http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/garden/06root.html

November 6, 2008

Food Storage as Grandma Knew It

By MICHAEL TORTORELLO

"IN a strictly technical sense, Cynthia Worley is not transforming her
basement into a time machine. Yet what's going on this harvest season
beneath her Harlem brownstone on 122nd Street, at Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
Boulevard, is surely something out of the past - or perhaps the future.

The space itself is nothing special: Whitewashed granite walls run the width
and depth of the room, 16 feet by 60 feet. A forgotten owner tried to put in
a cement floor, but the dirt, which takes a long-term view of things, is
stubbornly coming back. "It's basically a sod floor," Ms. Worley said.

What's important is that the shelves are sturdy, because Ms. Worley and her
husband, Haja Worley, will soon load them with 20 pounds of potatoes, 20
pounds of onions, 30 pounds of butternut and acorn squash, 10 heads of
cabbage, 60-odd pints of home-canned tomatoes and preserves, 9 gallons of
berry and fruit wines, and another gallon or two of mulberry vinegar.

The goodies in the pint jars and the carboys come from the Joseph Daniel
Wilson Memorial Garden, which the Worleys founded across the street. The
fresh produce is a huge final delivery from a Community Supported
Agriculture farm in Orange County, which they used all summer. Packed in
sand and stored at 55 degrees, the potatoes should keep at least until the
New Year. The squash could still be palatable on Groundhog Day, and the
onions should survive till spring. Ms. Worley, who counsels and teaches
adults for the New York City Department of Education, and Mr. Worley, a
neighborhood organizer and radio engineer, will let their basement-deprived
friends store vegetables, too.

The Worleys, like a number of other Americans, have made the seemingly
anachronistic choice to turn their basement into a root cellar. While Ms.
Worley's brownstone basement stash won't feed the couple through the winter,
she said, "I think it's a healthy way to go and an economical way."

According to a September survey on consumer anxieties over higher fuel and
food prices from the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa
State University in Ames, 34 percent of respondents said that they were
likely to raise more of their own vegetables. Another 37 percent said they
were likely to can or freeze more of their food. The cousin to canning and
freezing is the root cellar.

"I've been doing local food work for a long time," said Rich Pirog,
associate director of the Leopold Center, who conducted the study. "And I'm
seeing an increase in articles in various sustainable ag newsletters about
root cellaring."

According to Bruce Butterfield, the research director for the National
Gardening Association, a trade group, home food preservation typically
increases in a rotten economy. In 2002, the close of the last mild
recession, 29 million households bought supplies for freezing, drying,
processing and canning. Last year that number stood at only 22 million - a
figure Mr. Butterfield said he expects to rise rapidly.

Root cellars have long been the province of Midwestern grandmothers,
back-to-the-landers and committed survivalists. But given the nation's
budding romance with locally produced food, they also appeal to the backyard
gardener, who may have a fruit tree that drops a bigger bounty every year
while the refrigerator remains the same size.

While horticulture may be a science, home food storage definitely can carry
the stench of an imperfect art. According to the essential 1979 book, "Root
Cellaring," by Mike and Nancy Bubel, some items like cabbage and pears do
best in a moist environment below 40 degrees (though above freezing). To
achieve this, a cellar probably needs to be vented, or have windows that
open. Winter squash and sweet potatoes should be kept dry and closer to 50
degrees - perhaps closer to the furnace.

Other rules of root cellaring sound more like molecular gastronomy. For
example, the ethylene gas that apples give off will make carrots bitter. As
a general principle, keeping produce in a cool chamber that is beneath the
frost line - the depth, roughly four feet down, below which the soil doesn't
freeze - can slow both the normal process of ripening and the creeping
spread of bacterial and fungal rot. These are the forces that will turn a
lost tomato in the back of the cupboard into a little lagoon of noxious goo.

But if you leave that green tomato on a vine and drape it upside down, it
will gradually turn red in three or four weeks. "I've had fresh tomatoes for
Thanksgiving," said Jito Coleman, an environmental engineer who practices
the inverted tomato - which should be a yoga pose - in a root cellar he
built in the house he designed in Warren, Vt.

People who squirrel away vegetables tend to be resourceful, and they do not
limit themselves to the subterranean. Anna Barnes, who runs a small media
company and coordinates the Prairieland Community Supported Agriculture in
Champaign, Ill., says squash hung in a pair of knotted pantyhose stay
unspoiled longer than others.

Here, the cold is optional, too. It's the bruising that comes from a squash
sitting on a hard countertop, she said, that speeds senescence. ("You wouldn
't want to do it in the guest closet," Ms. Barnes said. Or, presumably, wear
the pantyhose again.)

Taken to a do-it-yourself extreme, lots of places can become stockrooms.
Margaret Christie has surrendered countless nooks in her 1845 Federal-style
home in tiny downtown Whately, Mass., to laying away the crops she grows in
the family's half-acre vegetable plot. Ms. Christie, 44, a projects director
for Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture, a nonprofit that supports
community farming in western Massachusetts, also feeds her husband and three
children from their milk goats, laying hens, pigpens and lamb pastures.

