The Cold Spring Farmers' Market Blog

More Lovely Market Pictures

2009-07-02T15:07:00.005-05:00

These wonderful photos are from a friend of the Market, Tom Carrigan of Cold Spring.

See more on Flickr.

A lovely day at the Market

2009-06-14T11:53:00.007-05:00

Saturday, June 13, 2009

Many thanks to long-time CSFM board member Ruth Eisenhower for sharing her lovely images with us.

See more images at Picasa.

2009 Vendor Application process is closed

2009-05-19T23:28:00.001-05:00

Vendor Application for 2009 Now Available

2009-02-27T07:23:00.004-05:00

It's finally here!

Download the 2009 Vendor Application.

Market will be accepting new vendor applications after January 27th, 2009

2009-01-23T09:49:00.002-05:00

Please visit our website for an application form after February 15th.

Corn Roast!

2008-08-29T10:07:00.003-05:00

This Saturday, August 30, Kessman Farms will be roasting their delectable ears of corn for all marketgoers to enjoy. Bring friends, an appetite, and a blanket to sit down and feast on your freshly roasted ears, while your other ears enjoy the tunes of the Edukated Fleas, playing from 10 to noon.

SCARLET IN BOGLAND

2007-06-07T23:20:00.000-05:00

by Peter Lewis

First come wild strawberries, early in spring, then blackberries and dewberries, then red and black raspberries, then the blues. They have pedigrees, this group, some thorny but always smart bright pedigrees.

Scattershot among the swells, here in the Northeast, are a mob of suspicious characters--ground hurts, crows, mountain ash, wild raisin, chokecherry, sweet pear, cloudy bakeapple--berry oddballs from the bush leagues. But take a cue from the birds and give them a go when the getting’s good.

Sitting awkwardly in this mixed company, betwixt and between the haves and have nots, are the late-season cranberries, dutiful minor leaguers who answer the perennial call up to the majors for a brief candent appearance, then are sent back down to the wastelands--to bog, barren, and heath--until November rolls around once more. They deserve better, and it wasn’t always so.

Native Americans knew a good berry when they saw one, and they knew how to wring every bit of goodness from it. They took the cranberry, one of the few sui generis fruits to North American soil, and squeezed it for dyestuff, chopped the unripe fruit for poultices (thus tapping the natural antibiotic properties), took it as a symbol of peace. They also ate it: in fritters, puddings, succotash; when eaten simple, they were known to add wild honey or maple sugar to cut the tartness. And cranberries redeemed pemmican, that native road-food patty of dried cranberry, smoked venison, fat, and wild onion, which when met face-to-face will be appreciated as an acquired (or circumstantially required) taste, not unlike that other ancient survivance, haggis.

Nor were Europeans, when they hit these shores, ignorant of the cranberry. In a Danish Bronze Age tomb archaeologists found a mug containing cranberry juice dregs (cranberry, bog myrtle, and honey--the Cranapple of its day). The European variety is smaller than its North American counterpart, grows all along the northern fringe, Scandinavia to Siberia, goes by a hundred names, including lingonberry and preiselberry. In Scotland and northern England, cranberry tarts were part of the “unwritten tradition of peasant cookery,” according to Jane Grigson in her Fruit Book.

Grigson also notes that cranberries are still known as crones and cranes in parts of Great Britain, and she goes on: “Why are they called
cranberries? Americans...say because the flowers are like a crane’s head. More probably and practically, if less poetically (why bother about the flowers), it is because cranes (which used to be common in Britain) and cranberries are both at home in the bogs.”

The hard-put early colonists loved their cranberries, not leastwise their familiarity (though plumper and, some said, tastier than the European) and especially their waxy skin, which kept the berries fresh a good long time. Whalers ate them while at sea to ward off scurvy. Household larders considered them a staple and used them every which way: in cakes and toasts, in stews, salads, biscuits, breads, for dressings, garnishes, spreads, stuffing, sauces, and relishes. Plus those desserts: sherberts, squares, shortcakes, and on and on. Recipes were appearing in colonial cookbooks as early as 1663.

As these were wild berries, an element in the common holding, folks were protective of them. Wampanoags had by 1845 legally protected the cranberry grounds on Martha’s Vineyard; in the late-18th century the New Jersey legislature passed an act fining anyone who dared to pick a berry before October 10th, while in Massachusetts, where autumn came that much earlier, access was granted on September 20th.

