FoodTrust – Connections

“Herring and taters, the food of the land;
If you don’t like it, you can starve and be damned.”

That old P.E.I. saying pretty well sums up what was on many dinner tables back in the Dirty ’30s. In the Great Depression money and variety were scarce but there was always an abundance of salt fish and potatoes. I once asked 108-year old Ann Byrne – born in 1897 and at the time PEI’s oldest citizen – if they ate fish on Friday when she was growing up in Lake Verde. She laughed and said, “More than on Fridays! We ate salt fish and blue potatoes and drank buttermilk to take the edge off the salt herring.”

McIntyre Blue potatoes – “Blues” to most Islanders – were once the most common potato grown on P.E.I.. They are a long potato that one man told me he, “carried to the house in the crook of my arm like firewood”.

My friend Gus Gregory from Souris remembers salt herring and blue potatoes being used as a spring tonic and cure-all when he was a boy back in the 1920s. “McIntyre Blue potatoes…the herring had to be salted in the fall, head and tail on. Then we cut the herring in two and boiled it. You had to soak it overnight in cold water to take some of the salt out. A feed of that was a cure for sick people.”

On the Gregory farm in Chepstow they grew old potato varieties like Irish Cobbler, Early Rose, McIntyre Blue and a variety Gus knows only as “Blacks” – a deep purple-hued potato. “Stars” were also grown to feed animals or to take to the starch factory in East Baltic.

Like many Islanders of his generation – he was born in 1918 – Gus grew up on a farm and fished on the side. His grandfather Dan Gregory passed down home remedies like the blue-potato-and-salt-herring cure. Grandpa Dan always sowed and harvested his crops by the phases of the moon. Root crops like potatoes and turnips were planted in the “dark” phase of the moon or when the full moon was waning. Conversely crops that grew on the surface like grain and corn were planted on the “light” of the moon – just before the moon was full. “The day he sowed wheat the wind had to be southwest, and in the light of the moon.” Lumber and firewood were sawn in the dark phase of the June moon. The branches were left on the trees to draw out the sap.

“Everybody made their own (wooden) shingles…the shingles would wear out before they’d rot.”

Up at the other end of the Island, 94-year old Amy Adams-Bryanton from Kensington learned the same customs from her grandparents. Amy was the first person to tell me about putting salt herring on the soles of your feet to cure a fever and pneumonia. I thought she was kidding me until 50 other people told me the same cure, which inevitably concludes with… “and in the morning my fever was gone and the fish was cooked !”

When I asked Amy about the McIntyre Blues and salt herring tonic she told me that’s the type of food that kept people healthy. She doesn’t remember anyone having the “stomach and bowel” ailments so common today.

You grew your own food – everything was local except the tea and sugar. Grandma Caseley used to sing a little song:

If iron tonic you need

Eat more spinach, beet and swede;

If your nerves are all awry

Lettuce and onions try.”

Dutch