The Daily Brine / History / The Women Who Worked These Fields
History
The Women Who Worked These Fields
We're a family-owned, women-run kitchen, and people sometimes ask what that means to us. Mostly it means we're standing at the end of a long line of women who did this work before us, usually without getting their names in the history books.
The farmhouse was the first ferment kitchen
On 19th-century farms across New York, the work was divided but never light. Women milked, tended the chickens, ran the kitchen garden, and spent late summer and fall putting food by so the family would eat through the winter. Pickling, drying, root cellaring, and fermenting were how a farm made it to spring. A crock of kraut in the cellar was insurance, and more often than not, a woman filled it.
On the factory line
When cabbage became big business in Upstate New York, the factories needed hands. In the Finger Lakes kraut plants of the early 1900s, the trimming floor was staffed mostly by women, who stripped the bad outer leaves and cored each head before it went to the shredders.
Women kept the books, too. Bertha Dratt Johnson was the bookkeeper at the Seneca kraut plant in Phelps until 1944. The men salting the vats usually got the photographs. The women coring cabbage and balancing the ledgers kept the whole operation running.
The farmerettes
In 1917, with men leaving farms for the war, a group of New York women organized the Woman's Land Army of America. Its members called themselves farmerettes.
By 1918, New York had about 40 farmerette units. Each was a small crew of 10 to 15 women living together under a supervisor and hiring out to local farms. Around 1,800 farmerettes went out across the state that year. They hoed, weeded, picked, milked, mowed hay, harvested grain, and repaired machinery. Farmers paid the unit $2 a day for an eight-hour day, and most of the women earned $15 a month plus room and board. It was a record harvest year for the state, and officials gave the farmerettes part of the credit.
A generation later, it happened again. During World War II, the Women's Land Army placed hundreds of thousands of women on American farms. In 1944, New York ran 25 camps housing about 3,000 recruits. When returning volunteers rallied in New York City in early 1945, a state agricultural official told the crowd, "The farmers want the girls back."
Here and now
Carly grew up on her family's dairy farm in Truxton, NY. Her grandmother, Erma Arnold, grew a garden, baked homemade bread, and made amazing Toll House cookies while raising seven children on that farm. She used a wooden kraut shredder the size of a long washboard to slice her sauerkraut, which she fermented in her cellar before canning. Gratefully, we started Food & Ferments with that same shredder to make our very first batches of sauerkraut!
When we came home from Philadelphia, our first commercial kitchen in Central New York was a converted woodworking shop at her mom's house, about 400 square feet with a lot of ambition packed into it. We've grown since then, and we're still family-owned and women-run.
We don't wear denim overalls with a Land Army patch, though we'd consider it. We do still bring in the cabbage every fall, salt it by hand, and pack every jar one at a time. It's the same kind of work in the same valley, and we're proud to be the latest in a very long line.
If you have a story about the women who farmed or fermented in Cortland County or the Finger Lakes Region, we'd love to hear it. Send it to us at hello@foodandferments.com, or tell us about it at the market.
And if you'd like to raise a fork to them, a jar of Traditional Kimchi or Classic Kraut does the job nicely.
~Dave & Carly & the F&F Crew
