Gathering Real Food
(Page 2 of 6)
April/May 2004
By Linnea Johnson
For early tomatoes I could always count on the Martins' roadside stand west of Kutztown. Mrs. Martin's greenhouse produced the earliest and the latest tomatoes on my Pennsylvania circuit. Spring, summer and fall, she and her children put out plums, peppers, tomatoes, squash, corn and melons. Often as not, upon hearing someone drive off the back road and park, one of her children would come running to help, to accept payment and to make change. Sometimes it was just me alone with the produce, and I left my payment in the box beside the produce display.
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One fall, the Martins' stand included a few small boxes of ground cherries. "Yum," I said when I spotted them. She said almost no one bought them because so few knew what they were. I bought two boxes and made one small, very acidic, slightly cherry-tasting pie. It could have made jam or a great sauce for a baked ham.
Then there was the time when I stopped by for tomatoes and Mrs. Martin came out to meet me at the stand. I told her how much I loved her tomatoes, thanking her for growing them so beautifully, season after season. I commented that I also loved seeing her children growing year to year. It was then she told me that one of her sons had drowned just days before, in the pond out back of the house. Did I know him, she asked? "No," I said, as we wept quietly in the presence of the tomatoes, peppers and sweet corn. But, I said, I felt as if I had met him given all the food he had helped to harvest from their farm, and which I'd eaten and which was now part of me.
There are several other stands along my usual route, and I often stopped in even if I thought I had everything I needed, just to see if they had anything beyond the ordinarily wonderful. Maybe someone on the farm had made freshly churned sweet butter that week, finished a handmade quill put by homemade jams and jellies or chow chow. Maybe there'd be pie!
Near Krumsville, there's a winery that makes good champagne-style wines. A Topton, there's a small meat shop where the butcher will cut exactly the steaks or chop I want and wrap them neatly in white paper High up one bumpy driveway, there's lovely dried flower farm called Persephone' Garden, where I stopped whenever I needed a special gift. Her shop is near her garden, and the arrays of blossoms inside and outside are a treat in themselves. She creates and sells all kinds of dried flower arrangements, and teaches classes, too.
And then there's the splendid, tree-ripened fruit from County Line Orchard just north of Kempton, owned and operated by Todd Smith. The years the late frost doesn't get them first, tangy-sweet apricots are sold at County Line. Every year I lived nearby, I signed my name to a list. If and when the apricots came in the next spring, I got the postcard they mailed to me, and drove up, delirious, happy and usually in the company of other apricot aficionados. Jam and pie recipes were dancing in our heads, the flavor of last year's crop alive on our tongues. Then I made pies and tarts and jams and fruit leathers and brandied apricot preserves—anything I could think of to capture the plush and zingy flavor of this too-rare fruit.
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