The Hans Herr House has a "basement" under about half of the house. Now, in different parts of the country, these are called root cellars, or storm shelters. In the root cellars, the ground is exposed so that the floor of the basement is dirt. With controlled air circulation, the temperature in this space stays remarkably constant the year around, say around 55 degrees F, or 15 degrees C. At the Herr House, the purpose of the basement was food storage. When I take visitors to the basement, we try to visualize the foods that we would find there, say about the first of February.
A wooden rod hanging from the ceiling suggests hanging something, and most people can easily guess that meats hung here. The primary meat here would have been pork, especially hams, sides of bacon, and sausages. Butchering usually took place in the late fall. The meats were smoked by hanging them on rods in the chimney of the large fireplace which took advantage of the smoke from the fires used for heating and cooking. The process had to preserve the meats for a year because butchering was done only in the fall.
(A second source of meats was fowls, the chickens, geese, and ducks. Geese were usually holiday treats at Christmas and New Years. Chickens were a flexible source of food, in that the chicken was usually killed the morning of the need. Other animals on the farm were cows and sheep. I do not know what use was made of the meat from these.)
Apples were widely in abundance in the basement. For a couple of months after picking, there would be fresh apples. For long term storage, the method was to cut the apples up in the fall and dry them. They could be munched on as dry food, but most often they became an ingredient in prepared food. Apples were definitely present in another form, namely as liquids. Making cider was another major fall activity. Some of the stored juice would be fresh, but a lot of it would naturally acquire a bit of a nip (alcohol). Some of it would acquire a lot of nip, as it was run through a still to remove some of the water.
Christian Herr had two stills for this purpose. Many of the estate inventories of our Germanna ancestors show that they also had stills.
As fresh food, fruit was beloved. Plums were a favorite from Germany, where they made plum butter. In America, the Germans found that the apple made better "butter" than the plums, so they switched from plums to apples. In season, cherries were a delight as one of the first fruits of the year. But, the long term, day in and day out, fruit was apples. Because the Germans took such a delight in their apples, they tended to keep good orchards with perhaps hundreds of trees in them.
I am just getting around to the vegetables but they will have to wait. Meanwhile, you can be deciding what the top two vegetables were. In the early eighteenth century, which vegetables did our German ancestors favor? You needn't be bashful; you can announce your answers here.
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(09 Jul 01)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.