Cherries in Winter: My Family's Recipe for Hope in Hard Times Read Online Free PDF Page A

cooked, lift it onto a platter and use the fat, steak juices, and the residue of the flour in the frying pan to make delivious
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country cream gravy
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    • • •
    NOVEMBER 1944
    SARATOGA, NEW YORK
    Matilda knew how to make a few simple dishes, like roast chicken and German potato salad, from watching her mother. But her experience in the kitchen really started when her husband, Charlie, came home early from work one day and said, “Tillie, I’ve bought a farm.”
    Charles Patrick Kallaher, an Irishman born on Saint Patrick’s Day, had at one time trained to be a prizefighter but went into a more sensible (albeitslightly less glamorous) line of work as a milkman. This decision served him well during the Depression, but years later, after the owner of the dairy company promoted his son to foreman, Charlie walked out. When he heard about a 200-acre spread available in Saratoga Springs in upstate New York, Charlie had a vision of himself and his family living off the land.
    The first Matilda saw of the family’s new home was the day in September of 1944 when she, Charlie, and two-year-old Carolyn moved into the twenty-three-room farmhouse that had been built during the Revolutionary War. They drove through an orchard of apple trees and past wildly, almost menacingly, overgrown berry bushes up to the main house. The crumbling building had fireplaces for heat, a pump for water, and an outhouse in the garden. The kitchen was in the servants’ quarters and consisted of a wall-length hearth with compartments to warm, cook, or bake. (Later, they’d upgrade to a wood-burning stove.)
    Charlie, ready to be a farmer, went out and bought five hundred chicks, eight dairy cows, two horses, and a herding dog.
    His bucolic fantasy was short-lived. The land had gone fallow, having not been actively worked for years,and the soil was too rocky to plant. Nor were the horses much good at plowing; one had the slow lope of a mule, and the other took off like a refugee from the Saratoga Racetrack. Faced with a barren field, the cows took it upon themselves to wander up the road to the neighbor’s farm, where they feasted on the lush front lawn and shat in the newly bald patches. They were roaming free in the first place because nearly all the stone fences on the farm had fallen down, and the dog, Happy, had never actually been trained to herd animals—he preferred to wait by the side of the main road to chase cars. Matilda, meanwhile, was trying to figure out how to cook meals in a 150-year-old hearth, and September in Saratoga was starting to feel like the dead of winter had in the Bronx.
    “You’ve got to do something,” Matilda said, “or we’re going to be the only farmers in Saratoga who starve to death.”
    “Jesus H.,” Charlie swore, shaking his head. “All right. I’ll go down to the factory and see what they’ve got.” What they had was the night shift, so Charlie started commuting thirty-five miles to work each sundown.
    As fall approached, deer began sauntering into the apple orchard and eating the bark off the trees. “It’s Bambi!” Carolyn said excitedly. Charlie threatened to shoot them, so while he was at work, Matilda put out some of the cows’ feed for the deer. “There,” she said to Carolyn, “now they won’t kill the trees, your father won’t kill them, and everybody’s happy.” The plan worked fine during the week, but the jig was up on Saturday, when Charlie was home and wondering aloud why the deer were waiting patiently by a bucket outside the barn.
    One morning Matilda was washing dishes in a pail full of water that she’d dragged in from the pump when she heard the cows heading up to the neighbor’s yard. She ran after them with a switch, screaming, “Get back, Evelyn! Go home, Madeline!”—many of them having been named for the relatives in the Bronx whom she missed.
    But the cows were determined, and Matilda found herself apologizing again to the owner of the neighboring farm,