The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon March 12th, 2008

Ok, it is one of the dorkier puns of all time (for those who don’t know, “Chatelaine” means “the belt you keep your keys on” and refers to the days when managing a large household meant keeping the keys to the storerooms where a family’s wealth in food, spices and goods were kept), but I do want to emphasize that maintaining a family’s stores really is a job – a real and important one.  It is only part of what “household management” once consisted of, but it is an important part (note, Chatelaines are generally feminine, but this can be a guy thing just as easily).  If your experience of food management is like what mine was back before I started doing all this - that is, buying food, stuffing it in the fridge, eating some of it and throwing the rest on the compost pile, the sheer depth to which you get involved with your food will probably surprise you.

Let’s start with the apples.  Eli is apple obsessed, and as obsessions go, it is an easy one to be supportive of.  So every fall, we buy 10 – 12 bushels of apples (this is far more than any rational family would need) and keep them in bins on my front porch.  But that saying about how one rotten apple will spoil the whole barrel – that’s not just a saying.  As we get later into the season, one regular job involves sorting out the apples, taking out those that are getting wrinkled or showing brown spots, and doing something with the apples – applesauce or dried apples usually, but I’m always for pie. 

As the season winds down, I’m doing this kind of work more often with the fresh foods we root cellar – roasting a squash with a soft spot and freezing the contents, cutting bits off a potato.  Mercifully, the onions don’t need my attention much, although a few begin to sprout.  But we have to keep the potatoes in the dark so they don’t turn green.  The carrots are now mostly softening up, but that’s ok – soup time.  The sweet potatoes thankfully remain resolutely firm – I always forget a few until it is time to clean out the storage in july for replacement, and they are usually still good.

Food storage management is a cyclical process.  Even for bulk purchases at a supermarket, for example, you think about it four times, at least.  The first is when you buy the stuff, and haul it home.  The second is when you repackage it for storage (you can order grains and beans packed for storage, but they will be appropriately more expensive) – when you transfer things to their buckets or jars, get rid of as much oxygen as you can (I’ll talk more about this later today), and WRITE THE DATE ON THE JAR, BUCKET OR CONTAINER OF FOOD BEFORE YOU PUT IT AWAY.  Now I can’t tell you how many times I’ve ignored this advice, always to my regret.    Seriously, if you keep a marker by where you keep the food, it takes .02 seconds – and you will be glad you did it.

The next time you visit the food is when you take it out and use it – and then again when you reorder/buy more.  The big key, I find, with knowing when you need more of things is embedding some signal in the storage process that says “time to get more” before you actually run out.  That could be a mental rule that you put it on the list when you take the next-to-last one out, or that you do a weekly survey of what you have, or for larger quantities, mark a line halfway down on the bucket – when you can see the line, time to get more.  Keeping a pad and pen around so that you can write it down when you are thinking about it helps with the “out of sight, out of mind” problem I have.

Gardens only flourish when the “gardeners shadow” is there to make them flourish – but food is like that even after it leaves the garden in many ways.  Some foods will happily and quietly sit on the shelf for long periods without your attention, but even they deserve and need a quick scan over now and then. 

I try to do this while getting ready for passover each year, since I’m cleaning anyway.  I try and look at, touch and examine every jar, can and bucket.  It is a good time to make large donations to the food pantry, and a good time to sort out what isn’t good, or what really should be used sooner, rather than later.  It would be smarter to inventory more often, but I don’t.

This is also when I begin my estimates of what I’ll need for the next year.  I track when we run out of home produced things – for example, we ran out of strawberry jam in January this year, and peach, blueberry and raspberry by the end of February (the fact that my kids get bigger each year somehow escapes me in my planning most of the time).  We still have cranberry and black currant, but those aren’t the preferred choices - ok, that means I need to put up 10 more jars of each to see us through to strawberry season.

 I estimate how much rice we went through last year. If I know this, I can make 2 or 3 bulk orders over the course of the year, spacing it out.  For example, I know we go through about 200lbs of rolled oats a year – so picking up a 50lb bag every few months will keep my stores about even.  If I want to increase them, I might pick up two.

As I go through, I sniff the jars of herbs, to see if I need more.  Every year, I grow more varieties of medicinal and culinary herbs – do I need to plant more sage or pennyroyal this year?  Or just harvest more regularly?  As I’m placing seed and plant orders, I think ahead to what we might need if current patterns go forward. 

Where do we want to replace store bought with homegrown?  What do we wish we’d had more of, and what could we have made do with less of?  The garden and food storage are more closely tied than you’d think – for example, my root cellaring is much more effective if I grow varieties designed to store long times.  So my seed choices begin with preservation in mind (I’ll post a list of varieties designed for keeping later this week).

I check the top of the jars of home canned food by pressing them gently – if one of them pops up, the seal has broken and the jar is no good.  It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a great while.

The freezer too needs some checking – I don’t want to find unidentifiable things in the bottom this year.  Are we out of home frozen broccoli?  Here is where a list, made in the fall, is a huge help.  We use boxes and bins in our freezer, and write down what’s in them, and also the absolute number of things – if I know I have only 5 containers of frozen corn, it makes it easier to space them out. I make marks for them and strike one off as we use it. 

Some things get rotated in location – I buy bulk, fair traded chocolate chips.  Through the fall and winter they sit in the cool pantry – in the spring, they move (except for a few in a jar on a shelf) into the freezer - serving multiple purposes.   In the fall, the freezer is far too full to accomodate chocolate chips and it is plenty cool in the pantry closet.  In warmer weather, the chocolate chips stay fresh better in the freezer, and the freezer runs more efficiently when it is full. 

-Dry and Dehydrated foods need the least attention – but not none.  Check for bugs, make sure seals are tight, and then check once a year.

 - Canned foods should be checked several times a year, to make sure that no hard bumps have broken a seal, and that they are being used regularly.  They will last some years, of course, but the nutritional content is higher early on.

- Root cellared foods should be visited regularly – every few weeks in the fall, more often as the winter progresses.

- Frozen foods should be checked on every few months.

I use one notebook (paper, not a spreadsheet kinda girl ), to manage all my stores – I know how many buckets of rice and jars of corn relish I’ve got, and when I bought them.  I keep running lists of things to order more of, notes on what to do better next year. I always forget to write some things down.  I always screw up and let something rot that shouldn’t.  I always make mistakes with food storage, and so, most likely will you.  Sometimes they are big mistakes, but as I get better, they get smaller – mostly. 

You shouldn’t expect to do this perfectly – yes, it is important not to waste food.  But the truth is that the best way to learn to manage stored food, to become comfortable as Chatelaine of your household, is simply to do it, and that means mistakes.  But make them now, while they are easily reparable.

 Sharon

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