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More on Mixed Pickles

10/14/2014

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Last week I wrote about Appalachian mixed pickles (corn, green beans, and cabbage "sauerkrauted," so to speak). I got some comments  on the blog site and some from outside it. 

One of the non-blog comments was from a local lady here,  Joanne, who  gave me a quick tip for producing mixed pickles myself. She assured me that if I will buy and drain a can of corn and a can of beans, mix them with a can of undrained sauerkraut, and give the mixture time to marinate a little, I will have "shortcut" mixed pickles (my term). 

I am glad to have the tip, although the process lacks several things compared to real mixed pickles. 

One of the assets it lacks is a real bean inside the bean pod. In our gardens around here, we let our bean pods bulge with actual beans before we pick them, and that means mixed pickles full of wonderful, protein-laden beans and not just flat green hulls. 

I have never bought a bean at a store, whether canned or fresh, that had any "bean" in the bean pod, and something critical is lost in the translation.

I am grateful for Joanne's tip, and I don't say I won't try Joanne's method if a " jones" for mixed pickles overcomes me when the quarts I have are a memory, but until that time, I will stick with Opal Sexton's mixed pickles, gloating about all the lovely round beans pushed up against the glass of the jar before I consign them to the skillet.

There are other reasons. Besides missing what green beans bulging with real beans contribute to the taste and the look-and-gloat factor, the other lack in the store-bought method is the step of  stringing the beans. 

I grew up stringing beans before we cooked or canned them. In those days bean pods came with tough strings along the seams. You grabbed hold of the end of the bean with the little hook, and pulled away from the curve of the hook.  Generally, that little end broken off, and you could pull the string off that entire side. 

When you hit the end, you pinched off that end, and continued pulling the string back along the other side of the bean. (I know I'm introducing a confusion factor here by using "stringing beans" for two different processes. This is a precursor to stringing the beans with twine to dry and make shuckeys; with shuckeys you are stringing up strung beans.)

Appalachian women strung beans by the bushel. Multiple family members would sit on the porch, pile their lap, usually apron-covered, full of unstrung beans, and commence to string, dropping the strung bean into a container for further processing, and the strings back into the apron. At the end of several hours of replenishing the apron and removing the strings from the pod,delving among the pile of strings to find the whole beans,  the apron would be heaped with strings, the supply basket would be empty, and the pods would be ready to string with twine for drying or break for cooking or canning.

These day, if you buy fresh green beans at a grocery store, chances are they will be stringless. I learned this only recently, although I suspect it has been the case for ages. 

No doubt that is more convenient for factory processing, but it has taken away bean-stringings and the pleasure of working and visiting with others on a common task, not to mention the small hit of satisfaction that came with removing the strings from a single bean pod, accumulated into a large feeling of satisfaction as the last bean is finished. There are few pleasures greater than working together for a common goal.



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Apples, Shuckeys, and Mixed Pickles

10/2/2014

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I've been doing some farmish things I never did growing up in a coal camp (or anyway never did beyond helping mother). I've been drying green beans to make shuckey beans, or, as my father called them, leather britches. If you have eaten shuckeys, you won't need any explanation, and if you haven't I can't really describe the difference in taste from fresh green beans (slightly smoky, maybe?), but I like them very much.
 
I've learned since starting to winter in Kentucky that shuckey-bean drying has changed over the years. Mother and I used to punch a needle threaded with strong twine through the center flat side of the whole green bean pod and continue that until we had multiple long strings of them. We'd hang the strings outside in the sun or inside over doors to dry. These days I find my neighbors - those who produce shuckeys - break them ready for cooking and spread the broken pieces under the back window of their closed-up, hot car to dry, or spread them on a piece of tin or aluminum out in the sun, or even put them in an electric dehydrator. Ah, technology. I'm using the car method, although we have an SUV and so no shelf under the back window. As a backup, we have them spread on the console under the windshield. Since the beans and the newspaper they sit on reflect so dreadfully it makes it hard to drive, that means a lot of taking-out-the-beans and putting-the-beans-back-in before and after each use of the vehicle, which the under-the-back-window-folk don't have to cope with. I'II have to admit it's more convenient to use the beans if they have been broken before drying, and they might dry faster as well, but I still love the process of stringing and the look of the strung beans, not to mention avoiding the repetitive in-and-out, the so I may go back to tradition next year.
 
I've also been consumed with picking, eating, processing, and giving away apples. We have two large apple trees - winesaps - on our land. They don't usually yield enough to worry about but this year we had a bumper crop. I eat several a day, but the tree yields a lot more than that.  Many of them inevitably fall to the ground and often are damaged. If they are only moderately bruised, I pick them up, wash them, and save them for eating. Refrigerated undamaged, they will keep for months, and I cram as many of the undamaged ones as I can in the interstices between other food, to the point that, if the refrigerator had a more forgiving coefficient of elasticity, it would bulge. Unfortunately, it would take a refrigerator a lot bigger than normal to hold all the tree has produced this fall, or all I can eat in a year. Or, this year, it seems, all even the deer can eat.
 
I'm also pursuing mixed pickles which, belying the common non-Appalachian assumption, have no cucumbers in them. They are a mix of green beans, corn, and cabbage, processed like sauerkraut. I find that I'm surprising myself with this foodie activity, since I have never been domestic. In the interests of truth, I confess that I am buying the mixed pickles from a lovely lady here in town named Sexton who put up 32 quarts of mixed pickles this year, and is willing to sell me five of those quarts.  (For those who don't know, one drains a jar of mixed pickles, and pitches them into a skillet of hot oil to heat. That skillet once held a generous amount of bacon grease, but these days, in the interests of our arteries, it holds a little olive oil.) If the mixed pickles have had years to marinate and are very sour, many people soak them in cold water for a while to moderate the sour and take out some of the salt, after which one can proceed to the drain and pitch step.
 
We of course brought back a lot of frozen salmon from Alaska, and we are the beneficiaries of a doe's weight of venison, (plus we occasionally receive gifts of personally raised and killed pork) so we will be eating little from the grocery store this year and much from the freezer. There's so much I don't know if the two of us can eat it in a year, but it feels good to kind of live off the land.
 
I'm off to wash the apples we picked from the tree or picked up from the ground this morning.

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    Author

    Nina Cornett is  presently at work on a memoir, is pulling together a concept for a mystery novel  set in Alaska, and is keeping a log of the Cornetts' efforts to bring  attention to timber theft in Kentucky with the thought that it might be the germ  of a future book.

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