Recalling Old Skills

By Annemarie Ahearn

In the winter months in Maine, there is time for activities that never seem to make their way into my schedule April through November. One of those activities is reading.  There is nothing more satisfying for a chef than reading a cookbook leisurely, paging through recipes for pleasure and inspiration with slippers on and a cup of tea in hand.  There is also a world of food literature that I have only begun to explore, such as Elizabeth David’s “An Omelet and a Glass of Wine,” Richard Olney’s “Simple French Cooking” and Coleman Andrew’s “Catalan Cuisine.”  I have also indulged in a book recommended to me by an equally indulgent friend, titled “White Truffles in Winter” by N.M. Kelby.  It is the story of Auguste Escoffier’s tenure in whites, the influence of his work, and his love affair with the temptress Sarah Berhardt.

In an effort to step outside of what some may call an obsession with food, I have picked up a book entitled “Two Old Women.”  It tells a simple and powerful tale of an Inuit Tribe in the interior of Alaska, who must trek across the cold desolate land, carrying hot embers to stay warm and setting animal traps in a desperate search for nourishment.  When the tribe nears starvation and can not afford to help the elderly along in their journey through the tundra, they make a painful decision to leave two women in their seventies behind.  The two women must fend for themselves, recalling skills from their youths to stay alive.  They make a rabbit carcass stretch for days, eating the innards, then the head, the meat and making broths with all of the bones.  They weave snowshoes for their journey ahead and must pull the weight of their belonging with ropes harnessed to their waists.  Many mornings, their aching bodies and bruised souls would rather stay motionless in their sleeping hole in the snow, a certain death.  But a force greater than pain and defeat stirs them, pushing them onward.

Survival is something I’ve never met face to face with.  I see shades of it in quieter parts of Maine, people living off the land, warming their homes with wood fires and preparing themselves for a sort of winter hibernation.  “Recalling old skills” is a practice that I’ve taken an interest in, not out of necessity, but because there is something intrinsically rewarding about knowing how to provide, on the most basic level, for yourself.  Even something as simple as planting a seed, watching it grow, harvesting, it and then consuming it, brings a reward that is almost indescribable.