It's that time of year. I've been busy putting up garden produce, freezing and canning a variety of fruits and vegetables. Yesterday when I was chopping up apples for a big batch of chutney, I got thinking about the first year I made this condiment, a must for curry dishes. We'd lived on Locust Hill long enough to have fixed the pastures, acquired a flock of sheep and had a freezer full of lamb.
What we didn't have was a cold cellar. Our little farmhouse, having been abandoned for six years, still needed too many more important things like rewiring, plumbing and plastering to worry about a cold cellar. That year, however, I had my first really successful vegetable garden and needed a place to store my potatoes, carrots, winter squash, etc. as well as all the jams and jellies, pickles and relishes I'd put up.
My mother had a beautiful cold cellar, one wall with slatted drawers for root vegetables, the other walls filled floor to ceiling with shelves. Each fall it became a library of colors - golden peaches, cinnamon pink applesauce, blue and royal purple jellies, green and red relishes. I must admit I was as proud of all my home produce as a mother hen with a clutch of new chicks and couldn't wait to line the shelves of a cold cellar with a display of colors equal to my mother's.
With the bedroom still riddled with falling plaster and the single bathroom still minus a bathtub, a cold cellar was hardly a top priority, but a nagging wife is harder to live with than a little falling plaster or the lack of a hot bath, so Hank finally faced the problem of where we were to put my gleaming jars of chutney, my newly dug potatoes and all the other preserves. His solution was, as usual, a novel one.
The cellar of the house contained an unused cistern, a 5x8x6 foot cement box that had once collected rainwater. Because the water from the dug well on Locust Hill was as hard as nails, the nice soft rainwater collected in the cistern was used for washing clothes. Hank decided that the quickest way to create a cold cellar was to make a top for the cistern, put some slatted shelves against its walls and cut a hole in one side to make a door.
I think blowing up a safe would have been easier than cutting a hole for the door, since the cistern was made of 3 inch thick cement, but Hank finally managed it, then fitted a makeshift door. The cistern was more like a crypt than a cold cellar though, dank and dark and uninviting compared to the cheerful, well-insulated room I remembered from childhood. That first winter, finding a jar of spaghetti sauce or a few carrots for dinner was done by candlelight.
I soon learned that high humidity, which is great for storing root vegetables, is anything but great for pumpkins, winter squash or onions. By Christmastime they'd begun to fester with mold. I also realized that it was a poor place to keep my jams and jellies as their labels became so obliterated by moisture that deciding whether a jar contained chili sauce or chutney was impossible until it had been opened. What was worse was that unscrewing the rusty tops of the jars defeated even Hank.
Eventually Hank put electricity in the cistern and one of those lights that goes on and off with motion. Open the door and it goes on, shut the door and go away, it goes off. He also used the space under the stairs to the second floor to built shelves for most of my preserves. Hardly a beautiful display, but I couldn't think of any other photo to take for today's column.
I found drier places to store my onions and squash, and nowadays don't bother to winter over any root vegetables. The crypt makes a fine wine cellar, quite a commentary of the Taylor lifestyle - once the diligent housewife, slaving over a hot stove, now sipping a glass of wine before putting a Stop and Shop cooked chicken on the table for dinner.
