How To Eat Local Produce Year-Round Part 2
More stories today from oral histories found in the Martha’s Vineyard Museum archive located Edgartown, Massachusetts. I’ve transcribed the interviews and written short stories that are instructive for those who enjoy the space of the culinary arts.
Barber Allen Mederios was born in 1903. She grew up on Martha’s Vineyard on a family farm with a large subsistence garden. The family grew, potatoes, carrots, beets, onions, turnips, cabbage, and corn. Mederios recalls that when the corn was ready to pick the family used to take the whole corn stalk and stand them up in the cellar with the corn on. “When my folks wanted an ear of corn to cook, they’d go down and take one and break it off of the cornstalks. If you left them that way they did not dry and they tasted good. But if you broke down the cornstalks then they would dry and you could not use them unless you processed it into cornmeal. But if you left them on the stock and the seller you could boil them on the stove the same way you would do any fresh piece of corn. The family stored turnips, cabbage, and carrots in the cellar as well but in a barrel of sand. They would get a barrel of sand and used it to make layers of carrots and sand, turnips and sand, cabbage and sand, and onions and sand right straight up to the top of whole barrel. “That would keep them and they were just as fresh as when you buy them at the store.”
