Culture – Page 52 – Into the Woods

Family dairies, R.I.P.

Small, family-run dairy operations used to be very common all across North Carolina’s Piedmont and the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains. They are gone. I doubt that very many of them survived much later than the 1950s. Like all small family farms, the dairy farms had to deal with competition from the larger, more industrialized operations. There also were health regulations to deal with. If I remember correctly from what a dairy farmer told me many years ago, to sell top-grade milk required that the milk be chilled to a low temperature — 34 or 35 degrees, as I recall — within minutes of coming from the cow. Small operations couldn’t support the cost of this refrigeration equipment.

This old dairy, on Mountain Road near Danbury in Stokes County, was typical. The building in which the milking was done was usually made of concrete blocks. This was because the building was constantly being hosed down and washed.

The smaller room to the right, with the sink, is the clean room where vessels were washed and where the milk was brought. The larger room to the left with the cow-sized door is the milking room.

The sink was for washing the milk cans and other vessels.

Recommendment: Lark Rise to Candleford

BBC: The hamlet of Lark Rise

I wonder if the BBC is making a particular effort to make more period pieces that reflect the lives of ordinary people, rather than aristocrats. For example, BBC Films was involved in the making of Bright Star, which is about John Keats. Keats and those around him were middle class, not aristocrats. There also is the excellent BBC television series Cranford.

In 2008, the BBC came out with Lark Rise to Candleford. This is about the people in the tiny hamlet of Lark Rise, and the more prosperous people of the nearby village of Candleford. These are honest stories based on the realities of village life — gossip, family trouble, poverty, and social jostling. The series is available on DVD, and from Netflix.

Let's hear it for the chickens

March 4: four eggs. There are three nests in the henhouse, but they always share and take turns.

My four chickens have averaged slightly better than three eggs a day all winter, and it was a cold winter. Even though it’s still early March, they’re already starting to return to their four-eggs-a-day standard of productivity. They have only ever broken one egg, and that was when they were young and inexperienced. I myself have accidentally broken three or four.

They are content, yet demanding, always hoping for treats, which they get, every day. Sometimes the best I can do is cut up some raw potatoes or carrots, or maybe apples, or pluck the outer leaves from a head of cabbage. Their favorite treats are kitchen scraps — peelings and leftovers. Pasta drives them wild. They seem to think it’s worms. On cold mornings they relish a warm breakfast — cracked grains mixed with leftover gravy or soup. During the summer, finding treats for them is easy because the kitchen always has lots of summer produce. During the winter, treats are more of a challenge. They always have laying mash in their feeder. But it’s treats that keep things interesting.

Newspapers and magazines are full of stories about backyard chickens these days, but here’s one of the best pieces I’ve come across. Peter Lennox, an academic, waxes philosophical on the keeping of chickens:

Watching chickens is a very old human pastime, and the forerunner of psychology, sociology and management theory. Sometimes understanding yourself can be made easier by projection on to others. Watching chickens helps us understand human motivations and interactions, which is doubtless why so many words and phrases in common parlance are redolent of the hen yard: “pecking order”, “cockiness”, “ruffling somebody’s feathers”, “taking somebody under your wing”, “fussing like a mother hen”, “strutting”, a “bantamweight fighter”, “clipping someone’s wings”, “beady eyes”, “chicks”, “to crow”, “to flock”, “get in a flap”, “coming home to roost”, “don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched”, “nest eggs” and “preening”.

The family cow

My grandmother Mary Lillian Bowman Dalton with one of her cows, c. 1925, Laurel Fork, Virginia

Yesterday while walking back from the mailbox, I was admiring one of my neighbors’ pastures. It has a good fence and a thick stand of grass ready to turn lush as soon as spring arrives. I realized that, in rural areas like this with a history of family farms, it would be relatively easy to bring back the family cow.

