Time Travel: The American Farm School

I had a Facebook friend request this week which catapulted me some 9,000 miles east and 50 years back in time, to Christmas, 1958 at the American Farm School.

We had just moved from Athens with our five-month-old son to the school outside Thessaloniki, Greece. We had a small upstairs apartment in a staff housing unit. The kitchen had a deep north window for food storage and a hooded charcoal burner for cooking; I had no idea how to use them. The power went off at 10 P.M. unless the poultry department was incubating eggs, in which case we had electricity all night.

I said I had to have a refrigerator, and the Farm School came up with a kerosene refrigerator which worked fine. I said I had to have a stove, and unknowingly I caused a crisis in the life of my downstairs neighbor, Demetra, who took the bus seven miles to Thessaloniki to do her baking in a public oven. Demetra calculated the cost of the public oven and convinced her husband, George, that she should have a stove at home.

Next door in the upstairs apartment lived Margaritis and Hariklea and their daughter Efthimoula, who was a little older than our son Nonda. It was Efthimoula who invited me to be her Facebook friend yesterday.

Life in the small community of the Farm School was pretty communal. Everybody spoke Greeklish except the 200 high-school-age boy students, who had to go to class.

I substituted at the English class once and taught the boys to sing “Camptown Races”. For months, the students would greet me on the path with “Doo-dah, Doo-dah”. We had the best milk in the world from the school’s fine Jersey cows. I would simply shake a quart bottle to make butter. There was always ice cream at the dairy, and because the boys learned animal husbandry, we could get meat, chickens and eggs from the proper department and vegetables from the huge class garden. Home repairs became classes for masonry, carpentry, plumbing and electricity.

We moved from the apartment to a beautiful stone house on campus. We had fig trees and a view of Mount Olympus. Our teenaged nanny was in heaven with 200 boys about, and she seized upon any excuse to take Nonda walking. We had dance classes on Saturdays, a shopping bus, and a beach bus for the mothers and children in the summer. I had little jobs teaching music at Pinewood, a school for foreign dependents at the edge of the Farm School campus and working on public relations and scholarships for the school. Occasionally I helped teach short courses in theater for people from nearby villages.

It was another lifetime. Actually, it was paradise.

Nicodemus and I visited the Farm School a few years ago. We saw the old house and Princeton Hall, which was the main school building. We visited the Orthodox church where Ed was christened and looked at the 20-ton rock the boys rolled from a neighboring town for a memorial to Theo Litsas, a saint who was my dearest friend; was, in fact, everybody’s dearest friend. I scooped up a little red dirt and brought it back home.

On Theo’s grave are these words from Paul’s letter to the Philippians:

Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything is worthy of praise, let your mind dwell on these things.

(Photograph is Nonda in the manger scene, 1958. Unfortunately, there were fleas in the hay and Nonda got bitten.)

The Primitive Kitchen

I wonder if they still make Universal food grinders and Foley food mills. Does anybody still make their own butter and chicken stock? The primitive kitchen has always appealed to me: the broth on the back burner, the soap perfuming the room as it cures, the blackberry wine bubbling in a gallon jar.

Some of this atavistic enjoyment certainly is due to my learning to cook as a bride on a farm in northern Greece, where things were pretty basic. I balked at the charcoal burner and the north window which were offered me as a kitchen range and refrigerator in our new apartment at the American Farm School outside Thessaloniki.

When I bought a little Swedish kitchen range, it caused havoc among the community women, who up to that point had been content to have their baking done at a public oven seven miles away. My nearest neighbor calculated to the penny what she had to pay the bakery plus bus fare there and back and presented her husband with proof that a cook stove at home would save him money.

The Farm School handymen found a kerosene refrigerator for me. The north window was fine for keeping things cool during the winter with its Vardar winds, but summers were warm and we didn't have electricity at night unless the school was incubating chicks. I don't know how it worked, but as long as you kept it in kerosene and fresh wicks, that machine would even make ice cream.

I learned to whip egg whites with two forks and to make butter by shaking cream in a mayonnaise jar until it separated. I canned tomato sauce in sterilized wine bottles with corks tied down with string and coated with paraffin. I cracked walnuts with a mortar and pestle, sometimes using the pestle to hammer a nail. I picked wild dandelion greens.

Nowadays, I use an electric mixer and buy butter at the store, but I still like to grind meat in the old Universal and make purees with the Foley food mill. I use my grandmother’s rolling pin. I still pick wild greens, make soap once in a while, make bread, and boil up the chicken skin and bones for stock.

The primitive kitchen is the ultimate in Slow Food.