Foods, Seasons, and our Memories. A Hundred Years Ago: The Last Fresh Vegetable Month

The last garden I put in, 2017.

Another interesting entry on A Hundred Years Ago.

The Last Fresh Vegetable Month

I've touched on this here in the past, but one thing that's very much different from our current, refrigerated, freezer, grocery store frozen food, transportation directly from Mexico, world, is the way we eat.

And by that I don't mean the latest wacky food fetish (you know, don't eat that, eat this, no don't, no do, um,. . . ).

No, I mean that it varied seasonally, by necessity.  And beyond that the seasons dictated to a certain extent what you ate at all.

On prior entries here you'll find photographs of  grocery stores with signs painted on them noting that they "bought vegetables".  Indeed, at the courthouse in Sheridan Wyoming there's a great photograph of downtown Sheridan in its early days with a store painted on its side with that it "buys and sells" vegetables.  I.e, it was doing the locavore thing by necessity.

Indeed, that local produce history, dimly remembered and somewhat inaccurately recalled, is one of the founding mythic memories of the Locavore movement, that movement which, as an environmental ethos, demands that you "eat local".

Pueblo Indian, 1890, living the lifestyle I would, were it an option.

I'm not dissing this.  Indeed, in my imaginary world in which I get to live just the way I'd want to, I'd be one of those guys who ate local as much as possible.  I'd put in a big garden every year and for meat I'd eat the fish, fowl and game animals I shot during the year.  Yes, I'd go full 1719 if I had the option.

Shoot, I might even brew my own beer.

My wife, who doesn't want to live in 1719, and prefers 2019, keeps this from occurring, although in years past I have put in a big garden (I'm on year two right now of a well failure I haven't addressed) and as we raise beef, we have a lot of grass fed beef that appears on our table.  But the idea remains attractive.

Anyhow, one thing about having in the past having sort of lived that lifestyle, first by necessity and then by design, and because I'm a student of history as well as everything else, I know that the concept of "eating local" isn't quite what a person might suspect, if they really apply it.

That's because you have to eat local, based on where you live.

"Modern Street Market", 1920s.

And that's at least partially what almost everyone did, in varying degrees, up until the 1950s.

Put another way, people had fresh vegetables in the summer and fall, as that's when they were available.

Let's consider the humble cabbage.

Cabbage probably isn't your favorite vegetable (I like cabbage, but my wife really dislikes it).  But cabbage doesn't keep all winter.  Planted in the spring, it's ready to eat about 80 days later. So that makes it available sometime in late spring or early summer depending up where you live.  And a lot of places it would be available all summer long into the fall.  But once it started to frost, that would be it.

So here, if you planted it, it would be first available in June, and last in September.  That's it.

You can't keep it after that.

And this would be true of most fresh vegetables.  You'd have them when they first matured.  If they are a crop like cabbage, lettuce or spinach that you can keep growing, you'd have them all summer.  If they were a crop like corn, peas, green beans or peppers, they'd be ready and fresh just once.  In some places, you'd get a second crop in, in others, not.

Well what about after that?

Just truck it in, right?

Well, not so much.

In 1919 the road system, as we've seen, did not allow for transcontinental transportation of fresh produce.  Indeed, an irony of the road system in the country is that it had deteriorated as the railroad system was so good.

Of course that would mean that shipping by rail was an option.  It had certainly been done for meat, and beer, in refrigerated rail cars dating back to the mid 19th Century.  I can find no evidence, however, that it was done with vegetables, and there's probably reasons for that.

If it was done, it was apparently not done much, but I'll take correction on that.

So no vegetables in the winter?

No, that was not the case at all.  It's just that they were not, as the item noted, "fresh".

1918 poster urging people to turn their backyards into gardens.

For one thing, canning was already a thing, both commercial canning, which was common, and home canning, which was also common. So you could buy canned vegetables all year around.  And this time of year thousands of people. . . mostly women, were busy canning their own garden produce.

Poster urging home canning from World War One.

The process for canning had been worked out in the mid 1800s, and it spread fairly quickly, in part due to armies picking it up to feed their troops in the big wars of the 19th Century.  One thing armies did, I'd note, is to can meat as well, in British parlance "potted meat", which few average people do, but the mother of my father in law did in fact do just that, the only individual person I've ever known to do that.

Famine was a real specter in World War One and World War Two. This Second World War urged home canning to combat it.

I'll be frank that home canning scares me and my family never did it, for which I'm thankful.  I'm not afraid of canned anything at the store, and I'm rather fond of some canned items, but home canning always makes me a bit queasy.  Too many stories, perhaps, that I heard as a child.  Anyhow, home canning was still widely practiced when I was a kid in the 60s and 70s, again all by women.  I know very few people who do it now.

This World War Two era poster urged growing more at home and canning.

My parents always froze some of their garden crop.  But this wasn't an option for people a century ago.  People didn't have home freezers like so many do now.  For that matter, the overwhelming majority of people had an ice box.  Refrigerators weren't a common thing at the time.

Exceptionally nice ice box.  Most homes didn't have one this large or elaborate.

We've dealt with this before, but ice boxes kept stuff cool, not frozen, and had to be regularly replenished with ice for that purpose.  People were still using ice boxes into the 1950s although their days were rapidly waning then.  At any rate, suffice it to say, if you could only keep things cool at home, you clearly had no means of keeping things frozen. No frozen vegetables at any time of the year in 1919.

Some vegetables keep a long time, however, if kept correctly.  Potatoes, for example, keep a really long time.  I've kept potatoes that were harvested in September or October all the way through until late February or March, when I was nearly ready to plant the next crop.  

That emphasizes why a crop like potatoes was such a big deal at one time.  They keep.  And a potato that's kept isn't much different in February, if kept properly, than it was in October.  "Meat and potatoes" weren't a staple as people lacked imagination or something.  You could have potatoes with your meat pretty much all year long.  And there's a few other crops in this category.

Additionally, some crops dry well. Beans are one, and so do peas.  Cowpeas (Cow Peas) were an 18th Century staple.  You probably know them by the name "Black Eyed Peas". Still a popular food in the United States, particularly  the South, they are a food staple in some parts of the world.

Other legumes and beans keep dried really readily as well.  The old jokes you hear associated with cowboys and soldiers about repeatedly eating beans are based on the fact that they keep and transport readily.  If you are on the trail, flour and beans are easy keepers. So "biscuits and beans" and "bacon and beans" would have been common foods out of necessity.

So during the summer you'd eat fresh heart vegetables, right?

Well, yes.  At least they were available during the summer most places.  If you were far enough south, they'd be available all year long.

But that's only part of the story.