I was invited to a reception at the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake on Friday. They are gearing up for the 2010 season, which begins on May 28th, with a number of new exhibits; among them is, "Let's Eat", which focuses on food traditions in the Adirondacks.
I met Gail at home, and together we picked Ben up at school, and we all headed down through Tupper Lake and Long Lake to Blue Mountain Lake. We love visiting the Adirondack Museum, and get down once or twice each year, but this time we walked along empty paths and past darkened halls; it's a little weird visiting the museum without the other patrons...
The reception was held in the Lynn Boillot Art Galleries, which we always call the,"Map Room", because of the huge and gorgeous and interactive map of the Adirondack Park that we can't help but play with whenever we visit. Besides regular reception-fare, there were a number of food items made by museum-staff following the recipes of longtime Great Camp cook, Hattie Shaw.
The monkey-face cookies were a big hit!
The exhibit itself is an interesting mix of food-related artifacts, from the past and present. The food traditions of the Adirondacks have a number of conflicting influences, that work together to create a unique mix of simple and fancy, local and exotic, home-cooking and resort-y fine-dining...you can see this comfy clash in many things Adirondack: million dollar log cabins, woodsy stick furniture with artisan-levels of detail work, and so on...
This tureen is a great example of the clash evident in Adirondack food traditions.
Ben and Gail and I loved looking around at the different displays and examples of food and the food industry inside the Park. This is a hand-press used to print menus for guests of an exclusive lodge around the turn of the 20th century.
If you click on the picture above, you can see a larger copy of the picture, which gives great examples of the contrasts in food that people served and ate in the Adirondacks for as long as people have visited and lived here.
There are great pictures of different dining rooms and kitchens, both fancy and plain, throughout the history of the Adirondacks...
Another interesting food tradition in the Adirondacks is the use of the names associated with the giant wilderness; there were (and still are) lots of products that use the evocative names to help give their product a boost...a modern example is the line of "Saranac" beers, which are made in Utica, NY, well outside of the Adirondack Park...
Another of the food traditions in the Park is the preparation of food and drink when camping or being guided in the wilderness...this was of particular interest to us, as we love camping, and are amazd at both the similarities and differences between the gear of today and the past...
I had never heard of these, but they speak of a time when the forests must have seemed endless and inexhaustible...
Ben was fascinated by this device, as was I, once I found out what it was...I had assumed that it was a meat grinder or pasta cutter, but it is a raisin de-seeder. although nowadays we take seedless raisins for granted, there was a time when the use of raisins in any recipe would first require soaking and then running them through this machine...a nice reminder of the amount of labor that went into food prep before so many of the advances that we have all grown up with...
Some of the signage is not yet in place (although it will be by the opening date of May 28th), so Ben and I read from the scripts describing some of the items that we were most interested in...this bit was about a family pickling some deer meat, inside the cleaned out carcass, prior to making jerky out of it over low coals covered in hickory bark...Ben was fascinated by the idea of getting all/most of your food during the warm months, and preserving it to feed you through the cold months...this is a concept that most people cannot identify with, given our dependence on the convenience of grocery stores with fresh produce and meats and grains year around.
All in all, it was a fascinating exhibit, filled with much more than we could take in during a single visit, but we'll likely be back over the summer with my parents to explore it, and the other wonderful exhibits at the ADK Museum.
We stopped on the way home for supper at the Adirondack Hotel, on shores of Long Lake, and went on to have a great weekend, although Mother's day (today) is buried in snow!