This year, she swapped a lamb for 40 pounds of sweet potatoes, 40 pounds of
onions and 40 pounds of carrots from a neighbor's farm. This cornucopia has
colonized the basement, along with the family's own potatoes. "They're
sitting next to the Ping-Pong table," she said, in "five-gallon buckets with
window screens for the lids."

Onions, garlic and pumpkins dwell in an uninsulated attic - except in
midwinter, when that space drops below freezing. Then the vegetables move
into the guest bedroom. If that space has already been claimed, they
occasionally hide out under the bed of her 11-year-old son. Their homegrown
popcorn kernels have a way of turning up everywhere, courtesy of the
neighborhood mice, who have developed their own taste for locally grown
year-round produce.

The contemporary American, for whom a pizza delivery is seldom more than a
phone call away, is an oddity in the annals of eating. Elizabeth Cromley, a
professor of architectural history at Northeastern University, said that at
one time, "just about every house had special facilities for preserving
food."

Professor Cromley has finished a book called "The Food Axis: Cooking,
Eating, and the Architecture of American Houses," which is to be published
by the University of Virginia Press in 2010. She said that understanding
food preservation is not a frivolous pursuit. More than 400 books instructed
19th-century Americans on how to plan a functional house, with a practical
larder, basement and outbuildings, she said. "You're not going to die if you
don't get a new dress," she said, "but if you don't know this, it will kill
you."

Harriet Fasenfest, 55, who lives in Portland, Ore., has been playing with
her food for a long time. A semiretired restaurateur, she started "hacking
up" her small city lot in the Alberta Art District to grow food. (Her
husband asked, "Where will we play Frisbee?" and Ms. Fasenfest replied, "The
park.") She also teaches classes on canning and created the Web site
portlandpreserve.com.

There is no digging a dry refuge from the seep and suck of a Portland
winter. So in lieu of a traditional cellar, she applies the scientific
method. "Last year I tried an experiment with four different varieties of
apples," she said, "to see how long it took them to rot. So I put them in a
box in my shed and then they rotted. It worked!"

When she's not filling her 10-foot-by-10-foot shed, she experiments in the
cubbyholes that sit alongside the outdoor cellar stairs. Copra onions, Ms.
Fasenfest has found, store better than Walla Wallas. An indoor heating vent
can cure butternut squash so effectively that it can probably last in cold
storage until the economy turns around (whenever that is).

Nevertheless, even those who rhapsodize about the pleasures of eating
locally grown food year-round have to admit that the effort doesn't always
seem worthwhile. Ms. Fasenfest has been forced to conclude that the labor
that went into growing and storing the 30 pounds of russet potatoes now
beneath the stairwell was not really adequate to the reward. "If we had to
survive off of those," she said, "we'd be dead."

</>

On Tue, 11 Nov 2008 00:17:33 -0600, "Gregory Morrow"
> wrote:

>"IN a strictly technical sense, Cynthia Worley is not transforming her
>basement into a time machine. Yet what's going on this harvest season
>beneath her Harlem brownstone on 122nd Street, at Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
>Boulevard, is surely something out of the past - or perhaps the future.
>
>The space itself is nothing special: Whitewashed granite walls run the width
>and depth of the room, 16 feet by 60 feet. A forgotten owner tried to put in
>a cement floor, but the dirt, which takes a long-term view of things, is
>stubbornly coming back. "It's basically a sod floor," Ms. Worley said.

16 feet by 60 feet? Is this what the rest of the world calls a
partial basement???


--
I never worry about diets. The only carrots that
interest me are the number of carats in a diamond.

Mae West

"sf" ha scritto nel messaggio > On Tue, 11 Nov 2008 00:17:33 -0600,
"Gregory Morrow"
>
>>"IN a strictly technical sense, Cynthia Worley is not transforming
>>her>>basement into a time machine. >>
>>The space itself is nothing special: Whitewashed granite walls run the
>>width>>and depth of the room, 16 feet by 60 feet.

16 feet by 60 feet? Is this what the rest of the world calls a
> partial basement???

It sounds to me like a one room wide NYC townhouse, and not a small one.

Giusi wrote:
> "sf" ha scritto nel messaggio > On Tue, 11 Nov 2008 00:17:33 -0600,
> "Gregory Morrow"
>>
>>> "IN a strictly technical sense, Cynthia Worley is not transforming
>>> her>>basement into a time machine. >>
>>> The space itself is nothing special: Whitewashed granite walls run
>>> the width>>and depth of the room, 16 feet by 60 feet.
>
> 16 feet by 60 feet? Is this what the rest of the world calls a
>> partial basement???
>
> It sounds to me like a one room wide NYC townhouse, and not a small
> one.

It's a brownstone, and in Harlem there were many large lovely
examples, though now they are mostly divided into apartments.

nancy