Root crops are easy to store for winter eating!įor centuries humans have been utilizing the earth-a temperature-regulating, flexible and free resource-to preserve our food. Though the reemergence of the root cellar is far from mainstream, it is significant and an indication that practicality and good common sense are alive and well in our valley, and that our local foodshed is resilient and strong. Still others are being built from scratch, combining old preservation wisdom with new technologies. Throughout the region one can find root cellars that have been remade and shored up, cleaned out and packed with carrots, potatoes, turnips and apples. Today, most stand abandoned, in various states of disrepair, but there are signs that the root cellar is making a comeback. Once, nearly every home would have had its own root cellar, particularly in the rural areas of the Hudson Valley. No modern invention can match them for food preservation, financial savings and ease of operation.
They were everywhere for one simple reason-root cellars work. home, root cellars were the chosen, and indeed the only, way to preserve produce outside of the relatively short harvest season.
Up until the 1950s when the refrigerator became a ubiquitous feature in every U.S. You can imagine someone, thousands of years ago, digging a hole and feeling the temperature of the earth, and putting two and two together. Put your hand on the wall, feel its coolness, and you immediately understand why they were invented. Step into an old root cellar, even one that stands empty and abandoned, and you can sense the power and integrity of the space. One such technology is the root cellar-that solid, grounded space where generations past preserved their food through the long winter months. Not for nostalgia’s sake, but for the wisdom and practicality behind it. There are times, though, when the technology or tool we are in danger of losing, is one that we ought to save. After all, evolution and innovation are often positive processes-if we come up with a tool that does the job better, we ought to use it. In some cases, the things we lose become obsolete or no longer make sense for our needs and our culture. Butter churns, horse-drawn wagons, stone foundations and cast iron cook stoves faded first from use, then gradually from memory. By Anne Dailey & photography by Jennifer MayĪs we evolve as a society, various tools and technologies disappear from our daily lives, rendered obsolete by modern innovation.
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