Pantry is a word that many of us and even our parents don’t know the meaning of. When this extended COVID-19 had been with us a month, we started to read about and see on TV, people (many without work for more than a month and had hungry children at home) lined up waiting for much needed food basics. This brought back memories of our little pantry under the stairs.
Until the late 1940s or 1950s, there was . . .
no electricity in our community. Many families didn’t have a car and in winter for many days there were no snow plowed roads. Many people still drove the horse and buggy or sleigh to go to town once a week for supplies in good weather. Being snowed in for a while never bothered grandma because there was always a full pantry, root cellar and basement.
The root cellar held potatoes, carrots, parsnips, apples and butter that had been stored away during the fall before. The basement had a wall of shelves with glass jars full of preserved crab apples, peaches, dill and sweet pickles, beets, corn relish, homegrown sage, dill, thyme and other dried herbs. The pantry was a very special place where large tin garbage cans, one for sugar, one for flour, were kept at least half full. A spare can of coffee, a box of salt, a can of pepper, was also kept in stock. Big cans of rolled oats, corn meal, rice, baking powder, baking soda and a box of Crisco to wax the cake and pie pans with were kept just above the old cook stove just to be handy.
Since the mid 1800s, our farm always had milk cows, so milk and cream was always plentiful and fresh. Fresh chicken was as close as the yard, as long as grandma gave grandpa enough notice to sharpen the axe and find a nice clean block of wood to chop the head of a fat rooster on. There was a barrel of salt pork in the root cellar and in the winter half a beef buried in the oat bin to keep it frozen and where the little animals couldn’t find it. When the warm weather came, the rest of the beef was cubed, cooked and stored in glass jars.
Good cheddar cheese kept for weeks just stored under a cheese cloth on a board, on the counter. We never had an ice house in my time because our neighbour Elwood cut ice from a clean lake and kept a big ice house because he delivered ice to the entire town.
My favourite day on the farm was baking day, when grandma cleaned off the old kitchen table that we still use today and mom, grandma and I would make buns and bread dough and then store the dough in the warming oven on the top of the stove. As we enjoyed the smell of fresh dough and bread, we rolled out pie crusts and usually made four pies each time. Often before breakfast, grandma and I made fresh tea biscuits. We never used a recipe and I could make them myself when I was only six. Now I forget how and there is no recipe. There was no such thing as buying gravy. Even if you could have, it was no match for home made gravy. Today, only the very best restaurants serve a home cooked meal that could even come close to the meals that we ate on the farm every day.
I wonder if when you are planning a new home today, are there are any plans for a pantry?
Chris Judd is a farmer in Clarendon on land that has been in his family for generations.
gladcrest@gmail.com
