Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Growing Up Amish: It's Berry Time

This is the second article I did for my local paper on the Amish, based on the Old Order way of living and my mom's experiences as a young Amish woman.  Be sure to check out the delicious berry recipe at the end.  There is even an "English" cheater version that tastes almost as good. :)

As the days lengthen into beautiful summer, luscious, ripe strawberries, blueberries and blackberries taunt us with their sweetness, begging us to pick them and taste their marvelous juices, taking us back to summers before when we gave in to their seduction.  The Amish, too, had times of berry picking when whole days revolved around these sweet gems.
Since my mother’s family had no kind of refrigeration (today some of my Amish relatives use a method of placing a large ice block into a deep freezer, not plugged in, to keep food items cold), the berries had to be eaten or preserved the day they were picked or the following day.
My mother remembers the berry season coming around with the ripening of the bright red, sweet strawberries.  Her mother usually planted a patch three or four feet wide that ran the length of their vegetable garden at the edge of their yard.  Also, the advent of the cherry orders marked the season.  
The Amish are a tight knit community where very few of them in my mother’s day had contact with the outside world.  Since there were no local orchards for the Amish to go pick their own cherries, they placed orders as a community to a place that one of the men in the community knew about.  This man would go around on a Sunday and ask the families how many cherries they would like to order, then he would place the order by phone at the English neighbor’s house.  After he got the delivery information, he told each family when the truck would arrive at his house with the cherries.  On the day of delivery, a freezer truck would come with five-gallon metal containers of frozen cherries.  The truck dropped off fairly early.  My mother remembers her father hitching up the buggy and heading off to pick up their order of cherries.  By the time the containers arrived at their house, the cherries were mostly thawed except for a chunk in the middle that were still frozen.  While the rest of the cherries thawed, the women got the quart-sized canning jars up from the basement and washed them.  Then they filled them with the cherries, topped them off with cold water and put them in the pressure cooker just long enough to heat and seal them.  The jars were left to cool on the counter, tantalizing rows of bright red or yellow cherries, ready to use in desserts or eat virgin from the jar.
But cherries and strawberries were not the only berry excitement of summer.  After the “necessary” berry picking came the wild berries, the ones my mother and her sisters picked just because they enjoyed the unique jam flavors these berries made.  These were the blackberries, boysenberries and dewberries that grew deep in the woods.  On berry day the girls rose early in the morning, usually around 5:00am, went out to the barn to do the milking chores, then returned to the house for breakfast.  Their mother had eggs, hashbrowns and oatmeal ready for them.  In my mother’s house the family did not drink coffee.  They had milk or water for breakfast.  If anyone wanted coffee, they had to make their own from instant.
After breakfast, the girls took the younger children with them, each of them taking a container to put the berries in.  Then they headed into the woods to find their treasures.  They found patches of berries, thick with thorns and crawling, vine-like, part way up the trees.  They had fun by daring each other to go into the thick brambles, seeing who could reach farthest into the bushes and the highest up the trees.  They would return to the house with their find to cook the berries down, add sugar and thickener then pour the finished jam into jars.  To seal the jars they melted wax and poured it over the top of the jelly.
Another treasure they enjoyed picking was elderberries which grew along the roadside.  In elderberry season, the women tried to keep boxes on the back of the buggy in case they stumbled onto a patch of elderberries while going out to visit friends.  On their way home, they would stop and cut off the heavy heads that held the clusters of tiny elderberries.  They filled the boxes then took them home to pick them off the severed branches.
After the jams and jellies were made, my grandmother set some berries by for fresh pies and delights or just topping off a piece of cake or tossing into a fresh cobbler.  Below is a recipe that has been passed down to me from my mother’s Amish days that I still make today.  There is a simple “store-bought” version that is quick to make and saves on time.  But if you want to experience the work and reward of flavor that was a daily requirement for the Amish, then follow the recipe below.

Cherry Delight
4 ½ graham crackers, crushed to make 1 cup
2 tbsp melted butter
4-8oz cream cheese, depending on your taste
1 cup heavy whipping cream
1/3 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla
2 cups cherries
4 cups water
3 tablespoons cornstarch
1 cup sugar
red food coloring for a more vibrant color (optional)

Before you begin, set the cream cheese out to reach room temperature.  (You could cheat and put it in the microwave for a few seconds, but remember, the Amish wouldn’t have had microwaves.)  You can use half a bar of cream cheese, or the entire thing if you like the flavor more “cheesy”.  Either way, the final result will still be sweet and dessert-like.  Next, cook the cherries in the water.  Bring to a boil and let boil for five minutes.  Then add cornstarch by mixing it into a few tablespoons of cold water in a dish.  Stir cherries while adding the cornstarch mixture.  Next, stir in the sugar and food coloring and let cool completely.  (A can of cherry pie filling also works here.) Mix graham cracker crumbs and melted butter thoroughly, then pat into a 9x9 inch pan and bake at 300° for 10 minutes and let cool completely. (You can use a pre-made graham cracker pie crust here.) Next, beat the whipping cream until it forms soft peaks then carefully fold in the sugar and vanilla and set aside.  (You can use an 8oz. tub of whipped cream here.)  Now, stir the softened cream cheese (make sure it’s not actually warm because it will melt the whipped cream) to get it loosened up, then gently fold in the whipped cream until mixed.  Put dollops onto the cooled graham cracker crust and spread evenly with a spatula.  Lastly, top with the cooled, cooked cherries and enjoy.  The dessert is best eaten the same day.

