Kimberly Williams, Rutland
What we have going on is a Root Words event. Root Words is a grant that SAGE, which is from Shrewsbury, and the Vermont Farmers Food Center have received as a way to gather different stories around food from the Rutland community. So Grace Davies, from Everyday Chef, is cooking tonight along with Leona, who cooked up a beautiful Polish soup called kapusta. It’s a pork and cabbage soup tonight along with some roasted potatoes. The idea is gather stories from folks about their food heritage and why food matters to them, and to highlight also that Rutland has a very diverse community and that we all are bringing our own food traditions to this community.
Leona Razanouski, West Rutland
All I know is, my grandmother started with kapusta. She used to have that in a kettle all the time on the stove. And I was born and brought up in West Rutland, all my life, I went to the parochial school, St. Stanislaus Kostka on Barnes Street in West Rutland. Now it’s ... a condominium. I wish I had written down a lot of the recipes from my grandmother. She didn’t have any (written) recipes. She just put in this and that, whatever, you know? You cook your pork first, and then your cabbage. My mother used to make it, and now I make it. You can use any kind of cabbage. They used cabbage because they had it in the gardens. They used what they had because they had to, right? They had 16 kids they had to use whatever! They had a great big garden. They had horses and pigs and chickens and ducks, whatever, in West Rutland on Whipple Hollow Road.
RH: Leona, tell me about galumpkis and pierogies.
LR: Galumpkis are pigs in a blanket — cabbage with hamburg, rice and tomato soup or something over them, and you bake them in the oven or you can put them on top of the stove.
RH: These are some hearty dishes!
LR: Oh, yeah! Then you can put your potatoes and carrots right in there and have your whole dinner. And pierogis are like a dumpling. You know, like a ravioli. Only we put, not ricotta cheese but a farmers’ cheese. Kapusta, of course, cabbage or sauerkraut. Mushrooms. The people used to pick wild mushrooms. Oh, my gosh, I wish I knew half of what they knew! Those older people saved on everything. She would make 16 pies. They had apple trees and all kinds of blueberries, blackberries, whatever berries they’d go and pick in the woods. And the boys would eat them as fast as they could!
Heidi Lynch, Rutland
This is a collaborative project. Vermont Farmers Food Center has been running a project for five years now called Farmacy, and it’s a fruit and vegetable prescription program where we work with doctors to prescribe farm shares to local families. So having done this program over the years, you can just imagine, we hear amazing stories of, “Oh, my family has this carrot soup recipe,” or “We do this borscht,” or this cabbage, so we’ve had this idea for awhile about how neat it would be to do a dinner series like this, make it really affordable and also feature dishes from community members and all connecting and sharing their stories. This particular event series is put on in partnership with SAGE, which is the Shrewsbury Institute for Agricultural Education and Arts, and they and the Rutland Farmers Food Center have together a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities that’s supporting this project and the story collection aspect of it. So it’s really about just being together and having those dialogues about our history, you know, place and how we eat and our landscape shapes who we are and our values. Tonight we have Polish, and then the next couple of weeks. We have Puerto Rican night next Monday, Syrian the following Monday and then final for the series will be Italian. Yeah, very excited!
Jack Crowther, Rutland
Root Words is this project to preserve and transmit the culture of Vermont and in particular this area, and so it’s focusing on occupations, food, characters, stories, all in connection with the land. So it’s a little bit amorphous, but we’re trying to tie these different elements together, bring out people’s stories — old-timers, newcomers — and relate it all to Vermont landscape, which is pretty distinctive. This meal, the pork and cabbage soup, a Polish meal, is one little piece of what we’re working on. This is a three-year project, and at the end of it, we hope we’ve contributed something to appreciation of the culture of Vermont, Rutland County in particular. And it’s kind of centered in Shrewsbury in a way. A lot of the participants are Shrewsbury residents and people who have farmed and lived here for some time, multi-generations in some cases.
Grace Korzun, Shrewsbury
My husband’s father had a dairy farm, and my husband worked on it. He sort of took over when his father couldn’t work any more. It was just dairy, a cut of hay and raised corn for the cattle and so forth. The milk was picked up by a boat tank, and I think in the early days it went to Bellows Falls, and then later on it went to Springfield, Mass. They had a sugaring operation, too. Certainly when my husband was young they did, and they were still sugaring after we were married, but after not too many years, the sugar house fell apart — broke down. They had chickens, but they didn’t ever sell eggs. They raised the chickens for meat. They had hens and roosters and they raised chickens, but not except to eat.
Stan Jakubowski, West Rutland
RH: Stan, what are your favorite Polish foods?
SJ: I’ve got to have galumpkis top of my list. And then I’m going to say pierogies. I like pierogies with sauerkraut and cheese the best, but I can eat any kind of pierogies.
RH: What’s your favorite Polish dessert?
SJ: I like kołaczki the best.
RH: How do you spell that?
SJ: I can’t spell very good. My wife would kill me if I tried spelling it.
Greg Cox, West Rutland
RH: You more than probably anybody else around here have revolutionized the image of farmers and farming in Vermont. What kind of goals do you have left? What do you want to do from here?
GC: Well, the goals never end because there’s always new opportunity and new things that come up that you never even considered. So I’ll continue exploring those opportunities and pass them on to the next generation, and we’ll have Rutland, Vermont, be the food capital of the world.
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