Over the years my kitchen, like many farm kitchens even now,
has been the setting for many interesting endeavours. The annual processing of
bountiful garden harvests, blanching, freezing, canning, making copious amounts
of apple butter and plum preserve, sauerkraut and pickles is hardly worth
mentioning: all this has become routine, and with family members pitching in
for shelling peas, cutting the ends off beans, pitting cherries and cutting
apples the task is not so daunting.
For years my mother-in-law came for month-long visits to
escape dreary Novembers in Germany. Under her expert tutelage I learned to cook
Borscht and meat-filled German cabbage rolls, but also the fine and elaborate art
of making “Königsberger Marzipan”, a sweet delicacy made with almond paste that
has its origin in East Prussia where she grew up. She taught Johann the cuts
necessary to dress a butchered pig, and showed me how to make the brine for the
ham in preparation for smoking and to season liver sausage – in short, I
learned skills very new to me and now largely lost for people of my generation,
let alone the generation of our children.
All these things took place in the kitchen, and to this day
it is not only the setting for big work bees, but also a favourite gathering
place for family and friends. Needless to say my kitchen has been greasy,
sticky, and messy from all kinds of endeavours, and I believe I am quite
tolerant of (temporary) chaos.
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| The bigger part of our own apple harvest |
These last couple of days, however, the kitchen has seen
more than its usual share of that. Weeks ago when the abundant apple crop was
ripening Carl found that many people were not going to make use of it and
simply let them fall to the ground and go to waste. He set out to save as many
of them from this fate as he possibly could and picked and gathered apples in
the gardens of several friends and acquaintances: he was going to make apple
wine! Our own three apple trees had once again produced well, too, but they are
much too precious to me to see them turned into wine. After several excursions
Carl had stowed away copious amounts of apples and crab apples in our freezer
and the freezers of two friends who generously donated space until he had time
for the next steps.
The snow provided the perfect opportunity to tackle this big
job. Garbage bags full of apples were brought into the kitchen, their frosty
outlines white on the black plastic. They found a temporary home in five
ten-gallon plastic tubs, and, thawed a bit and cut in half were transferred to
two steam juicers, mine and one of a friend. These juicers have been running
day and (with a two-hour break) night for about 36 hours now, and finally,
finally the last batch is almost done.
Johann and Carl took turns checking during most of the
night: the water level needed to be checked – once it had almost run dry – and leached-out
fruit had to be dumped and replaced with the next basketful. It takes between
two and three hours for one batch of apples to release the bulk of its juice,
and for the longest time the tubs hardly seemed to get any emptier. Every time
the clamps locking off the plastic hoses were opened and the golden, pink-red or
almost translucent juice – depending on the variety of apples – drained into a
big pail, we took heart, however: slowly, slowly, straw was being turned into
gold, or rather apples were being turned into fragrant must.
It didn’t take long for another side-effect to appear: with
all that steam being released the windows have fogged up and droplets of water are
gathering slowly until the panes look as if they are weeping. How welcome this
moisture would be during those times of -30 or -40 degrees when the relative humidity
in the house gets down to 25 or 30% and we try anything from drying laundry in
the basement to letting a large pot of water slowly simmer on the stove to
raise it a couple of degrees. Now, it is up to 55 or 60%, and I’ll be glad to
see it drop to 40.
As soon as the must had cooled off a bit Carl added sugar
and yeast and a few Campden tablets as a stabilizer. Now, ix five-gallon pails
in various stages of early fermentation are lined up along one of the kitchen
walls. The first one is foaming furiously already, the last one hasn’t quite
started to pearl yet. Within a day or two the stickiness and mess in my kitchen
might have disappeared, but the smell of fermentation will be overpowering, and
we’ll be glad that it is not too cold to open the windows and let in some fresh
air.
I believe even Carl was a bit overwhelmed by the magnitude
of this project once he realized just how many apples there were, but of course
by then it was too late. Instead of talking about less apples in coming years,
however, he is already making plans how to streamline the process. Maybe a
hydraulic press would be the answer?