Consider how quickly backyard chickens have come back into fashion. There is even a new bimonthly magazine for backyard chickens. Chickens, of course, require far less infrastructure, less space, and less labor than a cow. But if the day ever comes when we see severe unemployment (meaning that people find themselves at home most of the time) combined with inflation in food prices, I suspect that some hardy rural people who have the pastureland will go back to keeping a cow.

In talking with Ken Ilgunas last weekend about my oath to measure my success here by how effectively I can turn back the clock to 1935, I mentioned how I was the last generation to witness, and, in a child’s way at least, to participate in the operation of family farms. Neither the economics nor the infrastructure of the family farm is mysterious to me. Almost all of my relatives lived on small farms, and some of those farms were in operation before 1900. I have gathered the eggs, seen cows milked, seen butter churned, seen mules pulling plows, unloaded hay, fed and watered the horse, helped with the tobacco crop, and seen the wood cookstoves blazing and steaming while Sunday dinner was cooked. Apart from the land and the infrastructure required for a small farm, it’s a matter of labor. Somebody has to be home all day. A few strong young’uns are an indispensable asset.

Would I like to have a cow? No. I don’t have the pasture space. I’m also content with soybean milk, which I could make for myself if I had to. But cows have an amazing capability that ensures them of a niche in a relocalized economy — they can turn grass into milk.

There’s a lot of material on the Internet about family cows. This is a good place to start.

Thank goodness I'm out of style

Approved house style: New York Times

I can think of a hundred ways to psychoanalyze the people who set themselves up as lords of style and look down on the rest of us. But I’d rather try to be nice and think of it as a serious question: Why is there such a thriving industry and subculture of style?

The best answer I can come up with is that the style industry is an arm of consumerism. It’s to teach us to disdain and devalue what we have so that we’ll buy something new. It’s to teach us that if we don’t buy the new styles, people will make fun of us.

Invariably, the houses that newspapers feature in their architecture columns are boxes. The box in the photo above was certain to be featured in the New York Times, because, not only is it a box, it’s a crooked box that cost $1.4 million. There’s this quote from the owner of the house: “If we just produced another thatched cottage, we might as well still be living in caves.”

The plaid outfit speaks (loudly) for itself.

As for the cabbage, the food writer for Salon informs us that people used to eat cabbage, but cabbage fell into disrepute and something ruined its reputation. I never knew. The way to redeem cabbage’s reputation and make it fit to eat again, he tells us, is to give it a “ripping sear in smoking-hot oil.” Maybe later.

I live in a cottage, my best outfits are from L.L. Bean, and I eat cabbage the old-fashioned way. With the capital I save from not being stylish, I might be able to afford an out-of-style landscape, and a garden.

Approved style of dressing: New York Times

Approved style of eating cabbage: Salon

The coffee of yesteryear

Buffalo china cups, Victor mugs

Those enormous coffee mugs and gigantic paper coffee cups are symbols of the rat race. Once upon a time, it was understood that a cup of coffee was something to relax with and savor. The drinking vessels reflected that.

There is a science, of course, behind the new style and the old style of coffee drinking.

The science of the new style is simple: Get all the coffee you’re going to drink into a single vessel, and chug it fast while on the run. Still, it’s guaranteed that the first third of it will be too hot, and the last third will be too cold.

The science of the old style was much more complex and sophisticated. It required skill and attention from whoever was serving the coffee. The drinking vessels were made of heavy china. The cups absorbed heat from the first pouring of coffee, cooling it to a more drinkable temperature. Thereafter, there was the ritual of “warming up” the coffee, which required pouring more coffee at just the right time, before the cup was empty. This not only refilled the cup, it also brought the coffee back to the ideal temperature. This ritual was repeated until you’d had enough coffee. This is how the English serve — or at least used to serve — tea from a teapot.

To my lights, the ideal coffee mug was the mug made by the Victor Mug Company. This mug holds about 8 ounces when filled to the brim, or about 7 ounces when filled to a drinkable level. The ideal coffee cup was made by the Buffalo Pottery Company. These cups hold about 7 ounces when filled to the brim, and about 6 ounces when filled to a drinkable level. These mugs and cups were sold as restaurant china. They’re now collectable.

