Note to Readers: This short essay accompanied Mason® jars of barbecue sauce given in December 2007 as gifts to all the people who helped make the first year of the Grumblethorpe Farm Stand possible.
If you have received a pot of “Secret Sauce” from Brandi, you belong to a very, very special group of people who made something extraordinary happen. You see, unbeknownst to all of you, the making of this batch of sauce actually began six years ago…
When I started working as the Museum Educator at Grumblethorpe in the fall of 2001, farmers markets were just beginning to be a hot topic in Philadelphia. I was enchanted with Grumblethorpe, excited by its origins as a working farm and I thought it would be a wonderful if Grumblethorpe could be a farm stand location. I’d heard about an organization named Farm to City which matched farmers with host sites and thought it would be a good match for Grumblethorpe—hey, all a farmer had to do was set up his or her stand once a week!—so I presented the idea at my very first committee meeting.
“Who will oversee it?” “Who will open and close the gate?” “The site managers only work Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sunday afternoons from one to four, we can’t have people here unattended.” The committee members, consumed with preparations for the Battle of Germantown event and Octoberfest fundraiser, were polite, but not enthusiastic. The idea was new and I was new. Volunteers were in short supply. The list of objections outweighed enthusiasm, and, as I soon discovered, I would quickly have my hands full running the education program which was quite a job for a single educator. The blaze of my initial impulse died down, but the idea continued to simmer quietly on the back burner of my mind, turning up to medium each spring when I had the fifth grade classes hold sidewalk plant sales of the multitude of vegetable and flower plants grown by the children in the partner school program.
Fast forward to 2006 and new Executive Director Frank Vagnone bursts into Landmarks*, with all kinds of ideas – “I want to do this! And this! And this! And Grumblethorpe used to be a farm—let’s see if we can get a farmers’ market going!”
Well knock me over with a spoon! Landmarks Grant Writer Extraordinaire John Graham began submitting proposals for farmers markets to various foundations. Sometimes the budgets, when I saw them, were a trifle, (ahem), thin (operating a market garden is a tremendous amount of work), but Landmarks was now officially behind the idea.
By the end of the school year, however, we hadn’t received a single grant to support a farm stand and I was ready for a much needed break. When I returned to work at the end of June, however, John Graham had some news—a seed cast on the wind had born fruit—a grant for the farm stand had come in! On one hand it was “HOORAY!” On the other hand it was “UH OH!”
It was a dream come true, BUT. There were a lot of “buts”. The grant was only for four thousand dollars, one quarter of which was to pay to have a gate put into the iron fence on Grumblethorpe’s north side, another quarter was for supplies and a banner, leaving only two thousand dollars to pay a manager AND two teen assistants for a summer’s worth of work. It was already the end of June. We didn’t have a Farm Stand Manager identified. And who the heck would be willing to take on a job that truly required at least forty hours of work a week for the next twelve weeks for the meager one thousand dollars allocated in the miniscule budget? Experienced gardeners were already well under way with their own plots. All the farmers who worked through the various farm stand organizations had been placed at locations since March. The Grumblethorpe education garden was over-grown because we didn’t know we’d be doing a farm stand and a quarter acre is a lot of real estate to weed.
BUT, THEN there was Grumblethorpe Educator Amanda Miduski. One thousand dollars for flexible summer hours didn’t look so bad to a young graduate student hungry for experience that would build up her resume. She began working as our Farm Stand Manager the third week in July, actually pulling the two oldest Grumblethorpe Youth Volunteers, Chris Scott and Tedra Ishmael, both fifteen years old, from their last day of working as Counselors-in-Training for the Summer Day Camp, to be her assistants.
Underfunded and understaffed is the hallmark of life in the historic site field. The Grumblethorpe Farm Stand Project took this modus operandi to new heights—perhaps even perfected it. Amanda pulled in her six-year-old sister and her roommate to help out. Chris’s mother, Gunya, started pitching in. The education beds were weeded, additional tomato, pepper and other veggies were transplanted and plots were seeded with lettuce and radishes. Team Farm Stand began harvesting every Friday afternoon and selling from a folding card table set up on the sidewalk. Amanda went online to find a straightforward model for a simple business plan and worked with the teens to tailor it to the Grumblethorpe Farm Stand. As Amanda was also a print making major at the University of the Arts, she had Chris and Tedra design posters and then taught them how to silk screen print them as they began their marketing effort.
Grumblethorpe’s garden, however, simply did not produce enough to stock a real farm stand. Amanda spent hours and hours on the phone searching for a farmer who could supplement Grumblethorpe’s yield or secure a organization to help. The Food Trust, Farm to City, Weaver’s Way Food Co-op—she came up empty at every turn. She even placed an ad in the Lancaster papers. The organizations were supportive, but no one was available. In a last ditch effort I called my mom, an artist who makes a living painting the farms of rural Berks County, Pennsylvania, and asked if she knew of any farmers who might be interested in setting up a stand in Philadelphia for a few weeks.
