The best place in our house to keep our squashes and pumpkins happens to be under the bed in our guest room, a fact that some people find very amusing. There are a couple of reasons for storing them there. One is that hard shelled squashes need to be kept cool and dry and that upstairs room averages in the low fifties to low sixties because we heat with wood in the winter. Another is that as I come upstairs I can see the squashes — delicatas, butternuts, buttercups, New England pie and long pie pumpkins — I am reminded of potential suppers, and if I see spots on one, I know I had better put squash on the menu soon. Yet another reason is that room, unlike two other upstairs rooms perfectly suitable for vegetable storage, does not have a large rug so if one of the squashes gets away from me and goes into a state of sloppy collapse, I don’t risk ruining a carpet.
I can’t stick our squashes in the attic because they’d freeze, or in the cellar because it is too damp, or in the living room or kitchen because those rooms are too warm. I got this idea from an estate inventory from the 1700s which showed me that in the past people did not have such rigid ideas as we have today about where to store food. Bushels of beans appeared in bed chambers, squashes and pumpkins were stored in odd corners or in lofts over the kitchen. Even within memory, people stored slabs of bacon in woodsheds attached to houses and put their potatoes in the cellar.
Modern people put fresh vegetables in the refrigerator. By “fresh” I mean raw. Even potatoes end up there, or sometimes hung decoratively in mesh baskets where they turn green with envy of other potatoes stashed in cool, dark places like our cellar. We are lucky that our cellar still has a dirt floor and stone walls, and stays pleasantly humid, perfect for carrots, potatoes, beets, turnips, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, leeks.
It took a while to find a good place for onions. They like cool, dark, and dry but not as dry as the squashes like. For them I settled on the upper cellar way, where I string and hang them from old coat hooks with the additional advantage that I see them each time I go down cellar to get vegetables or take something to or from the freezer, or to pluck a can of cat food or a jar of pickles off a cellar way shelf. Onions detect the change of seasons long before I do, and the ends begin to pucker with the effort of putting out new roots, telling me which ones to use soon. Occasionally an onion rots, and the hanging bunch makes it easy to find.
Seeing the vegetables often seems to be an essential part of storing them. Seeing is to be reminded that they are there waiting to be brought to dinner. So much of our food arrives in our homes essentially dead that it is easy to forget that a truly fresh vegetable is still on a growth curve, aiming towards reproducing its kind. Root vegetables sprout and cover themselves with hairy little roots in anticipation of a second growing season to make seeds. And they don’t give up easily either. You can snap the sprouts off potatoes three times and yet another eye will put forth a pale, pointed shoot. The housewives’ chores in the past included checking over the vegetables, pulling out those with spots or rot. Failing to do so meant a grievous loss of food.
I recall the time I missed the fact that the new resident cat eschewed all cellar mice in favor of the ones that lived outdoors. We had been spoiled by the previous feline, a relentless hunter who had zero tolerance for indoor mice. Under the new cat regime, cellar mice reduced a bushel of carrots to an unspeakable mess and I wept and railed at the cat and anyone else who was around while I cleaned it up. That was when I decided to put them in those big white spackle buckets hung from nails driven into the first floor joists.
I used to wrap the cabbages in newspapers and set them on stones in the cellar, and the mice practically sent thank-you notes. I turned to another leaf from the page of history, this time Maine’s own famous midwife, Martha Ballard, whose husband, Ephraim, made a “swingeing shelf” for her. So I made one of an old screen and four nails and string. No mouse seems to want to risk the trip down the cord and my cabbages are safe, sound and very often mostly green until March or even April. A few mushy exterior leaves never bothered me. I peel them off and a lovely fresh cabbage is inside ready for coleslaw or boiled dinner.
If we ever install a furnace, we’ll have to wall off a section of the cellar just to store vegetables. For now, the “produce section” is all over the house, never mind the riches of tomatoes and peaches canned in ready-to-use quarts and pints, or the already roasted summer squashes in plastic bags in the freezer. Ditto asparagus and green beans harvested and frozen as least as fast as the best of the commercial ones, corn cut from the cob and frozen in its own milk, and shell beans blanched, frozen and ready for succotash. For variety, pickles of several sorts, chutneys and relishes.
Some people clutch their heads and say, “ohmigod, so much work!” It’s not as hard as you might think, and beats buying food that comes from goodness knows where, handled by goodness knows whom, to which goodness knows what happened before it got to the store, and in which goodness knows what vitamins, minerals, and other health supporting elements remain. It pleases my inner ant, while the grasshoppers of my acquaintance complain about the price of vegetables. q
Sandy Oliver cooks and writes on Islesboro.