{"id":26970,"date":"2015-09-08T16:12:12","date_gmt":"2015-09-08T21:12:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/?p=26970"},"modified":"2015-10-01T14:46:12","modified_gmt":"2015-10-01T19:46:12","slug":"some-food-stories-from-a-curious-observer-part-3-vitamin-supply-for-the-everlasting-winter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/some-food-stories-from-a-curious-observer-part-3-vitamin-supply-for-the-everlasting-winter\/","title":{"rendered":"Some Food Stories from a Curious Observer – Part 3: Vitamin Supply for the Everlasting Winter"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ColumnHeader-VeraP-2015-RGB\"<\/a>I already mentioned our garden. It was a co-op, a quilt of many tiny colorful gardens clustered together, where each patch belonged to a single family. The square footage was…let me think. Now I have to transcribe the graceful metric system into clumsy American standards… Got it! One single patch was about 1\/6 acre. Not much, but we had a small summer house, a few apple trees, a couple of cherry and plum trees, one pear tree with very hard almost inedible pears, a few black currant and gooseberry bushes, a patch of strawberries, some cucumbers,\u00a0some tomatoes, lots of beautiful flowers, and a really deep well\u2014spooky, dark, full of icy cold water\u2014which my wild imagination inhabited with some horrible monsters! Old slimy black logs supported it inside. How wonderful and scary it felt, when you looked inside, smelt the dampness, shout in it to hear echo and get scolded by adults for coming close\u2014just to imagine falling into it gave you chills!<\/span><\/p>\n

We, kids, (and later my kids) were always happily running around half-dressed, dirty with mud and green grass juice, and snacking on wonderfully acidic dock leaves or spicy-bitter huge leaves of the horseradish, which grew bright green and robust like wild weeds near\u00a0every fence.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"RootCellar-1\"<\/a>These little gardens provided lots of families with fresh organic vegetables and\u00a0fruit, fresh air, and some exercise. In the early spring, when snow barely melted, exhausted by the long winter, lack of sunlight, and vitamins, gardeners could happily pick a handful of new dock leaves (or even stinging nettle, which grew so wild and wonderful in every corner) and add them to a potato soup for an additional vitamin C supply.<\/span><\/p>\n

Throw in a couple of chopped boiled eggs, some chopped new green onions from your garden, a tablespoon of sour cream, eat with a piece of rye bread, and enjoy! I found some dock leaves growing here in the wild and made that soup a few times. If you can\u2019t find wild dock, replace it with spinach and add some lemon juice.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The so called \u201cvegetable stores\u201d usually did not have much produce, especially in the long cold winter, so people were always trying to get prepared in the fall and store something by themselves.\u00a0For that purpose almost every family had a basement.<\/span><\/p>\n

It could be located in the co-op garden like ours, underneath that summer house, or, in case if the family didn\u2019t have a garden, there could be some basement co-ops on the outskirts of the cities. They look pretty bizarre to a stranger, somewhere on the nobody\u2019s land, a few dozens of heavy basement lids,\u00a0clustered together, resemble a village of trolls. That\u2019s where\u00a0families kept potatoes, cabbage, apples, sauerkraut, preserves, and pickles. The big industrial warehouses for some reason\u00a0could not keep produce over the long winter well enough, lots of it was just rotten and thrown away, even if the crops were good. Individual families were able to take better care of their fruit and vegetables, for their own sake.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"RootCellar-awesome\"<\/a>In order to preserve berries, we were loading up ahead on lots of sugar to make jams.\u00a0There was never enough sugar, you couldn\u2019t just go and buy 50 pounds when you needed it, in summer. They didn\u2019t let you buy more than 4\u20136 pounds at a time (probably to make it harder for possible\u00a0moonshiners), so you go and buy sugar just about every day during the winter in order to get ready for the summer preserves making.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Black currant in particular is a very traditional Russian berry which thrives in the cold climate. I miss that bitter-sweet, almost minty flavor of her leaves. Sometimes I am able to find black currant jam here, at Dollar Tree, in small jars.\u00a0We used to have them stored by gallons every winter back in Russia; they are a great source of Vitamin C. My Grandma\u2019s and Grandpa\u2019s breakfast was usually just a piece of white bread with that black currant jam and some tea. For me Grandaddy cooked eggs or some hashbrowns. Black currant preserves were called \u201clive\u201d because they didn\u2019t require cooking.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

All you had to do was just crush the berries with some potato masher or grind them in a meat grinder and mix it up with\u00a0sugar, 1:1. It stayed fresh for a few months in the cool temperatures of the basement.<\/span><\/p>\n

Grandma was also making strawberry jams, some plum preserves, cherry jam, and gooseberry jam\u2014amber, transparent, flavored with emerald leaves of the cherry tree.\u00a0 \"The<\/a>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I already mentioned our garden. It was a co-op, a quilt of many tiny colorful gardens clustered together,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":238,"featured_media":26975,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68,464,443],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26970","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-food","category-contributors","category-vera"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/236verapt3FEAT.jpg?fit=620%2C349&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26970","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26970"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26970\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}