August 17: What’s Fresh at Your Vashon Farmers Market
What’s Fresh at Your Vashon Farmers Market tomorrow!
by Rebecca Wittman, Market Manager
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August 17, 2012
Here’s food for thought from Rebecca, our Market Manager.
Heirloom is one of those words that used to be reserved for things like your Great-Great-Great Grandmother’s silverware that came across on the Mayflower, or a piece of ill fitting furniture you could never get rid of because it was all that remained of your family’s once-great fortune. Lately, however, the word Heirloom has been taken hostage by the marketing suits, made to suffer the same indignity as the words Natural and Old Fashioned, to give a patina of legitimacy to things that are thoroughly inauthentic.
In small farming, though, the word Heirloom finds a rightful place, denoting agricultural DNA from a time when nobody had to check labels to see whether the food they were about to eat sprang from real dirt. Heirloom tomatoes are a prime example, those thrillingly delicious harlequin fruits of vines sprung from seeds preserved through generations of thoughtful seed stewardship.
There is a second side to the agricultural Heirloom equation, one that doesn’t get printed on the seed packet but that merits just as much reverence. In addition to the propagating wisdom, there is the passing down of food prep wisdom, the lore of “what to do with the food” after you take it home from the market or into the kitchen from the garden. (After all, who plants food just to leave it in the dirt?) I depend on my local farmers to provide the Heirloom fruits and vegetables, but I am blessed to have a family that has cared enough to preserve our Heirloom food wisdom, reinforcing that canon at every opportunity to pass it along.
My Idaho parents have been visiting this week, and I feel like my sister and I have been immersed in an Heirloom Food Wisdom master class. The twenty-five pound cabbage I purchased from the Farm Coop became, in a marathon of chopping, a huge crock of sauerkraut – into which recipe (which was basically cabbage and salt) also went the seasoning of dad’s reminiscences of sauerkraut-making with his own dad. The hopeless romantic in me was transported to that sweet scene, my dad as a young boy working with a beloved father (a grandfather I never met) – chopping and salting and tamping and repeating. I look forward to tasting our sauerkraut as though it were scooped out of the crock by my grandfather himself.
My mom and I made blackberry jelly from the gallons of berries she and dad plucked from the thorny canes around our yard. The sweet soundtrack to that exercise was a partita: my mother’s childhood voice gleefully retelling days of picking berries for her mom when their family lived in Silverdale, and then the very accomplished jam-maker’s voice telling me EXACTLY how to make that jelly come out clear (the secret: let the berry juice drain without pressure… which itself might be a great metaphor for achieving all kinds of clarity in life.) Thirty jars of perfectly clear, utterly delicious blackberry jelly were testament to the fact that this wisdom is best imparted in 3D. Seeing the rhythm and ritual were as important as reading the recipe she transcribed in her graceful handwritten script.
The same was true of the sauerkraut. What I got from watching dad cut that cabbage JUST SO far outweighed even the most verbose instructions from the internet (looked up before he arrived) and certainly flavored the kraut in ways I could never have gotten from mere ingredients.
I look forward to handing these rituals and recipes down to my own son, and perhaps one day even to his children. And because we live with the luxury of technology, perhaps I will even be able to show them the priceless Heirloom Food Wisdom of their great-grandparents in action.
When you come to the market this week, ask the farmers which of their offerings comes from Heirloom seeds. Those are a taste of farming history. Apply your own family’s Heirloom Food Wisdom to its preparation, even if it’s just a simple family recipe. Or take whatever you’ve got springing up in your garden and create a new Heirloom for your family (ask Celina Yarkin about her pickled zucchini!) and let the soundtrack of your preparations be “Teach Your Children Well.” The net result will be a gift to all who partake in that ritual, and might even become a treasured custom recounted one hot summer day by YOUR ninety-one-year-old kid.
Here’s what on offer this week at YOUR priceless Vashon Farmers Market:
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