Fridge-less Living

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Fruit

The fleshy, often sugary seedpods that we call fruit (including tomatoes, peppers, pumpkins, and winter squash) are produced by plants to attract birds and mammals that will eat the fruit and distribute the seeds it contains in their droppings. Fruits are preprogrammed to produce a sequence of enzymes that cause them to swell and mature their seed, then ripen and heighten in color, then soften and decay—at each stage emitting sight clues and odors that attract different creatures to the feast. Preserving fruits against their normal self-destructive tendencies is a challenge.

Pumpkin and winter squash are cur-curbits, a family of tropical vines that includes cucumbers and summer squash, that we consume in the immature stage, well before seeds develop. To keep for six months or longer, pumpkins and winter squash must be grown for that purpose and cured and stored in a moderately warm place with moderate humidity. Most importantly, select a keeping variety that will grow to full maturity in your locale. Don't expect to keep acorn squash for more than a month—if that. Choose reliable Blue Huhbard, Waltham Butternut, or one of the new miniatures, such as Delicata. To keep pumpkin past Halloween, you can roast the pulp and dry-pack it canned, one pie to a pint jar. To dry store, grow an old reliable variety such as Connecticut Field.

For best storage quality, plant as early as you can; let vines grow rampant, but prune each to the two or three best fruit. At an early age, set each fruit up off the ground on a pad of dry hay. Renew the hay once or twice during the season to keep mice or insects from burrowing. When fruit reach harvest stage, the skin won't dent with a thumbnail, and they make a hollow thump. Well before hard frost, harvest by cutting the stem several inches from the fruit. If stem sloughs off, paint the scar with hot paraffin or beeswax to keep it from wicking off moisture.

Then, let fruit cure for up to a month so skins can dry out and harden into a proper-keeping rind. Keep in a sunny yard up on hay pads, on the sunny porch steps, or inside in a warm room. Then, store in single layers at around 60°F and moderate humidity. My grandmother kept hers on hay in wooden orange crates under a porcelain table in a north-side unheated glassed-in porch that backed up to the kitchen stove. She reserved the very best tomatoes, stored them in straw down in the cold cellar, brought them up on November first, started ripening them in a paper bag with an old apple in it, and finished them off on the sunny window-sill. We often had a few precious and much commented-on fresh homegrown tomatoes in the salad for the four-generation family Thanksgiving dinner.

Fruit such as apples or pears can be kept alive and crisp for many months, but only if you keep them away from old or rotten fruit such as the apple my Grandmother used to ripen her Thanksgiving tomatoes. Almost all rose-family and citrus fruit—apples are just the most notorious—emit ethylene gas as they ripen. The stuff is colorless and odorless to us, but a snort of it gives many living plants the urge to move along in life. Commercial produce marketers gas green citrus fruit and tomatoes with ethylene in the truck on the way to market to liven their color; it doesn't do much for flavor in so short a time. Even in small concentrations, ethylene makes stored lettuce want to go to seed and makes potatoes and other root vegetables want to sprout, so many old-timers stored fruit and vegetables separately. In a modern cold cellar with good air circulation and a reasonable amount of diligence, the problem seldom becomes serious.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print