One of my first kitchen memories consists of my father handing a very small and somewhat clumsy me a gallon jar stuffed full of bright green cucumbers, red onions and golden liquid and telling me to “shake like hell, we don’t mind the noise.”
This was a unique kitchen task in that he felt there was not much risk in entrusting it to me—I often had a dangerous tendency to impatience and carelessness when tasked with a meticulous job. So involving me in a family recipe in which the actual last line (handwritten on a yellowed, crinkled Post-it) was “Shake like hell, we don’t mind the noise,” seemed fitting.
The raucous and celebratory shaking of a huge jar was the main allure of this recipe for me then, and still is now, although the list of great things about this recipe has since gotten longer.
1) It’s delicious. 2) It’s incredibly simple, bypassing all of the sterilizing and pressurization usually required for canned things. 3) When I am home, it uses up the overwhelming number of cucumbers that emerge from my mother’s garden. 4) It tastes like summer and lasts all winter. It provides brightness and crunch from local vegetables well into the season when the ground is frozen hard under feet of snow, unwilling to offer up any of the goodies that are so plentiful in the summer.
For this reason, pickling, as well as canning and other methods of preservation, is rightfully becoming a centerpiece of the local food movement.
Food preservation has been part of human culture for centuries, and actually was key in allowing previously nomadic cultures to settle and establish year-round communities.
Harvested foods no longer had to be eaten immediately, but instead could be stored for when fresh food was scarce. Food preservation in the home was a critical part of feeding oneself and one’s family during the winters of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries across the United States, a la the stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder.
To my young self, raised with three major supermarkets and an obscene number of restaurants within a five-minute drive, these were tales of long-lost, fantastical, nostalgic times where food was work—growing, raising, slaughtering, cooking, canning, every last part of every last organism used in some way to stave off hunger or disease or cold.
I knew as I shook the gallon jar of green and red and gold, many hundreds of years and technological developments later, that food could be transported from anywhere—scarcity was something that could be conquered by ingenuity.
However, in a manner that I hope is more than a trend or a fad, foodies around the world are returning to home food preservation as part of a healthy food system, a way to make the most out of locally grown produce when it is available.
This, I hope, will be the purpose of this column throughout the semester: to make the most out of locally grown food when it is available.
I have come a long way from my former jar-shaking self in terms of my interest and respect for food. I love food: I love to cook it, I love to eat it, and I love to study it. Every single thing on every single shelf of every single grocery store has a complicated history involving people and money and science and soil and sun.
I believe that with the way our system works now, we are too far removed from that story. I therefore hope to possibly inspire a trip to the farmer’s market, a different choice at Hannaford, a meal cooked with friends or at the Bowdoin Food Co-op using local ingredients. Or maybe just a dialogue about these things. About how a jar of pickles from Hannaford, sent to them from Michigan, processed in a high-tech factory, costs less than a bunch of fresh cucumbers from the farm down the road.
But not to worry, my first recipe is very budget-friendly, even when buying local! I got everything that I could for this recipe from the farmer’s market at the Crystal Springs Farm on Saturday morning, and the other things (sugar, vinegar, pickling salt—items not readily found from a local producer) at Hannaford.
I opted out of the gallon jar, and instead used a quart jar, anticipating less-than-happy roommates if a monstrous jar of pickles occupied most of our fridge space for the rest of the winter.
The result: tangy, crunchy cukes and onions as a quick snack that will remind me of 80-degree days, sunshine and that wonderful morning at the farmer's market, even when I have on two sweaters in bed and the sun sets at 4 p.m.
You will need:
2 cucumbers (Six River Farm, Bowdoinham)
1 red onion (Six River Farm, Bowdoinham)
¼ teaspoon celery seed (Gryffon Ridge Spice Merchants)
¼ teaspoon yellow mustard seed (Gryffon Ridge Spice Merchants)
¼ teaspoon turmeric (We already had this in my house…)
1 cup white vinegar
1 cup sugar
1 tablespoon pickling salt
A quart jar
Instructions:
1. Cut up the cucumbers and onion, both pretty thin. Put in jar.
2. Add everything else to jar.
3. Put lid on jar, shake like hell.
4. Put jar in fridge, and shake a couple of times a day for five days
5. Eat.