I’ve been thinking lately about how things that are not hard seem hard until you start doing them and get the habit. This occurred to me the other day as I was making salad dressing. I didn’t always make my own salad dressings. I am not sure quite how or why I started doing it, even, although it was probably some combination of urging from Alton Brown and Mark Bittman and running out of store-bought at an inopportune moment. And I just started doing it, and now I do it every time we have salad. I make a new salad dressing pretty much every time we have salad, just making enough for that night’s salad, even though I could make a batch and keep it for a while. The other night I made a salad of smoked (smoked by us, no less!) salmon, poached egg, arugula, and tomato, and I topped this with a creamy lemon dressing, and it was brilliant. I can remember back to a time when I felt sure that the additional time it would take to make the dressing would just be a hassle and impossible to fit in, but it’s not, once you get the habit. It takes time to really get the habit, but once you do, it’s just there, part of the routine.
I can remember, too, when I first started canning. I started with jam–marmalade, to be precise, and it started because of a particularly wonderful cookbook, The French Farmhouse Cookbook. The whole Farmhouse series (there are 3: Farmhouse, French Farmhouse, and Italian Farmhouse, and I have them all) is fantastic, and my copies are all splattered and dog-eared, and much loved. Anyway, they all have some recipes in them for jams and other preserved foods, since that is a typical part of the farmhouse cook’s routine. The French Farmhouse Cookbook, indeed, has a recipe for orange marmalade that intrigued me. I love orange marmalade, but a lot of commercial marmalades disappoint. She made it sound pretty easy in the cookbook, so I thought I’d give it a whirl. I made that, and then the orange-lemon marmalade. Then I made the Basque-style plum-vanilla jam. And the rhubarb-raspberry. All from the same cookbook. And then, once you start, the store jams just don’t taste very good anymore. You can taste their deficiencies, that you could never taste before, just by comparison to the real, amazing deal. So, you won’t settle for them anymore, so the next summer (well, now I do orange and orange-lemon during winter, since citrus is in season and cheaper then–we most certainly do not grow our own citrus here in Idaho) you just do it again, because of that hankering for the goodness. You do it often enough, it gets to be a habit.
I don’t remember exactly when I started in on the pickles. I do remember that once I had the canning bug, my mom gave me her old canning cookbook. It’s the Farm Journal cookbook from the early 1960s. It’s kind of hilarious, in the way that books aimed at housewives in the 1950s and ’60s are. But it’s also full of pickle recipes (it’s also full of bizarre recipes, in the way that cookbooks from that time period are: “salads” that consist primarily of mayonnaise and canned mandarin oranges, for example. Lots of molded Jell-O things, too, of course. It’s also funny in that it implies that zucchini is still mainly a vegetable grown and enjoyed by Californians and Italians. Oh, those wacky Californians!), and I think my first attempt was beets. I never liked beets until I learned how to pickle them myself. I always thought those tinny, unspiced things you get in the store were “pickled beets,” but it always seemed to me that the beet had potential to be great. And it certainly does. I’ve played around with my beet pickles and found a couple of pickling methods that I like. One adds the traditional cinnamon and clove to the vinegar solution. The other, and I made this one up, is pickled and flavored with fennel instead. I sliced fennel bulbs and Chioggia beets up last year to make a really pretty little salad pickle or pickle salad, and it was tasty. This year I’ll probably do it with golden beets instead of Chioggia, since the Chioggia beets lost some of their stripes in processing. I’ll save the Chioggias for applications where their colors are shown off to better effect.
The next habit I’m going to try to acquire is making more of my own soaps and shampoos and stuff like that. After that, I’ll be moving on to cheese-making. I’ve already started making my own laundry soap and most of my own household cleaning supplies; why not shampoo? And I believe Barbara Kingsolver completely when she says that cheesemaking can fit into your normal routine. I feel sure of this, because I have already acquired other habits that I felt sure I would never have time for. It is true that now any time I am watching Netflix, I am also doing something else: chopping onions for relish, pitting cherries, pulling dill seeds off their heads. But that’s all right. If you’re going to sit on your ass and drool over Bear Grylls anyway, you may as well be doing something constructive with your hands.
Anyway, you get the habit, or I do, and make them part of your life, and then you want to learn more. My forays into pickledom have now taken me to a place where I find myself reading up on molarity and buffering as they apply to pH levels in pickled vegetables. It’s really remarkable how you get to be 34 years old with a Master’s! Degree! and thinking you know a little something and then you find out that, really, you don’t. You have no idea what the fuck “molarity” is and why it should matter to your precious cucumbers, but it does, so you have to find out. Despite the fact that I can discourse at length about Heidegger and Chomsky and the grammatical complexities of Navajo, I don’t know shit. Except that I know that I don’t, so I think that’s a good place to start.
makingafamily 