Commonplace Vol. 4 Issue 1

Hello! This is a year-opening issue full of bits and pieces of stuff, rather than any single coherent topic. The stuff includes: Tesco stock, an annual report, food preservation, cider, ways to cook breakfast eggs, and Tumblr.

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(Apples from September 2022, which were turned into apple juice within hours of this picture, and then into cider - see below!)

Before I get into anything else, I should note that both the smoked nuts and the fancy kale I was muttering about in the last issue turned up in Tesco since. I don’t think this is anything to do with me writing about them, but I reckoned I’d better acknowledge the change, just in case.

There’s an annual report for this newsletter and for Gentle Decline over on my Patreon (viewable by everybody, but signing up for the Patreon while you’re there would be lovely).

There were a few questions in during the latter half of last year about food preservation (and storage), particularly with regard to home-grown vegetables. Food preservation is an interesting topic in the 21st century, because we mostly don’t need to do it at home, and indeed, it can cost quite a bit more to produce preserves at home than it does to buy them, which makes something of a nonsense of the original point.

There’s the argument that with modern supermarkets being able to source food from all over the world, and with canned foods, pickles, and jams being produced commercially, we don’t have any need to preserve food anymore. And this is absolutely valid in the short term. You can have strawberries and tomatoes in January, asparagus in October, blueberries in March, and if you want canned pears or apple sauce, it’s a hell of a lot less effort to get them from the supermarket shelf than it is to go through the complex process of doing it yourself. Who even makes jam anymore?

I’m of the opinion that we’re going to see, over the next few decades, a decline in what’s available from abroad in retail. I’ve written about this fairly extensively (and recently) in Gentle Decline, so you can read about it there if you want the details. The general gist, though, relevant to this, is that we're probably not always going to be able to import fresh produce from the far side of the world. Possibly we’re going to have difficulty getting it more than a few hundred miles. So food preservation is going to become more important. I do think that commercial preservation will step up to this, so that fresh tomatoes from Morocco will be replaced with canned tomatoes from Morocco, and since they can travel more slowly, they’ll be ok. We’ll probably also see a slight step up in production of stuff for preservation locally - there’s already a good bit of fruit grown in Ireland for jam-making, for example, and if that increases a little, it’d make Ireland pretty self-sufficient in terms of soft fruit.

My main reason for making jam (and whatever other preserves I get around to in a given year) is that mine are better than the commercial ones. Even the highest-end raspberry jam I’ve been able to get, anywhere, has not matched my own.

So then there’s storage. Some stuff doesn’t preserve well - root crops, in particular. You can freeze them, but they lose a lot of the good taste in the process. I have seen turnip and parsnip jams, but I think you’d need to be desperate before those became appealing. Potatoes fall into this category as well; you can (I gather) grow enough that you need to store them properly rather than just eat them. It hasn’t happened to me yet, but it’s a possibility.

So: carrots, parsnips, and beetroot can be left in the ground. As yet, we haven’t had the kinds of winter in the Isles that would prevent that, and I’m told that a couple of frosts can improve parsnips. If for whatever reason that doesn’t work, the best advice seems to be to bury them in layers of slightly damp sand. Potatoes need to be dried out - a process of several days, at least, which can be tough in the autumn if you don’t have a shed of suitable size - and then stored in breathable dark containers (hessian or paper sacks) in a dry, cool place. If you miss out on any of dark, breathable, cool or dry, the potatoes will try to sprout. I have direct experience of this, plenty of times. There’s also a piece in the Schools Collection (a set of folklore collected from schoolchildren in the 1930s in Ireland) about what’s now known as a potato clamp, which I haven’t tried, but I know was widely used on this island for at least a few centuries.

Weirdly, my maternal grandfather kept something over an acre of vegetable gardening - enough to need the application of a petrol-fueled rotavator in spring and autumn - but I have absolutely no recollection of what was done to preserve or store any of that. I do remember the apple cage which was on one of the lofts on the premises; a huge rack of wire shelves made so that there could be as much air as possible around each fruit, but without them coming in contact with each other.

Speaking of apples, the Scrumping Day we did in the autumn has resulted in a large container of a decent dry cider. It’s not the most flavourful stuff in the world, but a few months in bottles might do something for that. As is, it’s drinkable, and packs a moderate punch. Alcohol content measurement depends on using a hygrometer before and after fermentation, and we didn’t do so before, so it’ll have to be guesswork. My guess is around 7%. I’m planning to get an actual bottle-capper too, since they’re available for surprisingly small money.

I feel like everyone knows I’m a fan of breakfast foods. For years, I was convinced that poached eggs are hard to do, and this impeded a number of breakfast things I would otherwise have done. It turns out that poached eggs are honestly not difficult, and I’m not sure where I got the impression that they were. You crack some eggs and drop them in simmering water, and three minutes later scoop them out with a slotted spoon, and that’s it. No swirling of water, no drops of vinegar, and I’m now convinced they’re one of the easier forms of eggs.

Someone on Tumblr linked to Gordon Ramsay’s method of scrambling eggs recently, and I’ve watched it a few times with fascination. It’s bizarrely different to every other method I’ve ever seen or read; he doesn’t whisk the eggs until they’re in the pan, and adds the butter to the eggs rather than melting it in the pan first. And he whips them on and off the heat, rather than the steady low heat everyone else uses. I’ve yet to have the wherewithal to actually try out his method (inventive thinking is not my forté at breakfast time), but it’s definitely living in my head without paying any rent.

And while I mention Tumblr, Commonplace has one. In the manner of tumblrs everywhere, it is 90% reblogs of food-related stuff, and 10% whatever bee entered my bonnet that didn’t suit being written up in a newsletter. It’s been there for a while, I just keep forgetting to actually say it.

This issue has been brought to you by Hunter’s claws, howling wind and driving rain, new books, and the turning of the year. Eat well, and I shall write again soon.

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