We ate spareribs for supper the other night. I suppose many people did. After all, spare ribs are easy to find in the meat section of the stores these days. Our spareribs, however, were from one of the pigs we raised this year which we butchered this week.

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In times past, the Thanksgiving holiday was ushered in by pie making as it is even today in some homes. In their memoirs, some Victorian era writers recalled their childhood excitement when they saw their mother begin to assemble mincemeat, knowing that the holiday was right around the corner. Mincemeat pie making began with chopping meat, suet, apples, picking over currants and asking the children to pick out the seeds in raisins. The words "seedless raisins" are virtually meaningless today since seedless grapes have been common since the late 1800s in America. Formerly, raisins were larger, dried grapes, really, and their seeds had to be picked out by hand.

Early American mothers also recruited their children to pound and sift spices. Cloves, allspice, cinnamon, and nutmeg bought whole had to be pulverized in a mortar and pestle, then sifted through a sieve before cooks added the spices to mincemeat, pumpkin, or apple pies.

All this activity resulted in many pies, some of which were devoured at Thanksgiving dinner or shared with needy neighbors. Others were set away in cold parts of house, in pie safes, often to freeze. For a month or more, a hostess had pies ready to warm up on the hearth when company arrived.

In some houses, plum pudding was another Thanksgiving treat, one we associate with Christmas. There is a good reason for this. Early New Englanders, Mainers included, tended not to celebrate Christmas until the later 1800s. Instead, they indulged in all their favorite festive foods on Thanksgiving. When the irresistible attractions of Christmas prevailed in the 1890s or so, few people could envision a nicer meal than the one they had on Thanksgiving, so recreated it on December 25, turkey, pie, plum pudding and all.

Sandy Oliver, Food Historian, Author, MF&L columnist: The Way Things Were

No governor has declared it but I am here to tell you that October and November are our de facto National Food History Months.
Thanksgiving looms largely for food writers, poor crazed souls who have already been through turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, creamed onions, pumpkin pie, etc. in previous years and now–not again!–need a hook for the annual holiday story. And Thanksgiving with all its historic overtones, at least in New England, evokes the “what is the history of mashed potatoes anyway”
response.

All of us who work at examining our past food habits are deluged with phone calls and emails and interview requests. The most intriguing question I’ve had so far this season had to do with the relish tray on the holiday table: the oval glass or perhaps metal serving dish in which celery, olives, and pickles are presented. Does anyone eat them? Who knows, but the dish spells festival” when set down next to the cranberry sauce.

A quick check into history showed that there was a patent for a new style relish tray in the 1880s, and I surmise that celery, formerly an expensive item presented on fashionable tables in special glass celery vases or glasses (patent date of ca: 1840) designed to make the leafy stalks tower over the diners, had come down in price and stature and could now appear horizontally
on holiday tables, together with the increasingly available olives being produced in the U.S. (California, of course) just after the turn of the twentieth century.

I own my grandmother’s pink Depression glass relish tray. It has three sections, and the locavore that I am, I put dilly beans in one, homegrown carrots in another, and bread and butter pickles in the third. I also own my mother’s heavy, undivided, clear glass relish tray that I recall seeing full of green, pimento stuffed olives. I loved olives as a child, still do, and used to suck the pimento out to eat separately from the green olive.

I still put a relish tray on holiday or special occasion tables, though I observe it is increasingly a ceremonial move, and I see little attrition in the pickle selection.

Sandy Oliver, Food Historian, Author, MF&L columnist: The Way Things Were

On September 9, 1794, that is, two hundred and four years ago today, Martha Ballard, midwife, housewife, gardener and health care provider, living near Augusta, Maine, “scolt” her pickles. I “scolt” pickles yesterday with my young friend Marie who came over and helped me do in several pounds of pickling cukes. That is, we stuck them in jars and dumped hot water and vinegar on them with salt added. She took most of the jars home with her because I have already put up just about all the pickles that I think we will need.

Martha Ballard never mentions in her diary a variety of pickles. There seem to be very few sorts of pickles among Mainers at that time. The dill, sweet and sour, mustard, or half sours we know now are the donation of several ethnicities to our national pantry. Period recipes from the 18^th century show that some folks used what we recognize to be pickling spices—mustard
seeds, cloves, allspice, pepper, mace—in the crock or jar with the vinegar. Mrs. B. doesn’t even tip her hand enough to say whether she uses any spice at all. She may have wished to, but on frontier Maine certain spices may have been in short supply from time to time and easily forgone.

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A lobster bake is when you go to a nice rocky beach strewn with driftwood and abounding in rockweed. BYO lobsters, corn, clams or mussels plus the other fixings like salads and pies. I did this just last Sunday. My friend Ginny had some artist friends up at her home on the island here, and Jamie and I did a bake for them. Jamie got the rockweed, piled up the rocks and even started a fire. Then he had to go meet some other responsibilities.

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