Growing Up Amish: Preparing for an Amish Summer

Recently I did some articles for my local paper on growing up Amish since my editor has a fascination with them.  My mom is my source.  She was Amish from the day she was born until she was in her early thirties.  I too was born Amish, but my family left that culture when I was only four.  I think like an Amish person, but don't have the experience of living that life.  This article (and the following one) were created off of the information my wonderful mom gave me about the Old Order way of living.

Many people are curious about the Amish and their way of life.  I had the privilege of being born into an Amish family.  Although we left the Amish when I was about four years old, my parents both grew up in an old order Amish community, old order meaning they lived one of the more old-fashioned styles of Amish life.  There are several places in the US where large communities of Amish people live.  One of those places is Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which I have visited often during my fifteen years living in PA.  Some of the Amish in Lancaster have sinks in their kitchens and even carpet in their living rooms.  The Old Order were not allowed to have carpet or sinks.  So the information I am giving you is from a type of lifestyle similar to Little House on the Prairie.
Beginning in March or April when my mom was a young Amish woman, she would be helping her mother put in orders to Burpee’s seed catalog for the seeds they would need for their vegetable garden that year.  They would send out for green beans, peas, corn, lettuce, radishes and spinach.  They also planted lots of potatoes, a vegetable the Amish eat in abundant amounts.  But the seeds for potatoes come in the form of chunks of potatoes that contain an “eye” where a root can grow out of.  They would buy fifty to one hundred pounds of seed potatoes from a tractor supply store called Orfhlin.  If the weather was good that summer, they would harvest a couple hundred pounds of potatoes from this amount of seeds.  For tomatoes, cabbage and bells peppers, they would usually buy small plants that had already been started.  The Amish, like any people, fall on hard times, and some years my grandmother would be worried they wouldn’t have enough money to buy as many potatoes and seedlings as they would need to provide them with food for the following year.
When the weather turned right, usually in the beginning of May unless the cold was lingering on, my grandfather would plough up the garden to get it ready for planting.  He used the Farmer’s Almanac to predict the weather since the Amish are forbidden to have TV or radio.  The almanac was surprisingly accurate.  Sometimes they would get news of a bad frost coming that night by way of a visit from the milkman or some other English person that had access to the news.  Typically they did not interact with the English--what they called any non-Amish person--except for strictly business purposes.  If a frost was coming, it was extra work for my mother and her two sisters.  They had to cover tiny seedlings with overturned buckets or containers and to save the strawberry bed, they covered it with bed sheets or light blankets.  The next day, all the coverings had to be removed so the plants could soak up the sun.  Several nights in a row, sometimes, they had to cover their plants to keep them from being killed by the frost.  “Day by day we had to feel it out,” my mom said.  If they even thought it might frost, they would recover the plants.  If they took a chance and left them uncovered and the weather did turn to frosty temperatures, that meant they had to start all over with their planting.  All the careful plowing, planting, hoeing and caring for the plants would be wasted and they would have to put in that work all over again, and now with a late start due to taking a risk.
Also during this early stage of summer, my mom and her sisters would take count of all the mason jars and canning lids and rings they had.  Since the lids should only be used once, they usually had to buy more lids for this next season’s canning.  A large Amish family will end up with hundreds of jars of canned produce and meat by fall to last them through the winter until they can plant fresh again.
Even in May and June days could get really hot by ten in the morning in Bowling Green, Missouri where my mom grew up.  So to keep cool, they took advantage of the early morning hours to do things like strawberry picking or tending their garden.  If you passed a strawberry field in Amish country, you would see the older women bending from the waist to grasp the red berries.  My mom and the younger women would kneel and pick and sometimes crawl along the patch if the straw was clean enough.
The women would also take their work outside under the shade trees where they might catch a breeze.  they would clean green beans by snipping off the ends or pop shiny, new peas out of their shells or pull the husks off gleaming, golden corn.
To keep their house cool during the day, they would cover the windows with dark curtains that would keep out the heat of the sun.  By afternoon, even the dark curtains did not keep the house cool enough, so my mom would sometimes go for a visit to the dark, cool basement, just to get a small break from the heat.  She remembers my grandmother using a cool rag to wipe down her arms and face to cool off.  In the evenings, after the work was done, the boys would go swimming in the pond while the girls waded in shallow creek water under some shade trees.
Falling asleep was not always so easy.  The windows were open with screens put in them to keep the bugs out.  But there wasn’t always a breeze blowing and the upstairs where the bedrooms usually were was now hot and stuffy from holding the heat all day. 
Mothers hand-fanned their babies to keep them cool long enough for them to fall asleep, or they would lay them on the cool floor just so they could get a bit of relief.  The older children grew immune to the heat as the summer wore on, being able to fall asleep in spite of the heat.  Then early in the morning, before the sun was up, they would get up to start their day over again, hoeing, picking, cleaning the vegetables that would be their food all year long.