The American cranberry--which first went under cultivation in 1816 on Cape Cod--favors a boggy environment, watery and acidic, and it appreciates a coat of sand to keep the competition--weeds and insects--in check. Massachusetts and Wisconsin are the main commercial venues, with New Jersey, Maine, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Quebec, and Ontario also adding their share (plus a handful of independents from cranberry outbacks, like Tennessee and Georgia).

he majority of harvest cranberries are destined to be dried or turned into juice, jelly, or sauce. These are the berries that conjure spectacular scarlet carpets on the autumn bogscape, once the grounds have been flooded and the water reels have churned the water with enough vigor to loose the berry from its trailing vine. The berries are herded into a corner of the bog and collected. For the fresh market, the berries are dry harvested with rigs that resemble mechanical combs, which replaced the lovely cranberry hand scoop, or the berries are water raked after a light flooding. The job of the cranberry inspector is made simple because ripe berries bounce. They are shuttled into a contraption that gives them seven tries to try to bounce over a four-inch hurdle. Bounce, berry, bounce, or get the culler’s axe. And yes, cranberries are also known (unpoetically, as Grigson would say) as bounce berries.

Ocean Spray, a growers cooperative formed in 1930, now handles much of the production and distribution of cranberries. Over 70% of all cranberry growers are members of the cooperative, and they have been the beneficiaries of an extraordinarily successful promotional team. Ocean Spray has run some of the cleverest, most appealing advertisements in the history of television, and they introduced juice boxes back in the early 1980s. Nor have they shied from trying new things, once going out on a limb with a viscous cranberry syrup intended for use with alcohol, which bombed, and fruit juice combos, which took off like a Roman candle.

Growers concentrate on five varieties of Vaccinium macrocarpon, the American cranberry, but like all fruits, cranberries possess quirky varieties (there are over 100 all told) that would be a guaranteed experience to track down. There you are in a high alpine meadow, the wind biting and the first snow dusting the elevation (the later the cranberry is picked, the sweeter it is) following a tip that the meadow harbors the rare Thoughtful Bird cranberry. Or try to score a Potter’s Favorite, see if you can distinguish between it and a Searles Jumbo or a Bud’s Blue (who was Bud? why are his berries blue?).

Cranberries, the unlikely edible: red and tart, signals that trigger a warning light in the reptilian core of our brain, deep down in the survival mechanism--beware that color, and where’s the sweetness? (It took a hero--flying in the face of instinct--to push on, to tinker and coax delight from the pop-skull tartness. Perhaps it was that brewmeister back in Bronze Age Denmark. Well, skoal to you, my friend.) Though I only hazard this guess, I’d wager it was the increasing availability of naturally sweet berries and fruits, native and imported--those mentioned above plus apples and pears, currants, the stone fruits--that drove the tart cranberry from our collective consciousness and relegated it to holiday-only status.

But the cranberry is a tenacious old soul and it has slowly been insinuating itself back into our pantries over the past twenty years, mostly as a juice, but also fresh and dried. One important reason for this is the cranberry’s reputation as a health-giver. I like to think that it also may have something to do with the growing appreciation of regional foods--and by extension our sense of place--that we may be rediscovering the ability to know a good berry when we see one. And eat it.

THE BEET

2007-05-09T13:30:00.000-05:00

by Peter Lewis

It is not an inspiring vegetable, unless you have a medieval passion for highly colored food. I have never heard anyone claim it as their favourite."--Jane Grigson, The Vegetable Book

With beets, it’s an image problem. They are unkempt and whiskery and quick to bleed. This is no way for a vegetable to behave, even a root vegetable. But, like young boys, while some may be rotten, there are no bad beets.

It is fitting that the Vandals would take a shine to the barbarous beetroot, carrying it home with them once they were through overrunning Gaul and Spain and sacking Rome. In the early Middle Ages, some Germanic gardener got the fancy idea of squashing the elongated wild beetroot, arriving at the familiar turnip shape.

Now round, the beet rolled north through Poland to the Baltic states, then took a right into Russia and another right into eastern Europe, attaining a number of culinary expressions, not the least of which was animal feed, though perhaps best known is the glorious borscht.

On its home turf, you can't throw a brick without it landing in a bowl of borscht. And, of course, one man's borscht is another woman's charlatan. Recipes bristle and swarm, local distinctions are defended to the last spoonful.