My mom didn’t exactly hit pay dirt, but she did strike fertile soil of sorts. Jonathan Martin, a Mennonite farmer who sold his produce at Renninger’s Farmers Market in Kutztown was not able to come to Philadelphia, but he was willing to provide Grumblethorpe with vegetables and fruit from his own farm at cost if we could come pick it up in Kutztown. I made the first run, bringing Chris and Tedra along to help load and unload. My minivan was packed to the roof.
On the first Saturday of the expanded farm stand, I arrived at eight-thirty in the morning to find Amanda, Chris and Tedra on the sidewalk surrounded by a jumble of poles from three different pavilion frames. In their eagerness to help the teenagers had hauled the bags with the pavillions up from the basement and emptied them pell-mell onto the sidewalk. There wasn’t an instruction sheet in site. Amanda and I set Chris and Tedra to setting up the tables while we sorted out the tent poles. Tony from the Bargain Thrift Store next door helped hoist the canopies.
From the get-go we sold out every week (except for potatoes—a bushel bag lasted two weeks). The following week Richard Vogel, Grumblethorpe Garden Chair, came along for the haul to Kutztown to pick up the produce. Then Chris’s mom, Gunya, and Richard made the trip in Richard’s jeep. The next week Gunya strapped her one-year-old-daughter into her car seat and made the run in her minivan.
If we’d had a truck instead of a collection of SUVs and minivans we would have been able to purchase more produce—the demand was there. The stand seemed to generate its own staff as well. New Grumblethorpe committee member, Nadine Talley, joined the sales team. Germantown resident Shani Taylor showed up the first day to buy vegetables and remained to become the ace marketing agent, hawking “Fresh Corn, Silver Queen, Just Picked Yesterday” like a cast member from Oliver! Chris Scott displayed a handy talent for totaling sales figures in his head. The omnipresent Richard Vogel took photographs on his breaks from building the new garden shed.
Initially drawn by the lure of the renowned local emporium, Bargain Thrift Shop, the residents of Lower Germantown and beyond stopped by the stand. “How long have you been here?” “Will you be here next week?” “Will you have certified organic?” (Jonathan Martin’s produce, like that of many Mennonite farmers, is fertilized solely with manure, pests are controlled by border plantings of marigolds, and any infestations taken care of with a mixture of soapy water and red pepper powder. His growing methods are about as organic as you can get, but, also like many Mennonite farmers, he is not “certified organic” because under the “organic” label he can’t sell the volume he needs to make a profit.)
There were many, many mistakes made and lessons learned along the way. Simple things like having a price list tied to the fence behind the stand. Making sure everyone was charging the same price. Developing a system for getting the cash to the Landmarks office without Amanda having to make a subway journey with a roll of bills stuffed in her, um, sock. The farm stand was happening under the auspices of the Grumblethorpe Education Program and I doubt there’s ever been a program in which people learned more.
The third week of the market Jonathan Martin had the last of his peaches available. Perfect, absolutely perfect, peaches. The kind of peaches that give new meaning to the word “luscious”. The kind whose taste you can’t quite recall in the dead of winter—you have a memory of something firm yet yielding to the tooth like al dente pasta, but at the same time so juicy it must be eaten over the sink; so flavorful, so sweet you think it must only exist in dreams. I bought a whole crate.
My family ate peaches at every meal and for snacks the rest of the day and the next. And just before they turned over-ripe I stoned what remained, cut them into eighths and plopped them into my big pot with the rest of the ingredients for “Secret Sauce,” which even if I do make it myself from a family recipe, I still consider one of the wonders of the culinary world.
In going to “put it up” as they used to say, I ran into a couple of snags that make this particular batch particularly precious and delicious. You see, I burned the bottom of the pot, not once but twice—even with a flame tamer under the pot! The first time the pot took less time to come to a boil than I anticipated. I poured it into a clean pot and put it on low. The second time my son had a computer crises—his computer froze and he lost a summer book report he was half way through typing. Such anguish, such hassle! And what was that burning smell?!?!?! I carefully poured the sauce back into the first pan (now scrubbed clean again), and by the time the canning jars had come to a boil, the sauce was simmering for the third time. The beauty of burning the sauce is that it intensifies the flavor, so long as you don’t disturb the burned part on the bottom of the pan. The difficulty is that you simply can’t plan to burn the sauce—it just doesn’t work, it must happen by accident or not at all. And this sauce had been burned twice—a real feat. This particular batch of sauce is the best I’ve ever made—the result, I am certain, of the people who contributed to its making.
“Secret Sauce” can be used on virtually anything. Slather it on chicken as a barbecue sauce, drop a dollop into lentil soup, mix it with cream cheese for a dip, put it on French fries instead of ketchup, spread it on a roast beef sandwich. I have even considered drizzling it over vanilla ice cream.
But the very best way to eat this sauce, and the one I recommend to you, is some night when the world seems hard, when there’s too much work to be done, not enough people to do it, and not enough money to pay them, pull this jar out off the shelf and lean against the kitchen counter and eat it all by yourself with a spoon. And as you eat you will be filled with the spirit of a dream that not only came true, but came true because of you. A dream that is all the more wonderful because it has only just begun.
With great thanks & all the best wishes for a Wonderful 2008 Grumblethorpe Farm Stand!
*The Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks is the nonprofit which owns and operates Grumblethorpe.
Brandi Levine Consulting 