Fridge-less Living

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Set your screens in the sun and let the goods dry till leathery. Bring inside nights, on cool cloudy days, and during rain. Don't stack too many layers of screens one on the other: it's moving dry air that dries the food.

For inside drying, I used to employ a handful of onion bags. Now, short on space, I use a hanging drier that consists of a tier of five-foot-square screens inside a net bag. Hung near the woodstove, it can also be used to sprout warmth-loving seeds. Called the Food Pantry, it is sold by Lehman's and Cumberland Farms. Lehman's also sells old-time tin-pan water-bath dryers to set on the woodstove and dry popcorn and parching corn.

You can also make or purchase several kinds of electrically-powered dryers: boxes or plastic cylinders with stacked net trays or perforated trays inside. Some have fans at the bottom or rear, some just heating elements. Since it first came out in the '70s, my favorite has been Bob & Gen MacManiman's Living Foods Dehydrator, an industrial-sized device that is still available complete, as a full or partial kit, electric or gravity-powered. Made of honest wood, you can set it on top of your wood stove if the iron's cool enough. Plans are included in Gen's great little homemade book Dry It—You’ll Like It (MacManiman Inc., 1997) that has sold over a quarter-million copies.

Ignore the old-timey cookbooks that tell you to just string your beans and broccoli on thread and dry it in the loft. We believed all that and tried it 30 years ago—and discovered that destructive enzymes in the stone-dead plant will begin to digest the flesh, giving it a nasty off flavor before drying has a chance to put a halt to the process.

Treat all vegetables as if you were freezing them. Choose only the freshest; wash, trim, and cut them thin or into small bite-sized pieces that will heat and chill quickly. Set up a steamer or really big pot of boiling water and blanch the produce to kill enzymes, as you would for freezing.

Green beans, for example, need four minutes in live steam or two minutes in boiling water. Drain and plunge into the coldest water you can arrange. A bowl full of ice cubes is best.

Pat dry and string the green beans on thread for a modem version of "leather britches." Tender young beans will dry in a few days. Soak in cold water to reconstitute; the result will have a leathery texture if eaten raw or even after boiling. But they taste more like fresh green beans than canned or even frozen beans. Like many dried foods, "leather britches" are best used as an ingredient in soup or stew—real cold-weather meals.

In the south, cold cellars don't stay cold in the summer and drying was the most common pre-electrification form of food preservation. Below the Mason-Dixon line, "leather britches" were made from semi-mature green snap beans with seeds beginning to develop. Pods were snapped and strings removed before drying. For a meal, they were soaked overnight, drained, and cut up with scissors so the seeds popped free. Then seeds and pod sections were boiled for an hour or more with a chunk of sidemeat (salt pork or bacon) or a ham skin, and a good dollop of sugar and salt, if needed. This is great stuff, especially if the water is allowed to boil off till it starts to pop in the pork grease, and the "mess a' beans" is sprinkled with dried leaves of the old-time cooking spice summer savory. Served with grits and buttermilk, the beans make a fine supper that supplies a full spectrum of nutrients.

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