours, which we, and they thought hilarious. It was widely reported that the best way to suck walnuts was to spread them out in the driveway and drive your car over them. But I don't think we ever tried that. Shucked or unshucked, the nuts were spread out to dry, usually on the floor of the high attic above the second floor bedrooms. The main part of our house had a mansard roof so there was a low air space between it and the ceilings below. We had another attic over the kitchen and dining room but it was full of old furniture and trunks and such. Access to the high attic was through a trapdoor in the ceiling of the upper hallway, and you reached the trapdoor with an extension ladder brought in from the barn and maneuvered up the stairs and down the hall, being careful not to scuff the wallpaper. We only went up there to spread nuts to dry or when there was a leak in the roof. It was about this time that we sometimes acquired an unwanted boarder or two; mice that squeezed through a crack or crevice in the house and thought to spend the winter snugly ensconced in the walls and ceilings. We knew we had mice when they would wake me up at night rolling nuts around the attic floor overhead.

When the weather became cold enough for butchering, Dad arranged the purchase of half a hog from whichever farmer had good hogs for sale. The farmer would deliver exactly half of a full-size grown-up pig split lengthwise from snout right through to his curly tail. That evening we hurried through supper and cleaning up, opened the kitchen table to its full size, and laid the hog on it. Then Mr. Albert Bailey would arrive. Mr. Bailey was an old friend who worked with Dad at The Brewster & Church Co., and who had once been a butcher. Dad was no mean hand himself at dressing out meat and we had all the tools, saws, cleavers, and such, so they made short work of that half hog and Mr. Bailey went home with a generous package of pork for his trouble. The roasts, ribs, chops, etc. were wrapped and stored in the icebox. The hams and bacon were rubbed with salt and herbs and spices in preparation for smoking. The remaining pieces and parts were collected for sausage making. We didn't eat the feet, the head, or the hide, but not much else went to waste. Next day, the smoker was brought up from the barn and sited in the back yard close to the back door where it could be easily tended. The smoker was a tightly fitted wooden box about the size and shape of an icebox. In fact, an old icebox with the innards removed made a pretty good smoker. The hams and bacon were hung inside and a smoldering fire built in a large steel pan at the bottom. The fire was fueled with corn cobs and hickory bark, and kept going for several days. In the kitchen, the pieces and parts were put through a hand-cranked, one-boy-power, food grinder, seasoned with salt, pepper, sage, and so on, and "put down" in an earthenware crock to be stored in the cold cellar. I think a layer of lard was spread on top of the sausage as an air seal, and I know it was tightly covered. We never cased our sausage. I don't know why; we had a sausage stuffer among the kitchen utensils but we never used it. We also had a hand-cranked applepeeler, a cherry pitter, and other handy tools that would probably puzzle you if you found them in an antique store.

Out in the barn we had a large pen covering about one-third of the floor area and made from poultry netting. Through the autumn months it gradually filled up with live chickens, ducks, a turkey or two, and even the odd goose, prizes won at shooting matches. Dad was one of the finest marksmen in the country with both rifle and shotgun, and taught my brother and me to handle guns and shoot well from an early age. We belonged to the Chagrin Valley Rifle and Pistol Club and shot competitively on a regular basis. There were a number of shooting clubs and shooting ranges in the area and in the fall there were matches almost every Sunday afternoon. Cash money was scarce and the prizes were usually edibles; a ham or slab of bacon, sack of sugar, or quite often live poultry. We, well mostly Dad, won our share and took our winnings home to add to the larder. The live birds went into the poultry pen with straw on the floor, feed, and water, and even a nest box or two in case any of them felt like laying an egg or two, and there they stayed until their presence was required on the dining table. At one time we ventured over into western Pennsylvania, somewhere up in the hills, to participate in "pig shoots" where the prize was half a hog, but we caught on pretty quickly that the local chaps were running a scam and we didn't go back again.

So, we went into winter pretty well provisioned, and we ate pretty well, too, all year round. I planned to tell you what and how we ate, but I do get carried away when I start writing about food, so I guess that will have to be another story.

Love,

Father

COPYRIGHT

RETURN TO MAIN PAGE