The many lives of a farm kitchen

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. 

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?