June 2010 Archives

This recipe was requested by some readers of our most recent newsletter.

This is a very old-fashioned recipe that is not a pudding or even a pudding cake, but more like a heavy, porous coffee cake designed to be served with milk or half and half poured over it. It is probably a Mennonite recipe, because my Grandmother had never written it down before she let me transcribe what she did when making it — which would suggest that it was probably handed down by word of mouth in her family. And she was a Landis whose family had migrated down the Shenandoah Valley from Pennsylvania.

It is my very favorite sour-cherry dessert, and I could hardly wait each summer for the cherries to come in knowing it would be the first thing she would make. I never even poured the cream over it; I just ate it plain and still do.

• 3 Tablespoons butter
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 pint or more sour cherries, pitted
• 1½ cups milk
• 3 cups flour sifted with:
  • 3 level teaspoons baking powder and
  • A pinch of salt — about ½ teaspoon

Cream butter, sugar and eggs. Add dry ingredients and milk alternately. Fold in berries. Pour into 9-inch Pyrex baking dish and bake at 375 degrees for 35–40 minutes or until lightly browned on top and dry in the middle when tested with a wooden skewer.

Serve for breakfast or as a dessert with milk, cream or half and half poured over it. Serves 6–9.

Earlier today, knowing that I needed to sit down and write this evening, I was seeking inspiration in all the wrong places, and it was hard to find on a hot, sultry day way too early in the season. So I stepped into the kitchen and looked at what I had brought home from the market this week and realized that we are on the cusp of another summer full of fantastic ingredients just sitting there waiting for me to cook them up. It’s enough to make you wish they knew what joy they bring to those of us who love to cook and eat!

My kitchen has smelled like peaches all week, and I will make tomorrow the first Fresh Peach Cake of the season to take to Chester on Tuesday to sample at his stall — it’s either that or eat it all myself. There are blueberries in my refrigerator waiting to be surrounded by a lovely corn muffin batter — I may bring those to market too. And last night we sat around and watched Toy Story on TV while we pitted six quarts of my very favorite sour cherries — and they are in the freezer now awaiting the first Cherry Pudding of the season.

Some of the recipes have been handed down for many generations. The Cherry Pudding recipe is in my grandmother’s handwriting, and I forced her to record it one summer while we were making the pudding in her kitchen in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Even after we moved to Georgia when I was six years old, we came back to Harrisonburg every summer, and one of the things I looked forward to most was the trip to the Hole-in-the-Wall where farmers came into town to sell their wares off the backs of their trucks in an alley with a “storefront.”

Nanna Mommy always knew when to expect the sour cherries. Then as now, they didn’t last long, and we would make the trip, return home and make the dessert immediately; she wasn’t any better at waiting than I. The dessert is actually not a pudding but a very dense cake with only a few ingredients and no technical challenges at all. The final product is very dense and designed to be covered in cream when served up, which immediately is absorbed by the cake, transforming the consistency into something more like a pudding that it was before. I was the oddball — I just ate it plain. You could eat more that way because with the cream it was just too rich. I may have been odd, but I was not stupid!

In all these years I have read countless cookbooks and many years’ worth of food magazines (all in my basement, but that’s another story) and numerous articles and books about the history of food in this country and around the world, and I have never seen this recipe anywhere else — even under another name. Where did it come from? Who made it the first time? Was anything other than sour cherries ever used as the fruit? And why is it called a pudding? The back story is no longer part of my family’s story, and the best I can hope for is that the recipe will keep moving through time, hopefully with my own granddaughter who watched us pitting those cherries. She now looks forward just as I did to helping make the Cherry Pudding with me in my own kitchen. And putting her own stamp on the legacy, she wants to make a cherry cobbler too.

But what may explain even better my family’s love of food throughout the seasons — and the anticipation that brings — is this story: Nanna Mommy’s kitchen was big and airy with 20-foot ceilings and glass-fronted cabinets that I would have needed a ladder to reach. There was a large round table in the middle with bentwood chairs that were always filled with aunts and uncles and neighbors and friends drinking coffee all day long, it seems to me now. One day I was there with my Dad and others and my grandfather came through the kitchen door with black raspberries from the Hole-in-the-Wall. We soon realized that he was at the stove making them up into a sauce, spooning sugar into a small pot and stirring away — still in his jacket and hat from his day at the office.

So it must run in the family — summer comes, the fruit comes in — you buy it or pick it yourself — and you cook it up right then and there. Life is fleeting, but even more so is the fruit!

See you at the market!

If you’ve been to our markets, you might have heard the great music of mandolinist Tara Linhardt and her old-time musician friends. Well, Tara and some other musicians made a film, The Mountain Music Project: A Musical Odyssey from Appalachia to Himalaya, in which they traveled to Nepal and shared their music with performers in that country. (Watch the trailer.)

You can help the film win the People’s Choice award in the upcoming World Music and Independent Film Festival — just visit this page, click “add” next to the Mountain Music Project, and click “Vote” at the bottom of the page. Tara and her friends will definitely appreciate your support!

On April 27 three senators sent a letter (PDF) to Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. In the letter they accuse the Department’s Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food program as being elitist by “subsidizing the so-called locavore niche market.” Whatever that is! These wise men are concerned that the money being spent to reconnect farmers with consumers does not help the “conventional farmers who produce the vast majority of our nation’s food supply.” Then they really go after those of us who have decided that we want to support our small local farms and help the environment and preserve our health by calling the farmers “small, hobbyist and organic producers” whose customers are “affluent patrons at urban farmers’ markets.”

They seem to think that the farmers who supply markets across this country in small towns and big cities and sprawling suburbs are actually growing their produce on urban plots, in their backyards or in greenhouses on their roofs. Since the average farm in Virginia is about 40 acres, it is fair to assume that their farms are smaller than the vast corporate farms that seem to turn out E. coli-laden fruits and veggies with some regularity. But the real concern of these senators is that the grant and loan money made available under the program for the small farmers who sell at markets (most of which of course are not in urban areas — at least half of Virginia’s markets are in rural communities and small towns) is diverting money from the farmers who are hurting in today’s economy — like those farming for ConAgra, for example. And they may be hurting, but it is because their corporate masters are squeezing them as dry as a sun-dried tomato.

The irony here, of course, is that they somehow have managed to connect the small family farm to an elitist market system, when in fact the Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food initiative is designed to promote and support those small family farms that continue to disappear into ConAgra’s giant reaper. I am betting that none of the signees has ever been to a farmers’ market, ever met a small farmer who sells at farmers’ markets or has ever spent time with the kinds of people who really shop at markets — those very people who, no matter their income, have decided it is worth it to spend their own hard-earned money on real food with real flavor that was grown by real farmers who plant seed by hand and harvest the same way. How elitist is that?

Sometimes those of us who love our farmers need to speak up on their behalf. They are not going to be marching on Washington themselves anytime soon; they are too busy trying to save their farms. I would very much like to hear from more of you with your own comments. We will collect them and send them to Secretary Vilsack and to our own Virginia senators.