Autumnal Equinox

A mountain home.

Today is the first day of Autumn, at the end of a long summer. To celebrate, my wife and I rode over to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park for the Mountain Life Festival. 

Apples in the Apple House.

The Apple House.

The festival celebrates and showcases mountain folkways. They were cooking apple butter, and had a horse turning a milk to grind sorghum, which they were then boiling to make molasses. There were lectures on the importance of pork both for meat and lard — which they claimed is healthier than butter — for cooking and food preservation.

Gotta have chickens for eggs, too: hens live in this coop.

Read the sign to learn how to make lye soap!

Pretty neat stuff. There are large parts of this that we have incorporated into our lives — my wife has gotten into chickens this year. We garden and preserve food with canning and drying, and while I don’t own pigs I do render lard and use it in baking. Some other parts for now we’ve let go, but it’s good to know how it was done just in case. 

There was also an Appalachian folk music demonstration. This is quite different from bluegrass, more Celtic and often like traditional ballads. 

4 comments:

  1. I remember my mother and my aunt talking about preserving meat by packing it in the lard rendered out from the meat. I don't remember exactly how it was done, through some type of canning or just using the lard to seal out air and microbes.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The latter, mostly. The hot fat seals it against bacteria, so as long as it was thoroughly cooked when you packed it, it’ll keep.

    You get a lesser version of the same thing by cooking any food in fat. You’ll find it keeps a long time, especially if also refrigerated. It’s sterile from the cooking, and a layer of fat seals it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous6:23 PM

    "Potted meat" is the $$$ term for fat-sealed foods. I actually did something similar with a recipe for Ethiopian doro wat, sealing it with the spiced clarified butter. It kept very well in glass in the fridge. (I'm a coward when it comes to room-temperature storage and store-bought poultry, even cooked.)

    LittleRed1

    ReplyDelete
  4. Ah, potted meat - hadn't thought of that. As for food cooked in fat keeping better, makes sense. When I ate lower fat quick bread recipes for a while, I found they spoiled much more quickly than the standard recipes. Dietary fat is truly a miracle ingredient. :+)

    ReplyDelete