At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was bread. Remember that? The great dry yeast and flour shortage of 2020, when suppliers and stores couldn’t keep up with the cavalcade of new home bakers.
It’s easy to understand. Thrust into unfamiliar circumstances, you grasp at comfort — and what (for those who aren’t gluten averse) is better than a house full of the smell of baking bread, the first few slices still warm from the oven, that particular homemade, not-yet-bagged crisp and toothsome crust?
And that’s just the beginning. For the past few weeks, as concerns about the U.S. presidential election were ramping up, the food section of the New York Times has been going all out comfort food. “Comfort food forever” was the actual headline for one day’s offerings, but the truth is, it could have been any day.
Long story short? These are hard times. All of us are feeling it, one way or another.
The comfort foods went on and on: beef stew with ale and onions, French onion macaroni and cheese, chocolate pancakes topped with raspberries and caramel sauce, another beef stew with Dijon and cognac, yet another old-fashioned beef stew (with the editors citing New York food writer Regina Schrambling writing in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks, “Long before there were antidepressants there was stew”) and — get ready for it — pressure-cooker Guinness beef stew with horseradish cream.
There was also my personal favourite arterial-clogging surprise, which I can’t wait to try: a Mississippi roast beef that slow-cooks for eight and a half hours — after starting off in the cooker with a full stick of butter resting on top of the meat.
But food isn’t everyone’s thing — heck, it isn’t even really my only thing.
What is? Weirdly, being ready just in case. I feel that I’m the most prepared for anything — winter, pandemic lockdowns, a sudden invasion of deadly and evil clowns — if I have a peculiar trifecta.
No, not the three Ws of weapons, water and Wi-Fi.
I feel prepared when the cold room is full of homemade beer, the little chest freezer in the basement is full of supplies (especially if someone’s given us a bounty of moose meat), and I have rows and rows of stacked firewood. I don’t know why those three both make be feel self-sufficient and somehow safe, but they do.
Right now, I’m on a bit of a hiatus from brewing, though there are still plenty of gold-capped bottles ranked in their rows in the cold room. The freezer is moderately full, including bags of hand-picked blueberries and partridgeberries, and homemade applesauce, but not full to the lid.
But the woodpile?
Oh happy day.
Through lucky coincidence, we suddenly have a driveway full of firewood. Not just firewood, but hardwood.
And not just hardwood, but maple. Big maple.
I know I’m slighting this province’s undisputed hardwood king, big birch, but the Maritimer in me has a real weakness for the sheer amount of heat locked up in tight-grained maple, and the way maple sublimates into coals with a glowing red hot pattern almost like rows of hell’s teeth. It’s a classic woodstove wood, with smoke that has its own sweet, singular smell.
There’s still a lot to be done with our new maple bounty: it’s in long lengths, brand new from a huge tree cut down nearby this week. It’s as green as a Granny Smith apple, so it will have to be cut into stove-sized lengths, split, stacked and left to dry for months before it’s even ready to burn. That’s the perfect autumn outdoor cold-weather work, to my mind, the kind that leaves you with stiff muscles and a long, rectangular row of job well done that you can look at over and over again.
So, even though it will be a long time before we can use it, I feel as rich as when I dig up the potato garden.
Or as rich as when the house smells like fresh-baked bread.
Long story short? These are hard times. All of us are feeling it, one way or another. Mental health systems are feeling the strain, families are feeling the strain, employees are feeling the strain.
So split wood. Bake bread. Brew beer. Fill your heart at any spring you can find.
Russell Wangersky’s column appears in SaltWire newspapers and websites across Atlantic Canada. He can be reached at [email protected] — Twitter: @wangersky.
