Rainy Days

The first fork in North America was imported by John Winthrop, 1630. Both the spoon, or the scoop, and the knife go back forever. The fork cut back on the waving about of knives at dinner. More civilized. The rain moves back in for several days, a pleasant slow rain, and the temps stay quite warm. I'm stripped down to a tee-shirt for the first time in months, while I make a nice hash, corned beef, potatoes and onions, simple fare. The corned beef and potatoes are both canned (the winter pantry) and that got me reading about canning. Napoleon needed a way of preserving food and awarded a prize to Nicolas Appert for canning and sterilizing food in glass jars. The next year, 1810, Pierre Durand, patents food preservation in cans, which is superior when it comes to moving food in ox-carts. It's not until 1858 that a can-opener is invented and in the intervening 50 years cans were opened, this seems to be true, with a hammer and chisel or a knife. If you've camped enough, you know what opening a can with a knife is like. It's dangerous and scary. The odd cans, with the roll-tops, just a decade later, were all fish products. I've never understood why that was the case. Now, a great many soups and vegetables are pop-tops. There was a military issue can opener, before MRE's, a small thing, called, as I remember, a P-38, and small cuts were commonplace. Opening cans is always problematic. Anything not in liquid I take off both the top and bottom, corned beef for instance, so I can get it out of the can. I love the Argentinean corned beef in that odd can. A truncated, rounded corner, four sided pyramid with the top cut off. I was reading about Pueblo Bonito, built by the Anasazi about 1100, and there was not a larger apartment house built in the US until 1882, NYC. Any day I spend looking up things I'd noted is a day well-spent. Tractors didn't out-number horses and mules until 1955, the Fordson tractor and then the 8N in 1954-55. I plowed with a mule, trying to place this, maybe 1959, a pea patch outside Middleton, Tennessee, where my Grandfather, Tom, had his holding pens. He actually was a mule-trader. Until 1955 this wasn't a bad business, he had the money to buy young green mules and break them. They mostly came from Missouri, wild as you could imagine, but he had a partner, Wally, that could talk to mules, and they did well in the share-cropper economy. If you're only farming a few acres you don't need a tractor. After planting you just wanted to turn the middles, kill all those nutrient sucking weeds, and you can do that with a manual wheeled cultivator. Or a hoe, for god's sake.