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First Posted: 9/11/2014 If you looked at the huge kettles that tour guide Molly Maroney was tending over an open fire, you&#8217;d get the idea food is indeed plentiful on a Pennsylvania farm.
&#8220;Potatoes, carrots, corn, onions and parsley &#8212; all grown right here,&#8221; Mitt Mosier said as he poured chopped vegetables into the soup on a recent Thursday morning.
Visitors can taste the result of Maroney and Mosier&#8217;s labor in early October during a harvest festival at Quiet Valley Living Historical Farm in Stroudsburg, where costumed re-enactors regularly delight in showing people what rural life used to be like in the 1800s.
You can count on the harvest festival being a celebration of good crops this year.
But in the olden days, Cheryl Staham said, you couldn&#8217;t necessarily expect your food supply would last through the winter until the next growing season.
&#8220;Spring was a tough time of year, a time of hunger on the farm,&#8221; said Statham, who is director of education and programs at Quiet Valley. &#8220;Some people subsisted on a semi-starvation diet and did not have the energy to resist disease. A lot of children and the elderly would die.&#8221;
As soon as the rhubarb and dandelion greens appeared, she said, farm folks would rush to pick something fresh.
After the Civil War it became easier for Pennsylvania families to store food, she said. One reason was because salt, a valuable preservative, became more accessible thanks to salt mines in the West and improved transportation. Also, in 1858, John Mason invented the canning jar that bears his name, which was an improvement over one that had been crafted for Napoleon&#8217;s Army.
Clad in a kerchief, apron, and long skirt, Statham explained how people used to keep such root vegetables as parsnips, turnips and rutabagas in a root cellar. They would dry apples and other fruit. And, by adding salt to sliced cabbage, they had the makings of sauerkraut.
&#8220;Pennsylvania Germans especially liked pork,&#8221; she said, describing how bacon was cured in a few days but a ham could take weeks.
&#8220;Smoking the meat was not cooking it,&#8221; she said. &#8220;It dried the outer layers so bacteria couldn&#8217;t get in. Then they&#8217;d wrap it in muslin and hang it in the attic.&#8221;
The Pennsylvania Germans who settled Quiet Valley Farm used the top part of rye to bake their favorite bread and wove the leftover rye straw into baskets for food storage because mice wouldn&#8217;t eat it.
Sometimes they would remove a queen bee from a wild hive and put her in a tightly woven basket called a skep. The other bees would follow the queen and produce honey in the skep, which gave the farmers ready access to it.
Speaking in the persona of a 19th-century farm girl, 15-year-old tour guide Emily Goodyear told Quiet Valley visitors how the menfolk hewed and stacked logs to build a cabin. &#8220;Everybody else stuffed straw and mule hair and clay and lime into the chinks to fill them.&#8221;
She demonstrated how to weave at a loom, talked about how &#8220;my aunt sticks her bare arm&#8221; into an outdoor oven for 10 seconds to see if the temperature was right for the baking dozens of loaves of bread and showed how she could lower a bucket into a well for water. On a late August day, the well was dry.
&#8220;What was the alternative?&#8221; a visitor asked.
Pointing toward a stream, Goodyear said you could send a farm lad who would likely walk there. Unless you sent him on an errand close to supper time. Then you would have running water.

Exploring the past at Quiet Valley