Shrove Tuesday

This is the second in a series of blogs about winter. It follows an exploration of Candlemas here.  A future blog will explore more about how our ancestors survived the winter. 

This blog focuses on food. In a time before refrigeration and other modern technology winter was a time of hardship or even death. 

Living history, like the hearthside cooking event seen in the photo above, can help us understand more deeply the challenges our forebears experienced. In the past, most people were farmers and I consider understanding their basic experiences a significant part of researching family history and genealogy (something we do a lot of at the Conway Public Library's Henney History Room). Those photos and paintings and heirlooms of your ancestors become more meaningful when you understand the way they lived and we  offer many free outreach programs to local schools and community groups to accomplish that goal.

Today is Shrove Tuesday. as well as Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, pancake day and paczki day. All these have to do with the idea of celebrating the survival of winter.  Through living history programs we have taught basic historical skills such as ice harvesting, maple sugaring, food preservation, woodworking, etc. ... all of the skills common folk would have used to survive a cold, dark, New England winter.

Shrove Tuesday was also known as the deadline for weddings before Lent. Living history is also good way to understand how women were trained since childhood for the goal of being a "Good Wife." FMI see the book which you can get through the library here. 

Farm and time

The photo below helps set the tone for a farmer's winter. 

This plow, currently on display at Banners restaurant, is anxiously awaiting the Spring which starts on March 20. You can see the plow share in the snow behind the sulky seat. You can also see the hand and foot pedals/gears which control the action of the plow itself. FMI see our previous blog here. 

Another way of viewing the farmer's year is this chart from Thomas Hubka's book Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn. 

As fresh foods were not easily available during New England winters, many meals relied on preserved foods. For our previous blogs on preserving foods in the autumn for winter see here and here and here. 

Some of our outreach programs use a series of artifacts to explore technological change over time. For pancakes this might include the differences between a basic cast iron frying pan...

... to a specialized pan...

...to a automatic commercial unit. 

Now back to the little girl in the first photo above. As I said before, we did teach her the skills to survive a cold, dark, snowy New England winter with only nineteenth-century technology.  

However, she decided that the easiest way to survive a New England winter was to move to Florida where the hibiscus bloom in February... 

... and weddings are held under the palms in a subtropical garden. For more on our daughter's bridal path see our previous blog here. 

While spring starts all over the northern hemisphere on March 20, it will be a while before we can pick fresh strawberries up by Cathedral Ledge. 

In Florida the strawberry harvest festival starts in a couple days. 

FMI see here. 

March is also the beginning of the "march of the strawberries."

In his book The White Hills; Their Legends, Landscape and Poetry, Thomas Starr King starts his chapter on the Saco Valley with a strawberry story.

“We once heard of a traveller who went down to New Orleans, every spring and came North just fast enough to keep pace with the strawberries. He managed to rise on the degrees of latitude at even speed with the bounteous vines and ascending village by village and city after city plucked and ate and thus extended the spring time for his palate all the way from the Gulf of Mexico to Montreal.” 

Now that is a trip I would like to try myself! You can read the passage in his 1864 online edition, p. 137 here.