Processing local apples today for apple butter and applesauce. I prefer to use the fruit of local trees…besides being pesticide free, they often represent old varieties, or the unique qualities of fruit trees grown from seed. The flavours are distinct, more interesting, less bland, than applesauce made from commercial fruit. When I lived on the Skeena, I used to harvest the fruit of a motley assortment of apple trees, each one distinct, that had been planted 50 years or more before by an early homesteader, and apple trees from seed “planted” by birds sitting on the fence post, or by the scat of a passing bear. I used to pick the fruit green to try to get it before the bears broke the trees down, harvesting the fruit the same way they would the berries of a tall saskatoon bush. The flavours were unsurpassed, and the fruit was tangy, sour, bitter. My daughter and I would sit on a low stool and run the cooked pulp through a hand cranked Foley foodmill in the kitchen of our cabin cum new-old-farmhouse. The pectin from the green apples made the sauce thick before it was reheated with sugar to can.
Today I am processing the fruit from three old Edmonton apple trees. Apple trees planted by homeowners decades before are often neglected by contemporary supermarket-oriented residents, the fruit a nuisance rotting on the ground. Fruit trees are an investment that take decades to reach their prime, and stability over decades is a rare thing in today’s urban areas. The mentality to put food by, the skills and equipment to can or make jelly, are no longer universal, especially in urban areas where even home cooking from “scratch” is increasingly rare. I went to the market to buy apple juice needed for the cooking liquid to make apple butter…the closest source I could find was organic apple juice processed in Chilliwack near Vancouver. The sugar I will add is organic fair-trade demerara- hopefully ethically produced and both socially and environmentally “OK”….but certainly not within my 100 mile radius for “local”. I would have to search out a local honey producer for that, and I would find, in our climate, that the overwintering bees must be fed on sugar syrup, most likely tropical cane sugar, and neither environmentally nor ethically produced…so the honey I eat is local, but the bees are sustained by the global food system. We cannot escape the connections.
In urban North America our social system no longer supports food self-sufficiency either; we have jobs and time commitments. There is neither time to harvest food nor time to process it around our work obligations and our family and other social relationships. Today is a work day, and I have a nagging sense of guilt as I process the apples rather than marking papers, reading student web posts, working on my new course. We don’t get time off for harvest…but the apples need to be processed now. They have their own seasonal imperative.
Yesterday I also nibbled some high-bush cranberries on a walk and collected some mushrooms in the ravine by my house, an urban greenspace used mostly for urban dog-walkers, joggers, and mountain bike enthusiasts along with occasional pram-pushing parents taking babies out for a walk. The mushrooms are a gourmet treat- wild relatives of portobellos. The trick is to find them before they are too old, riddled with the larval excavations of mycetophylid flies. And of course to wash them well. I manage to find enough for a couple of skillets full that are still good, and now have a couple of freezer packs of “wildcrafted” mushrooms in the freezer. Mushroom harvest requires experience, local knowledge, and detailed ethnobiological knowledge of how to recognize edible kinds and distinguish them from unknowns or poisonous varieties. Some of my fellow harvesters come from mycophllic cultures like Italy or Poland. Most of my Euro-Canadian neighbours lack the skills necessary (and the inclination) to add local edible fungi to their diets.
I found it poignant when we were in Regina a couple of weeks ago after my partner’s mother’s death to go out into her tiny backyard to pick some things for my sister in law to add to the family lunch and find a neatly tended and highly productive vegetable garden, with chard, carrots, potatoes and onions ready for harvest. Few yards in my Edmonton neighbourhood have a ready source of fresh vegetables outside the back door, though it was common a generation ago. Jean came from a farm family, and valued growing her own.
