and eat them, the air rich with their 
aroma. Or the lush smell of the black- 
‘ berry pies cooling on the windowsill 
before supper. Or the taste as you 
crush a raspberry soaked in new cream 
against the roof of your mouth. 
Every summer it’s a question of 
what to do with more zucchini than 
anybody wants. The thin little zuc- 
chini appear in salads almost before 
they’re big enough to pick. Gradually 
they turn into tomato and cheese cas- 
seroles, are fried with onions, wind 
up in bread, become pickles, get set 
in a crock with yeast to become wine. 
In a good year you can’t even give 
them away. They lie on the vine get- 
ting ever larger. When neighbors 
meet, after taking care of the weather, 
they complain about zucchini and dis- 
cuss ways to disguise them. 
F B Grunzweig 
Earlier in this century, most of 
Vermont was open land. Today, with 
farming economically precarious, 
young trees cover the hills and fields, 
left. A good deer season provides a 
winter’s supply of venison, above. 
The first frost of fall always comes 
before all the tomatoes have ripened. 
Then a flurry of anxious activity be- 
fore sunset wraps ghosts of sheets 
around the tall tomato plants, turning 
the garden into a silent phantom choir. 
After the dangerous days at the time 
of full moon pass, several more weeks 
of warm weather will turn many to- 
matoes red, the last crop of parsley 
and Swiss chard will be cut, all the 
potatoes brought in. 
“Fall is the very best time of the 
year to make red flannel hash,” says 
Lucille. 
You have all those good things right out 
there in the garden. You put your meat 
to boiling, corned beef or a ham. You 
go out to get your beets, carrots, turnips, 
cabbage, and potatoes and head for the 
house just as fast as you can. You want 
to have a lot more beets than you’d dream 
you ever wanted, to make the hash good 
and red. First you put the beets in with 
the meat, the beets are going to take 
the longest. That’s how you guide it. The 
carrots and turnips get added next. The 
cabbage and potatoes go in at the end. 
You cook it until it’s just done. You’re 
making a whole lot more of this than 
you need for dinner. You eat this first 
with salt, pepper, butter, and vinegar. 
What’s left you grind up in the meat 
grinder, that makes the hash. Some of 
this gets put in the freezer so you can 
pull out a little hash made with all those 
fresh vegetables all winter long. 
You keep pushing right through the 
summer and fall, right up to deer season. 
It doesn’t ever let up. Everybody’s got 
more jobs to do than hours in the day. 
Sil always has a real big garden, the 
whole family is over here so much. You 
got to take care of it, get it in. Then 
the old hens come around. 
It’s not worth carrying most year- 
old hens over the winter, they can’t 
go outside to forage, feed is expensive, 
they don’t lay. Lucille doesn’t keep 
chickens, but plenty of people do. 
There’s no shortage of old hens for 
people willing to pick them up live 
and do them in. Forty old hens on 
a Sunday morning brings out the 
whole family. At one end of the line 
out behind the house, by the big cellar 
door, Lucille’s father is wielding the 
ax. Sil dunks the dead birds in hot 
water and hangs them from a beam 
in the cellar. Many hands pluck out 
the feathers. Lucille, her mother, and 
Inda gut and quarter the still-warm 
birds (Judy hates this job). In front 
of Lucille is a crockery bowl filling 
up with yellow unlaid eggs. The pack- 
aged hens go into the cellar refrig- 
erator to cool for a day, then into 
the freezer. All winter long these old 
hens will be centerpieces for Sunday 
dinners of risotto and all the fixings. 
Lucille feels the family learns about 
their Italian heritage from the Sunday 
dinners. 
Other birds are eaten besides hens. 
Inda is as good a shot as her brothers 
at deer, but it’s mostly the men who 
duck hunt from blinds in the bays 
81 
