Pilgrims Don't Wear Pink Read Online Free PDF Page B

the freezer.” She closed the refrigerator door and opened the freezer on top, which was packed with freezer-burned bloody carcasses. It looked like someone had hacked up a human corpse and stashed the evidence. I tried not to gag.
    â€œYou ever rendered pork fat before?”
    â€œN-no,” I stammered.
    â€œFirst time for everything.”
    Ruth loaded my arms with a frozen roast and a lifetime supply of lard, and we headed upstairs. Lard, it turns out, is not so gross. It’s really not that different from butter. Raw meat, however . . . like really raw meat—drawing in horseflies from the barn, dripping globules of yellow fat onto the counter as it defrosts—is another story. I stopped breathing through my nose as I hacked up Babe the pig and transferred him to the frying pan under Ruth’s watchful eye. It bubbled merrily away in a sea of lard, as I seriously considered a vegan lifestyle.
    It got better once I’d conquered the beast. Ruth took me out back to show me around the kitchen garden. In addition to the flowers there for purely decorative purposes, there was an herb patch, a vegetable section dominated almost entirely by beets, some sprawling blueberry bushes, and a mostly empty apple barrel. Except for the little signs indicating what was what for the visitors, it was exactly like what a colonial woman would have had for everyday use. We headed back in to steam some beet greens in one cast-iron pot and boil the beets in another. Looking at my hands stained red with beet juice, an idea occurred to me . . . hmm. When Ruth wasn’t looking, I used a pewter plate as a mirror and blended some beet juice into my cheeks as impromptu blush. Not bad! I rubbed some on my lips. It actually looked like a shade of Burt’s Bees lip-gloss I’d lost last summer. I wasn’t going to break the modern makeup rule, and I certainly wasn’t going to crush beetles into red lip stain like actual colonial women had done in the pre-Revlon era, but in the immortal words of Tim Gunn on
Project Runway,
I was going to make it work. I swiped some soot from the top of the bread oven (we weren’t using it) and streaked it on my eyelids. Easy, breezy, beautiful, ColonialGirl.
    Baking I actually have a bit of a knack for. Last year I took first place at the Minnesota State Fair Bake-Off with my caramel apple pie recipe. I practically learned to read on my mom’s
Martha Stewart Living
magazines. Martha may not be super into lard and molasses, but I think even she would have been impressed with the perfectly steamed Indian pudding I produced an hour later. Ruth explained that open-hearth baking was like using a Dutch oven when you go camping. I don’t camp, so this analogy was lost on me. But it wasn’t so bad. You stuck your baked good in a cast-iron lidded pot, put the pot in the ashes, and used a pair of tongs to give the pot a quarter turn every fifteen minutes, to ensure it baked evenly. It was a lot riskier and less precise than modern baking, because if you opened the lid to check on it, you put the whole enterprise in jeopardy. Plus, back then cookbooks weren’t widely used. No Martha giving you step-by-step instructions on how to blanch your marcona almonds or create aromatic herb bundles for parchment-baked perch. Thankfully, the homestead had its own special book of handwritten recipes on the shelf in between the jar of Brer Rabbit Molasses and a honey pot that functioned largely as a bee cemetery.
    Â 
    By the end of the day, I had fashioned a feast of pork fat, beet greens, and Indian pudding, none of which I was remotely interested in eating. I was sweaty, sooty, smelly, and my arms ached from lugging around those insanely heavy pots. Tired and gross as I was, it was actually strangely satisfying. Sure, I’d only produced four tons of pork-infused lard, but I felt like I’d really accomplished something. More so than, say, writing a five-paragraph