Food on the Farm Number Three

I had an easier childhood than many in the 1930's and 40's. My folks were not rich. Far from it. We had a dairy farm in the North Country of New Hampshire. My dad had paid off his mortgage in the twenties when times were good instead of going deeper in debt as many did-and ended up losing their farms,
Dad was a good gardener. We had plenty of vegetables to eat. Mother would can the surplus.I would often wake in the morning hearing the click, click of his hoe as he tended his garden behind the house. I seldom saw any weeds in his garden. We had tomatoes, Swiss chard, lettuce, carrots, cucumbers (many became pickles), corn, pumpkins, and squash. On one side of the garden were rhubarb plants which came up every year. We kids liked to get a saucer of sugar and dip the tart stalks in the sugar and eat them while making faces because it was still so sour. On the other side of the garden were parsnips which I do not think anyone but Dad ever ate.
We picked raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries, ate a lot, and canned the rest. I remember many mornings when Dad would come home from taking the milk jugs to the creamery and announce that he had heard that there were lots of blackberries in Lunenburg (across the river in Vermont) or blueberries on Dalton Mountain or some somewhere else. We would gather all the smaller pails and milk pails and off we would go. It was usually a day after a rain and no haying could be done. We would come home scratched, tired, and happy. My mother and older sisters then set to work cleaning and sorting the berries. There would be a shortcake and pies for a few days. Raspberry bushes grew on the low stone walls that separated the fields “overback”. We picked them frequently as long as they lasted.
We had some apple trees but had lost most in the freeze of ‘34.I do not really remember that, but so I have been told. So Dad would buy a couple of barrels of apples in the fall and keep them in the cellar. There were shelves for the canned fruits, meat, and vegetables in the cellar. There was also a large potato bin where the annual crop of potatoes was stored. Mother would sometimes send me to get some apples for a pie and always counseled me to look for those developing bad spots. If I wanted an apple to eat, I got the same warning. Once I asked if I couldn’t please have a perfect apple! Sometimes in the fall we would pick a lot of crab apples and take them to be made into cider. Oh, so good.
We had our own meat. Dad would butcher a cow and a hog in early winter. My mother would pack the cuts into cloth bags, hang them in the woodshed until they were frozen solid, and then they would be put in the oat bin in the granary where they would stay frozen well into summer. Some of the hog meat would be ground up and flavored for sausage. Some beef cuts were canned, and hams were smoked in the smoke house. I would get very tired of canned beef in the summer but knew better than to complain. How happy I was when my mother bought some hot dogs or hamburger meat
We had three small chicken houses which were alongside the garden. Each held about 20 or 25 hens. As soon as I was big enough, I had to feed and water the chickens and pick up the eggs. Once I saw what seemed to be a big kitten under a nest. I reached down to pet it and then I saw a white stripe down its back. I got out of there as quickly as I could. We would have a stewed hen for dinner sometimes. They were chosen because they were no longer laying and stewed because they were old and tough.
With a large family to feed, my mother had a rule. You ate what she served or you ate bread and milk. When she had pea soup, I ate bread and milk. When we had liver, my brother Winston ate bread and milk. No complaints from either of us.
In the spring my brothers would tap some maple trees in the woods across the road from our house (they belonged to my Uncle Bill Bishop who had lots of maple trees and a sugar house way over on the other road near his house). Sometimes I went with them to collect the sap. We also had a big maple in our yard that they tapped. Its sap was especially sweet. They would pour the sap into a big wash boiler {that could be part of another tale)on the kitchen stove and keep it boiling until it became syrup. This did not produce all that much syrup but it was delicious. We would go to a “sugaring off” at Frank Rowell’s up on the mountainside (quite a climb). Dad would buy some syrup and pails of maple sugar. Mother would use them in cooking and we would have syrup for biscuits and pancakes.
Mother made her own bread, dried apples on a rack which hung from hooks over the kitchen stove, made a cake and a pie or two nearly every day, and served 20 meals a week. On Sunday nights we were on our own to pick up what we liked and could find, often bread and milk or leftovers-if there were any.
Breakfast was usually cereal, hot or cold, rolls which Mother made each morning (when someone asked for the recipe, she said to beat an egg or two-if available., add some butter, pour in some milk, and stir in flour until it felt right).
Dinner at noon was meat and potatoes with whatever vegetables were ready in the garden or canned ones, bread, and pie (lemon, apple, berry, raisin (and another note-my dad loved raisin pie so he would bring home boxes when grocery shopping until my mother had to show him she had way too many in the cupboard).
Supper was a dish like macaroni and cheese, rice, shepherd’s pie, corn or fish chowder, pea soup (ugh!), what they called sauce (berries, canned peaches, pears, plums or other canned fruit) which my dad insisted we eat with bread whether we wanted to or not, and some kind of cake.
What did we drink? We drank a lot of milk. Unlike some dairyman, Dad encouraged us to drink all we wanted. Others felt this was their income and discouraged their families from using much milk. Mother liked her tea. Dad drank Postum in the mornings. As we children got old enough we could have coffee. In the summers we made root beer using a 15 cent bottle of root beer extract, quite a bit of sugar and 5 gallons of water. We put it in quart jars and put them in the cellar. The hay crew consumed it rather quickly along with water and sometimes lemonade. When we had raspberries, Mother would make raspberry shrub. She squeezed the juice from the berries, and then mixed the juice with sugar and vinegar. We would put a little in a glass and fill it up with water. Delicious.

In telling my husband about how we grew up in New Hampshire, he compared it to his growing up on an East Texas farm. While different in many details, there were many similarities, especially in the nearly self-sufficient farmers of that time.
We ate well and probably more healthy than many today in spite of using lard to make pie crusts and not knowing better than to eat the fat on the meat. I think all the fruits,vegetables,and hard work more than made up for that.