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By Dorothy E. Noe Photography by Steve Larese
FOOD’S
THE PASSION OF HER LIFE
Food
remains a recurring theme in Mary Clystia Garrison’s life. Not the
prepackaged stuff adorning grocery shelves, but homemade canned jams
and jellies created with native ingredients—food to savor and
remember.
Garrison, 84, first saw
the plains of eastern New Mexico from inside a covered wagon when
her parents arrived 81 years ago as homesteaders. Her life growing
up when railroad tracks were first stretched across New Mexico was a
far cry from the superhighway lives of her grandchildren. When
Garrison was a girl, doors were never locked, water was always in a
basin on the kitchen counter and the woodpile was full. Strangers
could help themselves and would leave everything as they found it.
Back then you didn’t dash
to the supermarket for eggs. Your cellar stocked 100 pounds of
sugar, 5 gallons of sorghum syrup, sacks of flour and cornmeal,
25-pound boxes of dried fruit and chiles, all your canned
vegetables, jams and jellies.
“My mother,” Garrison
recalls, “had a knockout recipe for mincemeat, and we had jars of
that in the cellar also. One Thanksgiving, we made mincemeat pies
and my dad decided we should bring one to a miner living a few miles
away. So we saddled the horses and set off. Well, this miner was so
pleased to see us that he invited us to dinner and set sourdough
biscuits, potatoes and a roast in gravy on his kitchen table, which
gleamed with a lovely warm patina.”
After dessert and coffee,
he asked Garrison, “Girlie, did you like the roast?”
“Yes, sir,” she answered.
“Guess what it was,” he
ordered.
Well, it tasted a bit
wild so she said, “Bear.”
With his eyes twinkling,
he told her, “Honey, you’ll be tellin’ your great grandkids about
the porcupine you just ate for Thanksgiving.”
As a youngster, Garrison
was treated like a princess because of her curly red hair but
“whupped” a lot of boys for calling her “Red.” Those same curls were
once dunked in an inkwell by the lad sitting behind her in a
one-room, adobe schoolhouse. Garrison didn’t attend school until she
was 8 years old, which was when her younger sister could handle a
horse and ride with her. Since another girl riding home from school
by herself had died when her horse slipped, Garrison’s parents
insisted on a buddy system.
Garrison dressed for
riding in a scratchy wool skirt draped over hated long johns.
“My dad would allow us to wear pants if we were working on the
ranch, but as soon as we came indoors, we had to put on a skirt,”
she remembers.
With her lunch bucket
tied to the saddle, Garrison rode her horse—a black Welsh pony—to a
school she still recalls vividly. “We tied our horses to a dead
cedar tree,” Garrison says, “and hung our coats on nail pegs. There
were about 39 kids and one teacher and we all drank water from a
galvanized bucket with a dipper. We washed our hands with lye soap
in a blue, speckled, enamel wash pan.
“After evening chores
and homework, my sister and I drank a cup of warm apple cider. We
had picked the apples and made barrels of cider ourselves.”
And that brings us back
to the passion of Garrison’s life—food. For years, Garrison managed
a large cafeteria in Albuquerque while she raised her five sons, and
her husband drove a truck. When Garrison’s husband took a job in
Mosquero, they found the house on a ranch that she prayed for—one
with an orchard, a basement and a fireplace.
In Mosquero, Garrison
continues to garner blue ribbons and grand championship awards for
her culinary skills. She’s got a special recipe for her Papago
Indian-style marinated jackrabbit, and another for wild quail. Blue
cornmeal’s a favorite ingredient for cooking every thing from Navajo
cookies and muffins to a batter for her stuffed chiles. She boasts
four recipes for buffalo pemmican (jerky). And, then there’s the
sautéed yucca blossoms.
Mixed among Garrison’s
many recipes are memories and tales. For example, there’s the cousin
who was captured by a raiding band of Apaches and raised by
Geronimo’s sister. But, that’s another story.
Dorothy
E. Noe, a retired teacher and homeowner in Placitas, pines for the
turquoise New Mexico sky in New York, where she writes, hikes,
horseback rides, tutors and plots her next trip to the Land of
Enchantment.
NEW
MEXICO
MAGAZINE / MAY 2005
Used by permission |
