The Rural Voice, 2003-06, Page 44Before the days of luxury
Before the dabs of
refrigeration, food
preservation was a
serious business.
Canning and root cellars
were common for fruits
and vegetables, but it took
ingenuity and
community action
through the 'beef ring' to
enjoy fresh meat in the
summer months
By Barbara Weiler
think it is only in retrospect that
we who lived on farms in the
forties and early fifties can fully
appreciate the great many changes in
farm life in the post war era. These
changes involved new machinery that
made farm work easier and more
efficient, improvements in
outbuildings and barns, as well as
more living amenities for the farm
family. It was sometimes said
jokingly but with some ring of truth
that you could tell who was boss in
the family by whether conveniences
came first to the house or the barn.
The farm my parents purchased in
1939 had a solid brick house and
good farm buildings along with 100
acres of land, but had no hydro,
running water or indoor bathroom.
My father was determined that our
city born mother should have all the
conveniences as soon as possible, but
also wanted to update his farm and
equipment.
One of the problems on our farm
was that of keeping food cool in the
summer. My grandparents in
Toronto had an insulated wooden ice
box and ice was delivered regularly,
40 THE RURAL VOICE
keeping their milk, butter and meat
cool in the summer months. Some
farms may have had ice harvested
from nearby lakes and ponds, cut in
the winter and stored in an icehouse
for summer use. In our area only
businesses such as the butcher shop
and perhaps some village dwellers
had these kinds of luxuries. In the
winter, we kept our meat frozen in
the unheated back kitchen, and milk
and butter were stored in the cool
cellar in a cupboard with screened
doors. At meal time one of us kids
was regularly asked to "Run
downstairs to get the milk and
butter." It was after my mother,
pregnant with her fourth child, fell
down those cellar stairs with a coal
oil lamp in her hand that hydro was
installed in our house and barn in
1941.
Even when hydro had been
installed, we could not afford all the
modern appliances at once. The
electric wringer washer was deemed
to be the most necessary piece of
equipment to begin with, and a
refrigerator had to wait a little. By
the end of the war, taps replaced the
hand pump that brought water from
the cistern and a storage room
upstairs that we had referred to as
"the junk room" was converted to a
bathroom.
Refrigeration of food in the
summer presented a problem. Hard
working farmers needed meat and
could not spend time making daily
trips to the butcher. Why buy meat
from a butcher anyway, when you
have a field of beef on the hoof? The
solution was the co-operative beef
ring. A number of farmers got
together and made an agreement to
take turns each week supplying an
animal to the beef ring members
during the summer months. A local
butcher slaughtered the chosen beast,
and the meat was divided amongst
the members, each receiving the
allotted number of steaks, roasts,
ground meat etc. This required a lot
of organization, weighing and
dividing of cuts. As a child, I was
never quite aware of exactly who did
this or how it was arranged. On
Saturday morning someone drove
through the countryside delivering
the weekly portion to each member.
We had Holstein cattle and there
was discussion about whether a dairy