Winter Food Storage - The Bleak Frontier

[Applause] [Music] it's winter it's it's truly the most difficult time of year just to survive we've had to basically prepare all year long and really it doesn't matter whether we're in the city or in a frontier situation winter is hard but in a frontier situation you can't go down to the store you've got to have exactly what you need to survive for three months the only store you've got is to go out in the woods and go hunting and that works but it's very difficult to survive that way so we've had to you know take all year long to preserve all the things that we're going to be needing this entire season is what our pantry looks like here in the cabin if you think about this cabin it's a tiny room it's probably smaller than your garage at home and yet we've got to figure out how we're going to store a winter's amount of food in this tiny little building this is just a little example of what you might have as a painter here in a cabin like this we've got bags of dried grains we've got storage canisters that might have pickles in them all different kinds of things we might store something dry like sugar etc we've got barrels that we will use to store amounts of grain in jugs to store liquids in all these things although have to be protected and obviously we need a lot more than that we might be like living on top of our provisions and there are even opportunities where we might have to take some of these things outside and bury them in a hole in the ground to protect them and to make them last the winter this is very difficult to have an entire season's worth of food in a tiny little building like this it's a a true challenge and and certainly was a challenge in that time period out here in the wilderness you can either hunt for food in forage and it's hard to forage in the winter for the most part uh you can use what your animals are giving to you that you have you know stored for for food and for cream bakes that kind of thing and you have your stores of grains dried vegetables pickles that sort of thing that's what that's what we've got to use we're getting a little tired of eating meat we're getting a little tired of eating what we're hunting day to day so this recipe lets us use things like eggs cream milk sugar that's stored back barley that's stored back and create something that is a little sweet has a different texture but still has a hearty grain in it so that you're full when you go to bed at night we looked through a lot of recipes to find some that would work in this setting and the one that i really liked was in the latest assistant by charlotte mason it is french barley pudding to a quart of cream put six eggs well beaten but only three of the whites then season it with sugar nutmeg a little salt some orange flour water and a pound of melted butter a pound of melted butter mix with that six handfuls of french barley boiled tender in milk butter the dish put it in the bake it's that simple uh we are not our pallets are not about orange flower water these days we typically see that on a recipe and decide not to use it so i'm not going to put that in there alright i've got our milk in the pan i'm bringing it up to a boil and what you have to do you have to stir this the entire time you don't want to scorch your milk you don't want to burn at the bottom anything like that you want it to taste good because this is the base for pretty much everything in the recipe so i'm going to bring this to a boil once it comes to a boil i'm going to put a barley in and then we're going to simmer that until the barley is done and depending on you know what kind of barley you're using it'll take different amounts of time but you'll know what's done is like cooking any other grain we're going to have this recipe because we don't need a huge pudding that's not what we're going for just big enough for a couple people to eat and this will do just fine for that [Music] do while the barley was cooking i went ahead in this mixing bowl and i put a cream i put our eggs the sugar and the nutmeg now it's time to incorporate the butter you want the butter fully melted but you don't want it so hot that it cooks your eggs so what we're going to do is let it cool a little bit after you take it off the fire and then we're going to do a little bit at time while we're stirring so that we're just incorporating the heat slowly all right so also while you're working with this the the point is not to whip the cream so only stir to incorporate don't try to mix everything up together in there now we're going to add the barley essentially what we've made here is a custard and so it's we we want this barley to kind of act like a crust so you don't want to add so much barley that it's all incorporated together you definitely want more custard than you have barley so just be a little careful as you incorporate it not to get too much in there [Music] well we brought brandon in so he can try this out with us and well i don't know this this baked for quite a while solidified right up and smells really yeah it's got a really good smell yeah it's got that classic custard smell to it yeah that barley really set up it's got a you know a good bite to it i mean that nutmeg really comes through this we put a lot in there but man that's good add a little bit more salt to this one than i thought that i would and it comes through and it kind of gives that savory feel with the sweet i like it you know you can really bite into the barley it's got a dessert feel to it but it eats like i mean oh yeah it's certainly hearty well and you know we're eating it hot you could even slice this up and you know it could be good for probably three or four days you could come back to this especially in this kind of weather man i love that barley texture it's completely different really you know the sweetness the texture is different everything is different about this than the standard meal that you would have you know day in day out right so good yeah i feel like the texture thing is a big thing right because meat meat meat it's all you know it's just the same yeah feel the same thing but this has even got multiple textures going on in there that heavy cream that it's like it's very creamy where the barley is not yes and you can kind of get that perfect bite that's got everything or you can separate it a little bit right it's really good well these grains aren't ground so it's a whole step of processing you don't have to do you don't have to you know turn it into flour and all that you can take that barley and use it right away right from storage into your dish no extra process and there are like i think like in a modern sense when i think of oats i think of oatmeal which makes me think of breakfast cereal yeah and and like coming up in kentucky we always mix the jam into this so it's like a sweet thing right but you see so many recipes for oats in soups or in you know kind of a sew or a hash kind of setting and they just go both ways so well a wonderful dish that basically comes out of storage doesn't it uh at a time of year when you're eating a monotonous diet day after day and yet today we get to bring things out of storage and make something special it's almost a dessert and yet it's filling enough to be a meal all in and of itself such a good one and so easy to do you should try it and if you want more on food preservation make sure to check out this egg preservation video

Channel: Townsends

Views: 324,325

Rating: 4.9696903 out of 5

Keywords: townsends, jas townsend and son, reenacting, history, 18th century, 19th century, jon townsend, 18th century cooking, cabin, custard, barley, log cabin

Id: YTojZ-aqyvc

Length: 9min 38sec (578 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 11 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/SemichiSam]

We'd be ok if we could convince the guy in the blue sweater to overwinter with us. Talk about storing up food! I'm seeing hams, beef shanks, pork belly, head cheese, ribs . . . oh, my god, the ribs!

We're heading into the hunger gap now at my place (January to April. Almost nothing edible is growing). We do have a lot of preserved food, even though we have access to grocery stores. The local animals are less well prepared. The deer have already started besieging our backyard. Sometimes bears break down a fence section, not intentionally, but they weigh up to a quarter-ton, and they go where they want to go. I walk my perimeter every morning at dawn and make repairs as needed. When the bears don't prepare the way, the older bucks throw themselves against my fence until they create a breach. Then the herd comes in. If I let them make themselves at home, by the end of February they'd be eating the bark off of my fruit and nut trees.