When looking for cups in the housewares section of a couple of chain stores, I was not terribly surprised to find that they don’t even carry cups and saucers anymore, and all the mugs are huge. eBay is the answer.

I really feel for the people who have to drink their coffee from huge vessels, on the run. Now that I’m retired, I drink coffee (well, a coffee substitute) the old-fashioned way. I used my large set of Victor mugs during my working years. But now I’ve slowed down to cups and saucers.

Solastalgia?

New York Times

The New York Times Magazine for Sunday has an interesting piece on the developing field of ecopsychology, which explores the ways in which mental processes and mental health are affected by the environment.

Solastaglia is a word for what we experience when we see damage to our world. This experience varies from place to place. But around here, that would be what we experience when we see a beautiful farm we knew as children bulldozed away for a development. Or woods cut down for timber, leaving behind stumps and mud. Or a new road cut through the countryside. It makes us feel sick.

Turnip greens

The grocery store in Walnut Cove had turnip greens this week for $1.29 a bunch. As Michael Pollan says, eat more leaves. Especially at a good price.

By the way, what you see on the countertop is what we around here would call a mess of greens. When I was in elementary school, a teacher once derided one of the children for saying “a mess of greens.” The teacher said that that was not proper. How sad. It is perfectly proper, but it does mark one’s dialect as Appalachian English. I have previously written about stigmatized dialects.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives an example of this usage from 1503: “You have very good strawberies at your gardayne in Holberne. I require you let us have a messe of them.”

Mess means a portion of food sufficient to make a dish. As I understood the term growing up, it particularly meant a portion of food brought from the garden. I never heard anyone talk about a mess of bacon.

Two recommendments

For your DVD list: Jane Eyre, BBC/Masterpiece Theater, 2006. Perfect. Ruth Wilson, who plays Jane Eyre, is Jane Eyre.

October Sky, 1999. Based on a true story, Jake Gyllenhaal is a nerd boy growing up in the West Virginia mountains who doesn’t want to be a coal miner. Instead, after seeing Sputnik pass overhead in the October sky, he dreams of building rockets.

The history of fireplaces

My fireplace burns propane.

While watching on DVD the 2006 Masterpiece Theater / BBC production of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, I realized that, though some features of houses have changed a great deal over the years, fireplaces have changed very little. There was the Rumford fireplace — a more efficient fireplace — that was becoming the state of the art at the time of the American revolution. And of course coal-fired fireplaces and gas-fired fireplaces were developed. But the elemental fire and hearth are things that humans have had in their houses for as long as they’ve had houses.

Though today fireplaces have a certain utility as backup sources of heat in case our modern heating systems go down, they are not really necessary, and that is not how we justify their cost, which is considerable. We have them because we want that archetypal presence of hearth and fire in our homes. If you walk through a building supply super-store like Home Depot this time of year, you’ll even see simulated “electric fireplaces” for people who don’t have chimneys.

In Walden, Thoreau had a lot to say about the cost of our houses. He wondered why people want such big houses when much smaller houses would do, even though people sometimes spend a lifetime paying for their home. Thoreau saw this as enslaving ourselves to our houses.

If anything, houses now cost even more now than they cost in Thoreau’s day. These days, probably a third of the cost of the house goes into systems that didn’t exist in Thoreau’s day — central heating and cooling systems, electrical systems, fancy plumbing systems, and so on.

The cranky and eccentric Thoreau was quite cynical complaining about houses: “Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have.”

It was in Thoreau I encountered a reference to the Rumford fireplace: “An annual rent of from twenty-five to a hundred dollars (these are the country rates) entitles him to the benefit of the improvements of centuries, spacious apartments, clean paint and paper, Rumford fireplace, back plastering, Venetian blinds, copper pump, spring lock, a commodious cellar, and many other things. But how happens it that he who is said to enjoy these things is commonly a poor civilized man, while the savage, who has them not, is rich as a savage? If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man — and I think that it is, though only the wise improve their advantages — it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”