My grandparent's basement
was the Fort Knox of German Russian culinary treasures.
It was where my grandfather kept his
"wascht spritz", where -- while adding spices -- he'd grind meat into
sausage casings, and where my grandmother kept her favorite old time
cast iron stove with the heavy round lids that you'd lift to add fuel,
corn cobs, wood, or dried cattle patties that were my mother's childhood
job to gather from the prairie, the best fuel for baking arching brown
leaves of homemade bread.
My grandma never quit using
that basement stove, sneaking down the steps, out of sight of her
new-fangled, electric range bought by her grown sons and installed
in her kitchen, because she said, as if the stove were some kind of
sentient but unresponsive animal, "that dumb thing doesn't want to
cook the right way..."
My grandparent's basement
was also the place where in deep wooden bins we'd store the forty
bags of potatoes we harvested each fall from our large garden, and
also, the place where grandma's shelves sagged with all the containers,
bottles, crocks, and jars of pickled beets, sweet, sour and dill pickles,
watermelon rinds, canned chickens and sausage, liverwurst, gholadetz,
schwatamaga, and anything else that could be smoked, canned, preserved,
or put up in brine. There were also jar upon jar of dark chokecherry
jelly, made from berries picked from trees lining our alleyway, and
spreading that "chelly" as my grandmother called it, on thick slabs
of crumbling slices of home-baked bread always held for me, even in
the coldest weather, the lush promise of summer to come.
Author
Ron Vossler
Collectors
Edition Schmeckfest
on Videotape
If
you missed seeing Schmeckfest on Prairie Public Television, you
still have a chance to enjoy this heart-warming (and mouth-watering)
documentary. Order a videotape copy of Schmeckfest for only $29.95.
This wonderful Collectors' Edition includes the full documentary plus
almost 20 minutes of bonus footage not seen on television. Order
online now or call 1-800-359-6900 to order your copies today.
It was where my grandfather kept his
"wascht spritz", where -- while adding spices -- he'd grind meat into
sausage casings, and where my grandmother kept her favorite old time
cast iron stove with the heavy round lids that you'd lift to add fuel,
corn cobs, wood, or dried cattle patties that were my mother's childhood
job to gather from the prairie, the best fuel for baking arching brown
leaves of homemade bread.
If
you missed seeing Schmeckfest on Prairie Public Television, you
still have a chance to enjoy this heart-warming (and mouth-watering)
documentary. Order a videotape copy of Schmeckfest for only $29.95.
This wonderful Collectors' Edition includes the full documentary plus
almost 20 minutes of bonus footage not seen on television.