Winter’s Bounty | The Farmer’s Life

Three seasons of work is revealed inside the farmer’s freezer.

Even as my pastures are sealed inside a white vault of snow, and the garden, too, huddles in a bunker called “winter,” so my basement contains a microcosm of the farm at large. All that I’ve raised—the meat and produce of both venues—is held in the frigid thrall of my chest freezer. Talk about time standing still: there’s a calendar year in here—the rhubarb juice of June and the blueberries of July lean quietly beside the lamb shanks of October and the pumpkin pie of November. And whereas the growing season is one long rampage of germinating and tending and attempting to assert order (weeding out pea beds; retaining sheep in their paddocks), here within the 14.9 cubic feet of my manual defrost Kenmore, there is eternal peace. The turkey lies down with the hamburger, the chocolate zucchini bread rests against the applesauce. Now after so many months of keeping up with surfeit—blendering pesto and blanching beans—there is only the easy prospect of containing it, brought to me courtesy of a guy with a cool idea, Westye Bakke.

Bakke, a refrigeration consultant to Frank Lloyd Wright, took cold storage one step further and 30 degrees lower. By 1945, his sub-zero freezers manufactured in Wisconsin were sold to preservation minded homeowners all over. Whereas before, food was kept frozen thanks to blocks of ice repeatedly plunked into insulated cabinets, now a whole flock of white appliances could do the job of keeping a summer’s loot at the daytime high of the last ice age.

“Cold Spot,” the forefather of my food trunk, a 1955 model with 20 cubic feet, boasted a 700-pound food capacity and claimed to store 350 meals at a time. My grandmother used to have something like it. At the conclusion of our visits, she’d dash off to her garage to open its lid, the way a mechanic lifts the hood of a car. Peering in, the freezer’s light shone on her face like a pale sun as she shuffled items searching for the right mystery dish smothered in tinfoil to send us home with. Applesauce? Onion soup? Meatballs? We never knew what she might withdraw until she finished excavating. When she was, she’d hand her gift over with a triumphant, “Here!”

Perhaps it was more than her mystery dish that she passed on to me. An overeager kid, I was constantly subjecting some poor visitor to an exhibit of some kind, of my stamp collection, say, or a group of drawings. Later, that impulse became my excitement to show off a growing season’s worth of work. “Wanna see my chest freezer?” I have actually uttered more than once.

To be fair—it is something of a treasure chest. Even if its contents do not sparkle or gleam like gold and emeralds, I often dip into my harvest’s largess in order to thank a helpful neighbor, barter for a jug of syrup, or to bribe a busy electrician.And instead of driving icy roads to fetch a bunch of groceries, I simply descend a flight of steps. For breakfast I’ll dig out a bag of peaches and the asparagus quiche I made back when our hens were flush with eggs. For lunch I’ll haul up a pre-cut portion from one of our turkeys and thaw it for sandwiches. Back again at the freezer’s rim, I’ll solve dinner with some lamb chops, blanched broccoli and a jar of black currant sauce. When sickness strikes, I’ll paw around for chicken broth; when company comes I’ll palm a jar of cider and pluck up a Tupperware of raspberries for some muffins. As winter progresses, the freezer’s load will shift from its home below ground to my dinner plate above, migrating from its chest to my chest, the chest of my husband and those of my dinner guests.

Meanwhile, a harvest from six acres, stored in the Kenmore’s torpor, the true vault at the core of our farm, allows us to happily inhabit the season. Caught between last year’s plenty and next year’s bounty (dreamed in the pages of seed catalogues,) we’re fortified by the good fruit of our labor and Westye Bakke’s ingenuity.