Bottom of the Barrel

 

Most of us buy our food, and have little or no connection to times of plenty and famine, cycles of harvest and lean times. Often as not, modern people asked to name the hungriest time of year will name Winter. But before global transport of food from wherever the harvest is coming in to suburban USA, before food preservation technology took hold (nostalgia for canning gets us, oh, a fraction of a percent back toward the dawn of the human appetite), Spring's beauty was draped over the harsh reality that the livestock were yet lean and the crops were mere aspirations, months from fruition.

Stocking a larder and avoiding losses from it, therefore, was a matter not just of avoiding guilt over waste, it was crucial. I've availed myself of canning, a bit of freezing (I may have bouts of nostalgia, and experiment with ancient foodways, but hey, I'm not gonna forego modern conveniences entirely), and have transformed part of my garage into a cellar with hanging mesh sacks of shallots and onions hanging, potatoes stashed in dark places, and crates of apples. Recently, the Winter Solstice a fading memory and sunlight growing every day, the apple scent experienced a slight change, the sweet lilt got a tangy edge, mellowing turning into fermentation and, if I did not move, outright rot.

Sure enough, the last milk crate of apples purchased just before the Farmers Market shut down for the Winter had a few bad ones. Many of the remainder had bad spots, and passive preservation clearly could not continue without spoilage loss. 

 

 

So I did what any reasonable person would do. Handed my eight-year-old a knife and told her it was time to learn how to cut. She's had some practice with avocados, but even an old apple is harder than that, and we worked together, me teaching her how to hold the knife and the food, pointing out when she was about to risk slicing herself instead of the fruit, and how to avoid that. Adding blood to the applesauce is no way to get your iron.

We had a great time, and in the end we had a bunch of applesauce, which can be put in the fridge, the freezer, or even canned so that the apples season of 2012 can last past the lean months. The compost got a meal of scraps, and we got enough delicious sauce for a bunch more meals.