Plenty Herring, Plenty Meal

Plenty herring, plenty meal
Plenty peat to fill her creel
Plenty bonny bairns as weel
That's the toast of Mairi.


Thus goes the last verse to the Scottish bridal song Mairi's Wedding. And when I wish at least the herring and meal on my acquaintances, one of the first questions is, "Yes, but how long can you keep that herring and meal, when will it go bad?"

Alas, it's a trick question.

It was a couple of seasons ago when excurding off to Babylon that I stopped by the garden on my way to town to inventory for the big salad I was going to have for supper. One of those really cool salads for the summer heat full of spinach, sweet onions, pear tomatoes, basil and dill, and ripe feta cheese from goat milk. But most of all ... cucumbers.

Cucumbers are curious things to grow. Grown in good organic soil they will produce profusely for a few weeks, four at the most, and then the plant short circuits. It is a sort of plant cancer and a geriatric cucumber will yellow in the leaf and all the cukes will curl in odd shapes. So I long ago figured to count on a patch for no more than a month's harvest and when that patch began to bloom, plant another one to take it's place when the geezer vines became confused. Sometimes I don't time it just right and a trip to the garden won't yield any cukes for a few days.

And yet, another trick the cucumbers pull is to hide their fruit. You can pick over a patch, then straighten up to take a breath, and there are more cukes right where you were just picking five minutes ago. Something's going on, I'm not sure what, and I'm not sure I really want to know. Maybe they should plant for new gardeners every month or so as well.

At any rate this July morning there were no cukes. None whatever. And I was really keen on that salad! So on my way back home I stopped by a grocer and got a few cukes. They didn't vibe right. My food sense told me there was something amiss, but then it always told me this about store cukes and in fact much of store produce. But it was the only cuke game in town.

Arriving back on the farm I stopped by the garden for the tomatoes and herbs and glanced over at the cucumber patch. Dozens of them! I'll be damned! So I picked the sizeable ones into the basket and made my way to the kitchen.

Given the choice of my cukes or the ones I'd just paid money for, I was glad to give the store ones to the pigs. But I got distracted and left the store cukes and my surplus cukes in the basket and the basket got set aside and forgotten.

Three days later I had need of the basket and saw the forgotten cukes. The ones from the store were rotten from end to end, but mine were just about like the day I picked them. Of course, I threw away the former but I kept the others in the basket at room temperature to see how long it would be before they went bad just as an experiment. A week went by, then two, then a month. They were shriveled but still edible! Finally after the gods only know how long, the cukes dehydrated to hard rattly shards .... but never rotted.

I repeated this experiment with a number of things from the garden and supermarket. In almost every case the supermarket produce rotted in a very short time when left at room temperature and in almost every case the produce from my organic garden dehydrated before it could rot.

Here's a characteristic of really good food, the type one should be eating: it lasts a very long time!

So when I attempt to address how long something will last in storage (as I will in the next few posts), it is a trick question. It greatly depends on the quality of the food to begin with. And it depends on your food sense to know the difference.