At home with CISA’s Margaret Christie

By Melissa Weinberger

In certain sanctums of the Valley’s food-obsessed community, over conversations that rarely mention trends in artisanal pork, the finer points of washed rind cheeses or the benefits of truffle oil, the name of one local foodie seems to recur.

Margaret Christie is a 20-plus year resident of the Valley, and a longtime staff member at CISA, Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture (the folks who brought the Be a Local Hero bumper sticker to the regional landscape). Over the years, she’s become somewhat of a go-to gourmand for fledgling locavores and aspiring homesteaders, who look to her pantry of preserves, her precisely packed, immaculately labeled winter freezers, and her cartons of stored potatoes and celeriac, as impressive, inspiring examples of year-round local eating.

Margaret, her husband Nicholas Jones, their 12 year-old son, Elihu, and their 8 year-old daughters, Larkin and Calla live on a 12-acre spread in Whately, where they grow, dry, pickle, can and cook (and, yes, kill) most of the food they eat. What they don’t grow, they get from neighbors and friends through informal barter arrangements and thoughtful gifting.

On an early spring visit to the Christie-Jones house, the homey scent of simmering stew filled the kitchen, which Nicholas, a professional carpenter, renovated two summers ago. With a pot of homegrown lamb, parsnips, carrots and potatoes cooking on the stove, a fire was just getting underway in the living room, and an arrangement of early seed trays was basking under lights in the kitchen, future broccoli, kale and onions just beginning to sprout. A plate of crackers and homemade goat cheese was served with a choice of apple cider or honey-sweetened grape juice, as the family gave us a grand tour of their culinary credo in action.

LAMB STEW

Margaret: Nicholas made it. The parsnips, potatoes and kale are all ours. And so is the lamb. We do trade carrots and onions with somebody. We give them meat—lamb and pork—for a bunch of storage storage crops.

Elihu: We don’t feel bad about the meat. It’s OK because that’s what the animals are for. It’s not like, if you were to have one as a pet and then killed it. That would be different. But we have them with the intent of eating them.

M: It [the inevitable slaughtering] hasn’t really ever been very hard for the kids. We usually go out and we say good-bye to the animals, and we thank them. We don’t do a big ceremony, but if the kids are going to school, we tell them to say good-bye and that so-and-so isn’t going to be here when they get home.

Nicholas: We usually alternate years raising pigs and meat chickens. This year we did pigs. Also, we lost a lamb, right before slaughter, to a predator, so we’ve eaten a lot less lamb. Fish & Wildlife was uncertain whether it was a coyote, a bear or a bobcat. Some winters we’ll eat a lot of lamb, but this winter, it’s been a lot of pork chops, ham and bacon.

E: The bacon’s not great this year.

M: You don’t think so? Elihu, you’ve just gotten picky!

E: The bacon this year just has these big streaks of fat in it.

C: Mmmmmmmmm, it’s delicious.

SPICES

E: Show the spice drawer!

M: Nicholas renovated the kitchen, and when he was done, we would show people the spice drawer. It was the one thing that everybody would see and say “whoooh,” The kids picked up on it that this spice drawer is something special. And now they show it to anyone who comes in the house.

M: I really like growing peppers, and we make our own paprika. We dry the peppers and then grind them.

N: It doesn’t have a lot of heat, so it’s really good for the kids.

PANTRY

M: That’s the grown-ups’ favorite part of the house. Some people say you should keep your preserved goods in the basement, somewhere cool and dark. But I think they’re beautiful, and I get a lot of pleasure out of having them around where I can see them. We’re coming up on the end of the year, so this is sort of a low point. But we just finished
sugaring, so there’s a lot of maple syrup in here.

N: We have 19 taps, on around 8 or 9 trees. We made about 10 gallons this season.

Larkin: And we have dried apples!

M: Yep, dried apples, which the kids are WOLFING down. We don’t grow apples here. We get a lot from Clarkdale and Apex, but we do grow pears.

N: And we do have dried melon. We don’t make a lot of it ‘cause it’s kind of ridiculous. Think about a melon, it’s pretty much all water, so it’s a lot of drying.

M: And it’s really sweet.

Calla: It’s mmmmmm.

M: I never would have thought about drying melon. I actually learned it at the first Winter Fare. There was someone there, maybe Danny Botkin? And he had dried melon. It has the sweetness of Fruit Roll-ups, but as time goes on, Fruit Roll-ups seem to have less and less fruit in them. They come with cartoon characters on them and they seem to be less a food, and more like a toy. We make our own “Fruit Roll Ups” out of peaches.

C: And they don’t have any sugar in them. And they are dee-lish-ous.

CORN

M: We have popcorn and also dried corn that we grind up and use for corn bread, which I’m going to make tonight. We’ll have it with the lamb stew.

