Carla Emery: Author of the Old Fashioned Recipe Book
(Page 13 of 17)
May/June 1975
By the Mother Earth News editors
PLOWBOY: Carla, I don't envy you. As a matter of fact, I'm getting exhausted just listening to what you've already done. And we haven't even gotten to your biggest project yet . . . the School of Country Living. Tell us about that.
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EMERY: Well the idea first came to me about three years ago. I was outside hanging up clothes and thinking of all the people who'd been writing to me about the book. You know, they'd write and ask things like, "Could I just come up for a day and follow you around?" or "I've got a daughter that loves horses. Could she spend the summer with you?" or "Can I bring my scout troop to your farm so we can look at the animals and have a picnic?"
So I was thinking about that and thinking about how hard it was to tell someone how to butcher a pig or pull a frame of honey in a book. "Gosh," I thought, "what a beginner really needs the first time he butchers is a pig with dotted lines on it . . . or an old-timer standing right at his elbow. And the only way to explain about honey is to dress someone up in a bee veil and take him right out to a hive and stand there very calmly with a million bees buzzing around—ZZZZZZZ!—and say, "OK, that long one there is the queen. And these are the drones and all the rest are the workers and fighters."'
And I suddenly knew that what all those people needed was a School of Country Living. A place where they could go and milk a cow and dump animal manure into a methane digester and butcher a pig and make some soap and tan a hide and make some jerky and do all the things that are in the Old Fashioned Recipe Book. And I got very excited about that idea and I ran into the house to where Viola-a woman who was helping me research the book-was boiling bones and I said, "Hey. I've got an idea!"
Then, of course, it went through a lot of stages after that. It's not enough, you know, to tell someone how to raise food for himself and for his animals. He's got to know how to use the by-products . . . how to make soap and tan leather. And he's also got to know how to use a tractor and harness a team of horses and ride and make up a pack. And if he wants to raise some cows he's got to know an Ayrshire from a Holstein or a shorthorn . . . and it just goes on and on.
So we figured out all the things that people would need to know and then we refined everything so we wouldn't have two classes on the same subject at the same time. And so that every class periodmorning, afternoon, and evening-would offer something for a vegetarian, something for a farmer who already had a great deal of experience in country living but who wanted to learn something new, something for the total amateur, something for a man, something for a woman, something for families who wanted to learn together. And I wanted a special children's program too.
But even that wasn't enough. We had to get the classes in sequence so that people could start with something simple and work up from there. And there were a lot of technical details to iron out. For instance, when you butcher a cow, you have to wait a week for the meat to age before you can cut it up . . . which dictates the way you can arrange your classes. And if you expect to serve that meat in your dining hall—or allow your students to drink the milk from your own cows—the state says you have to put in Grade A processing facilities right on the grounds. Some of these requirements are ridiculous—such as the one that says we have to build a special air-conditioned room for the entrails from the animals we butcher, even though we plan to cook the guts and feed them to the pigs-but we have to obey them.
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