There are chilled versions, where the root goes into a Cinderella routine, the sweetness brimming beneath its rude exterior and all that brilliant color released into creamy elegance. There are hot versions, and more hot versions. Darra Goldstein, in A La Russe, mentions over a hundred varieties from the Ukraine alone. Beets are the common denominator (though there is also a green borscht flavored with sorrel and spinach)--that fabulous purple--but the folks from Kiev add lamb and garlic, while those over in Lvov prefer a small, mild frankfurter. Potato goes into the Galacian soup, the citizens of Chernigov toss in yellow squash, over in Poltava poultry and dumplings get the nod. Sugar is added to further sweeten some concoctions, or lemon for tartness, or soused apples for the pucker.

Beet eaters continued to tinker with the root. The Italians dandified the classic deep-purple beet (which have names like gang members: Crosby's Egyptian, Detroit Dark Red) by turning it pink with white rings, a widely available heirloom known as Barbarietola di Chiogga, or just Chiogga for short. (Don’t expect the color to hold; it typically bleeds and evens.) There are cylindrical beets--the Formanova and the cunningly named Cylindra--that are handy for slicing, and there are gold and yellow and white beets, handy for not tattooing your fingers or anything else they touch, including other foods. Remarkably, they all taste like beets, though I find the red more earthy and the baby beets too sugary or bitter at the expenses of flavor.

Beets have profited from the boon in locally grown, organic, and antique varieties of produce over the past 20 years. Homely, perhaps, but no longer low rent. Currently, the jury seems to favor baking over boiling. Baking preserves the beet's color and nutrients, heightens their sugariness, concentrates the flavor, and makes their flesh more savorous. Trim the stalks to 2 inches, leave the roots and skin on, and bake covered with foil (folded to catch the drips) or in a baking dish at 350 degrees until tender; this can be hours depending on size. Or you can steam the beets, with those the size of a pool ball taking about a half hour. Either way, the skins will slip off like pajamas. You may want to boil the big bubbas, such as the mangels and mangolds, two types of sugar beets that can weigh in at 10 pounds and would likely take a month to bake through.

The uses to which beets can be put, other than borscht, are legion: pickled, cooked or grated raw in salads, buttered, sugared, mixed with cream and herring, in a gratin. They are prized as raw juice. My personal beet favorite is red-flannel hash--onions and potatoes and beets fried in a little bacon fat--a treat not to be confused with calico hash, I've been warned, which is corned-beef hash made with beets, and also mighty tasty.

By all means don't forget the greens; they're what attracted humans to the plant in the first place, way back when on the storm battered Atlantic coast of North Africa. The yellow beets have a particularly succulent leaf, as do the Early Wonder red beets, good in soups and for stuffing pasta. Then there are the lithe, metallic-purple leaves of MacGregor's Favorite, an heirloom Scottish beet grown for its tops. It's as endearingly close as a beet will ever get to making a fashion statement.

BEET TIPS

Like sweet corn, the quicker from earth to maw the better, as once picked the beet sugars are busy turning to starch.

Separate greens from roots if you are not going to eat the roots within a day. The greens rapidly turn slimy (thus they are a good freshness indicator).

Borscht with meat is always better the next day. The flavors just get better when they have time to get acquainted.

Add sour cream to your plate of borscht, not the cooking pot; re-heating will cause the sour cream to curdle.

If you want to avoid purple fingers, prepare cooked beets with your hands in Baggies, and if you want to avoid a purple countertop, cover it with waxed paper or parchment.

As with wine spilled on the tablecloth, put salt on beet stains. Also tastes good on the beets.

Market Calendar

2007-04-04T16:13:00.000-05:00

This year the Cold Spring Farmers' Market opens on Saturday, May 26th (Memorial Day Weekend).

You can visit our website to see our detailed calendar.

Become a Business Sponsor

2007-04-03T16:55:00.000-05:00

As a Business Sponsor of the Cold Spring Farmers' Market, you help support regional agriculture while encouraging local customers and area visitors to shop in the village. The cost of seasonal sponsorship is only $100.

For more information and to download an application, please visit our Business Sponsor page on our website.

Join our email list

2007-01-11T15:48:00.000-05:00

Keep in touch with your market.

Sign up for our email list here, and we'll keep you updated on future market events. Let us know if you'd like to donate your time, money, or expertise to help keep the market going and to make it even better. Comments & suggestions are always welcome.