Fall Flavors

Another month, another visit to Greenfield Village. This time, one of my college friends was visiting home, and I joined her and her parents for Fall Flavor Weekends at Greenfield Village. It was a cool, cloudy day, but I was still surprised by how uncrowded it was, not that I was complaining. I guess Fall Flavor Weekends aren’t a huge deal compared to some of their separately ticketed events, but I enjoyed it. Mostly things go on in the village as usual, except with more cooking and demonstrations.

When we arrived, we first headed in the direction of the farm, where they were threshing, and later baling, wheat. The thresher was powered by a steam engine that would have made the rounds to each farm as needed and also periodically let out giant plumes of smoke. From there, we visited the mid-19th century Firestone Farm, home to Harvey Firestone, the tire guy. He was friends with Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, and apparently the three of them would sometimes go vacationing together. At the farm, they were in the middle of lunch (featuring cabbage, squash, and a bread or cake?), and were making apple butter in the basement.

Threshing wheat

We next briefly looked around the Liberty Craftworks area, but it was mostly business as usual for them, though the print shop did print up some recipes for ham. On our way to lunch, we walked through the farmer’s market set up in the pavilion, which I had never seen open before then. For lunch, I got pork and beans with cornbread at A Taste of History, and it was delicious. I still really appreciate that their food tastes like food and not salt and oil.

Barns by the craft shops

After lunch, we wandered through the rest of the houses that were cooking. McGuffey’s birthplace (~1800, Pennsylvania) was making rabbit stew and some sort of English pudding that gets boiled. The Mattox family home (~1930, Georgia) had crackling bread and peach cobbler. Outside near these two houses, they were also making cheese and butter, plus baking apple pies (three of them, cooked in three slightly different ways – how do I get a job that involves more pies?) on an open fire. Then at the Edison homestead (~1915, Canada – this was Edison’s grandparents’ house that Edison would visit) they were having ham, a grape/celery/mayonnaise salad, and something else involving rolled fried spinach. The Susquehanna plantation (~1860, Maryland) was cooking crab cakes and biscuits, and finally, the Daggett farmhouse (~1760, Connecticut) was cleaning up by the time we got there, and had just finished brewing a batch of beer. We learned about some of the different things they used to flavor the beer, and the grains that were cooked into a mash and could be eaten as a sort of breakfast cereal before fermentation.

Overall, I liked the event; it was a different look at the houses in Greenfield Village and they kept it pretty low key. No crowds, a bit of behind the scenes, and food. What more could I ask for?

But wait, there’s more. The last fall flavor is mine. I had been watching The Great British Bake Off again and decided what I really needed to do was bake a cake. Specifically a nice complicated upside down apple cider cake that involved cooking apple slices in cider, melting butter and sugar to caramelize, arranging a layer of apples on the bottom of the pan, baking a spice cake (from scratch) over the apples, and turning the whole thing upside down. It’s a bit of a pain, but worth it in the end, because it’s not like I have better things to do with my time. (Research? What research?)

Upside down apple cider cake