Old time farming
by Ruth Bolotin

In this charming memoir, 91 year-old PCC member, Ruth Bolotin, remembers her days on the family farm in a tiny village in Siberia. Ruth reminds us that many skills are needed to produce foods without the modern technologies we take for granted today.

The plethora of lovely produce at my neighborhood farmers’ market often takes my mind back to Barguzin, the tiny Siberian farming village, Barguzin, where I was born 91 years ago. The contrast is not in the produce, but in the production methods.

Although at that time modern farming technology was emerging in other areas of the world, in Barguzin, our one-street village in the Lake Baikal region, we had no electricity and no motorized equipment. Farming there had not changed since the plow was invented.

Narrated by Trudy Bialic, Director of Public Affairs

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An early memory is of a typically sunny, hot spring day. I am nearly five, standing at the edge of a field watching Father walking behind a horse-drawn plow which he guides by its handles. As the old mare trudges up one row and down the next, the plow digs into earth still moist from recently melted snow.

Our small terrier, Kolya, barks excitedly, running and sniffing among the lumpy rows of damp earth the plow leaves on one side of each furrow. Father will seed that field with rye, and tend to it during the almost twenty-hour-long sub-arctic days of the short, hot summer.

Memories are still surprisingly vivid: I watch Father at the morning milking of our cow, Manya. When he leaves with the milk I tentatively approach Manya with my eye on her udder; she turns her head and looks back at me with a suspicious “grown-up” look.

It is clear that she knows I have no business there, but I have to see if I can make milk come out; never mind that Father had just emptied her udder. Tentatively I touch it and quickly have to jump aside to avoid Manya’s hind leg kick. I know better than to try it again.

Father returned and led Manya into the single street of the village to join the other cows collecting around the young man who will herd them to graze in the valley at the foot of the mountain.

One day Father came home with tree gum — a chunk about one foot square. “Manya is off her cud,” he said as he set it on the tree stump used for chopping wood and proceeded to hack it into chunks he could put in Manya’s mouth. My friends and I scurried to grab the larger crumbs scattering to the ground. They had a pleasant, mild turpentine flavor. I didn’t see flavored gum until years later.

Like magic, Mother turned Manya’s milk into many great foods. A bowl of milk set aside overnight always had the cream at the top by morning; it was delicious over the raspberries picked from the two bushes that grew under the beehive that hung on the post of the garden gate.

A pan of milk set on the warm shelf behind our wood-burning stove would sour in about 30 hours. The cream skimmed off soured milk is, of course, sour cream, delicious in salads and in borshch, a sweet and sour cabbage, beet and tomato soup, loved by Russians.

Mother’s borshch was sweetened with the wild flower honey our bees produced. I still use wild flower honey in my borshch. (The spelling I use, borshch, is the correct Russian pronunciation; anyone who has a problem saying “shch” needs only to say “fresh cheese” to get it right. It’s that easy.)

Sweet cream and sour cream can be churned into butter. The fluid that remains after churning either is buttermilk, a refreshing, calcium-rich beverage which can also be used as the liquid in baking and cooking.

When milk sours the fluid under the soured cream thickens and congeals into “clabber,” which tastes something like yogurt. When clabber is heated it curdles. Mom poured the curdled clabber into a cone-shaped cheesecloth bag suspended above a bowl to drain. The solids that remain in the bag after draining is curd cheese. Yes, yes! That is why that sleazy fabric is called “cheesecloth.” And when curd cheese is mixed with sour cream, it becomes the familiar “cottage cheese.”

The fluid that drains out of the cheesecloth bag is whey, an excellent source of high quality protein, with many of the essential amino acids; it can be used as the liquid in bread dough, in soups, vegetables and pasta.

It’s remarkable that, without adding one single ingredient, Manya’s milk can become so many products: whole milk, skimmed milk, sweet cream, sour cream, butter (counting both butters as one); buttermilk (counting both as one), curd cheese and cottage cheese; all healthful tasty foods; and, of course, whey — a healthful ingredient. We didn’t have the culture for yogurt, but it certainly belongs on the list of great milk products.

Indoor plumbing did not exist in Barguzin, but we did have “running water.” It ran through ditches from the Barguzin River to, and through, every yard in the village. These ditches provided water for every household and garden use, and, in warm weather, Mother would set containers of food in the ditch to keep cool since there was no way to get ice in the warm months — we didn’t have iceboxes.

In the fall the river froze solid and the farmers brought the harvested grain onto the river ice to thresh. The threshing tool was a flail — two sturdy wooden rods tied together with a leather thong. In a cooperative plan the village men would, all together, thresh each farmer’s pile of grain in turn. The purpose of threshing is to get rid of the chaff — the brittle, ultra-thin outermost “skin” on each grain. When cracked with the flail the airy chaff flakes would bound up and get caught up in air currents and float lazily in clouds around the workers.

There is something about clouds of anything that drives children wild; my friends and I would rush into the flying chaff, with leaps, shrieks and waving arms, bumping into the good-natured working men. The threshed rye seeds were ground into flour at the mill.

On baking day Mother started the wood fire in the stove early in the morning, even before starting the bread. The stove was a built-in white-washed brick structure jutting into the kitchen from the outside wall of our log house. The only fuel used in the village stoves was the plentiful wood from the nearby forest.

The fire in the brick firebox is allowed to die down by the time the bread is ready to bake. That firebox, now heated through, served as an oven. Mother scraped out the hot ashes into a metal bucket. Watchful of the heat she laid the loaves of bread right on the hot bricks and shut the door. The bread baked in the accumulated heat, and soon the kitchen was filled with its yeasty fragrance. The loaves always had some wood ashes stuck to the bottom, but everyone ate it with no concern.

Siberian winters were too cold for small animals, so the chicken coop was brought inside in late fall; it fit perfectly under the kitchen table. The calf also had to be inside until it was butchered for meat, which was kept frozen in the icy outdoor temperature until used. The kitchen floor was covered with hay until spring when the chickens were moved back outside, the hay swept up, and the floor scrubbed.

We rarely had food that we didn’t grow or trade; I didn’t see sugar until I was five. When we eventually got some, it was not granulated. The tan-colored crystals were thin, flat, translucent rectangles up to about one-third inch in diameter, just perfect tiny windows for a teeny little doll house, I thought.

Cabbages and root veggies were kept in the root cellar. Racks built under the kitchen ceiling held the tomato vines with the tomatoes on them, many still green; they could be picked as they ripened or cooked green. Mother pickled the cucumbers and made sauerkraut in crocks out of some of the cabbages.

Today’s farmer with modern equipment still works very hard, but modern farmers would be hard-put to imagine working without the equipment, the electricity and the gasoline we take for granted. Yet for centuries, in simpler times, farmers lived that life without respite, and thought nothing of it because alternatives did not exist.

Ruth Bolotin is a published writer and won a first prize certificate from the Pacific Northwest Writers Conference in 1972. She has been an active PCC member since 1977.