BEANS

M: These beans were just bought. We actually do grow beans, but we ran out this year. It was just so wet, and the beans didn’t do very well. We normally do Jacob’s Cattle and some pinto beans and another bean that was very similar to Jacob’s Cattle. In fact, we mixed them up when we threshed them [separated the bean from the pod].

AIR TIGHT JARS

M: I really love these jars. They were my grandmother’s.

N: It’s a good story. When Margaret’s grandparents were married for about 10 years, they bought this house on Buzzard’s Bay, right on the water.

M: And my grandfather’s mother was against it. She would say, “Oh, it’s so humid, everything is going to rot around here.” So, my grandmother’s mother-in-law, who she really didn’t get along with, actually bought her these beautiful jars. I just always remember them from the house when I was little. She always kept cookies and cereal in them. I come from a large, extended family, and we still go to that house, but people stopped using the jars. So my mother said, “You should have these jars, Margaret.” She knew how much I loved them, and that I would actually use them. She was looking out for me.

PIERCE BROTHERS COFFEE BEANS

M: I was not a coffee drinker, but when we started milking goats, we’d milk them in the morning, and then we would have warm milk. That’s what started me on coffee, being able to put warm, fresh goat milk in it.

N: Margaret does most of the milking, and if I time it right, I can go out to the barn with my coffee cup, and fill it half up with milk. When you squirt the milk out into a cup, it foams, so I get this cup of super foamy milk, and with the coffee, it’s like a cappuccino. It’s a pretty good way to start the day.

SAUERKRAUT AND PICKLES

M: Calla loves pickles. She’s our pickle girl.

E: We have this red cabbage sauerkraut from Real Pickles that is so good. It’s salty and really juicy. I eat it plain.

YOGURT

M: That is our first batch of goat’s milk yogurt. We have two goats, and we breed both of them, and we hope that they’ll both kid. One didn’t get bred this year, but the other one just kidded about three weeks ago, so we’re just now getting into milking.

MILK
L: I like the goats milk! It doesn’t taste at all the same as cow’s milk. It’s much creamier.

FRUIT CUPS

E: We take them into school for lunch and they’re sooo good.

C: We take them for snack.

M: We’ll take frozen berries, and then we’ll usually put something else in there, like canned peaches or apples, something that’s not frozen, because the frozen stuff gets mushy. This way there’s texture.

N: We use lots of strawberries, grown here in Whately.

M: And Dave Gotts’ blueberries, and a bunch of our own blueberries. And we have a lot of black raspberries because we grew a lot of those this year.

CELERIAC

M: Last year, I read something that basically said you could just take celeriac and store it on a shelf in a cool basement. So, I did. And it totally shriveled up. This year, I did it the same way we store our carrots and beets, packed with lots of leaves to keep the moisture in, and the celeriac stored beautifully. I’m going to use one of these in the stew.

POTATOES

N: We got these from Dave Jackson up at Enterprise, because we were pretty much all out of our own potatoes and still had a couple weeks of winter to get through.

M: We planted the same amount of potatoes that we usually do. But because of the rain, we only got about half as many.

LARD

N: We use the lard for a lot of things, depends on who’s cooking.

E: If it’s him, he uses it for everything.

M: We have a lot of lard, and because we really can’t eat it all, what we need to do is make soap. Soap that’s purely lard is really, really soft, so we add another kind of oil, and then for scent, we use essential oils that we get from the Co-op in Greenfield.

THE MAP (a diagram of the freezer’s contents)

M: This is essential, so that we can tell where things are.

N: Of course, I can’t understand that map.

M: We’re pretty organized about not losing stuff in there, because we have to eat it up before the season starts again. The vegetables, and especially the fruit, are not particularly good three years later. Canned things are ok, but the frozen things don’t really last more than a year.

N: We basically don’t buy vegetables. In season, we blanch them, pat the moisture out, put them in bags and freeze.

M: Frozen vegetables undoubtedly suffer because of texture. What we tend to do, and we eat a lot of frozen vegetables, is quickly stirfry them, with a lot of garlic, because pretty much everything tastes great with garlic.

N: We grow vegetables that we like to eat, combined with those that freeze well. We freeze a lot of broccoli and beans.

M: That was true for a while, because they grow well for us, but when you’re eating your frozen vegetables all winter, you need more variety. So lately, I freeze a lot of asparagus, I freeze a lot of peas, and greens like chard and kale. Something else I learned at Winter Fare, is salads from beets, carrots and celeriac, julienned, delicious. And it’s crunchy, which is nice in the winter.

BIRDS

M: People have been giving us roosters lately, which I think is evidence of more people having chickens. They get chickens, and then when they have no use for the roosters, they’re just not prepared to slaughter them.

N: I’ve been slaughtering a lot of roosters lately. People are giving them away. You’ll see [laughter] “Free roosters to a good home.”

M: We keep them around for a while. They have a nice crow and cluck, but they always get mean. And then we kill them.

N: They make really good stock.