Turnip Day and Bickled Peets

On the 25th of July
Sow your turnips, wet or dry

I imagine that for most folks, last Saturday slid by unnoticed. But for those of us who are grounded in in the arcane folklore of Missouri agriculture, it was Turnip Day—once brought briefly into the national spotlight by native son Harry Truman in 1948, when he called for a special summer session of Congress in an effort to light a fire under Republicans who controlled both chambers of Congress but produced little legislation.

Truman's call for a Turnip Day Session came July 15, at 1:45 am, in the context of giving his acceptance speech as the Democratic candidate for President. It was the start of his dramatic climb back into contention against the heavily favored Thomas Dewey, who he nipped at the wire in the November election. 

While Truman's gamble occurred 72 years ago, it occurred to me that here we are with Republicans diddling again, this time bumping along downstream without a rudder (Trump has plenty of rudeness, just no direction) in the fast water of a pandemic. It's incredible watching this train wreck unfold. Every single day, Trump loads up a shotgun… and discharges it into his foot by nightfall. (I appreciate that there were a lot of metaphors in that paragraph, but I imagine the meaning was clear nonetheless.)

While it's not obvious what we'll get with Biden, it's damn clear what we get with Trump and people are fed up and weary of the divisiveness, the venality, and the dysfunction. There's a bumpersticker on our block that encapsulates it all: "Any Functioning Adult in 2020."

• • •

Beyond politics and Show Me folklore, last weekend was notable because I was able to indulge in one of my favorites pastimes, condiment making. I lived for four decades at Sandhill Farm, where we had a foundational commitment to growing and preserving our own organic food. Over my years there I developed a niche for processing acidified foods (think tomatoes, fruits, and pickles), and I miss it today.

Happy as I am to be living in Duluth (as I type, it's 79 degrees with 44% humidity beneath a sky filled with cotton ball clouds—eat your heart out), I long for the rhythms of farm life. While Susan and I enjoy putzing around in our 100 sq ft backyard garden, I hit the jackpot last Friday when I was running Susan out to the car dealer's and we passed someone peddling fresh vegetables out the back of a pickup in a bank parking lot.

Thinking to pick up a half dozen ears of fresh corn (to accompany our grilled salmon fillet for dinner)
I pulled over on my way home and stumbled onto some nice wax beans and good looking beets. For reasons that escape me, it's hard finding beets at a decent price, so I knew a good deal when I found one, and I jumped on it, buying a half bushel. Sunday I turned those into 16 pints of pickled beets. Yeehah! (Susan made a double batch of moussaka earlier in the day, so our kitchen was redolent with the aromas of love.)

In addition to the odd experiment with a new recipe (last year it was chow chow pickle; this year I have a batch of red cabbage sauerkraut going), my baseline condiments (the things I never want to run out of) are: corn relish, dilly beans, pickled beets, and tomatillo salsa. Because we're just a household of two, and you can only expect your children to eat so much, I've disciplined myself to only making a batch of each of these every three years. Otherwise we'd need to devote an entire wall in the basement to canned goods storage.

Beets are an especially evocative food for me. In addition to something Susan and I both enjoy, it was one of my mother's favorites (though she only cooked them when Dad was on a business trip). When labeling the beets yesterday, I was reminded fondly of Ann Shrader, with whom I started Sandhill. (She and I share a son and a full deck of memories: 52 years worth.) Annie has a penchant for spoonerisms and enjoyed referring to what I had just created as "bickled peets," so that's what we'll call them here in Duluth. A new tradition.

Now if I can only find a bulk source of ripe tomatillos…