Ebony's Pearls

Herbs III
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In America, at least judging by the many homes I’ve toured and the floor plans I’ve pored over, the pantry has shrunk from a root cellar or other room of its own to a small cabinet and an appliance. Most homes have only a week or two of food available and most of that is perishable. At least a third of it gets thrown away as inedible.

The pantry used to be a respected room of the house. In truly large households, large enough to hire servants, a pantler was an important person. The pantler held the keys to the pantry and kept it inventoried and stocked for a year’s worth of food for the entire household – servants, family members, guests, and enough extras to feed the indigent who came to the back door. They consulted with the gardeners about the kitchen gardens and the cook for putting up the food that was stored there and may have shopped the farmer’s markets to add to the stores.

And now, our “pantry” is a cabinet and a refrigerator.

As part of the ongoing theme of the permacultured kitchen, managing a pantry is essential. A pantry is where our preserved and root cellared foods are stored for the year. This makes it sound as if there is a massive annual undertaking to stock the pantry. Truth is, stocking the pantry is a year round effort as you preserve and store what’s in season so it will be available all year round, restocking as new crops come around. Depending on where you live, stocking the pantry may be a weekly endeavor during the harvest season or a bi-weekly to monthly endeavor all year around.

We can talk about stocking the pantry in many other posts, this one is about how to set up and manage your pantry.

Given that many homes - and precious few apartments – come with adequate pantries, we have to all make do with what we have. If you own your own home, you could build in ceiling cupboards to store pantry items. Barring that, we need to find other ways to get creative. Take your dishes out of the cabinets and nestle them ornamentally (or stack with practical precision) on shelves. Use the cabinets for food storage. Buy or build low boxes you can easily slide under beds and the sofa to hold jarred or canned goods. Use canned goods as book ends or stacked ornamentally among your books, movies, and music. Build door top shelves to hold more stored foods. Stack milk crates full of stored foods in a corner of the laundry room or by the hot water heater or along the floor of closets. I’m sure you get the idea and will look around your dwelling with fresh vision aimed at maximizing your food storage.

Managing a scattered pantry like that will take coordination. Since you’re reading this on a computer (you are, right?), you have a tool that will save you time and grief – the computer. You don’t even need a special program, a word processor or a spreadsheet program works just fine. I prefer the spreadsheet program. Make a form for each room in which you are storing food (Living room, master bedroom, back bedroom, laundry room, kitchen – egads! We actually store some food in the kitchen!). In each room’s page, list what foods you are storing there and how much of each. When you use the food, make sure you subtract it in your form. When you add more food, add it in your forms, too. When you are pondering dinner, you won’t have to wander from room to room, pulling out underbed boxes or opening cabinets. You can just open your spreadsheet and glance down the list (spreadsheets allow you to also add images which can make it much more fun to browse through), making your selections. You can also store a file of favorite recipes using the foods you most commonly store.

What do you keep in your pantry? That depends entirely on your own food preferences and habits. My pantry is a blend of store-bought canned goods, boxed and bagged goods, herbs and spices, and foods I’ve put up myself either from things I grew or foods bought at the farmer’s market. I have home canned jars sitting alongside tin cans of commercial foods and my spice cabinet is a blend of store bought and home grown. You may start out with a pantry of nothing but store bought foods and eventually augment it with home canned (yours or a friend’s!), or even replace the store bought eventually with only home canned. I’m not a purist; I’ll always have a blend of store bought and home-made.

I only keep foods I will actually eat. It makes no sense to me to buy or put up food I have no intention of ever eating. It’s a waste of food and space, and if you have limited space, don’t fill it with food you’ll never eat. Of course, I like a huge variety of foods, so I have a very varied pantry with food from a wide selection of ethnicities and countries. I also happen to have a dedicated pantry room so I have the space to store a big variety of foods.

The best way to find out what foods you rely upon and prefer is to spend some time documenting what you really eat. That spread sheet can come in handy for this, too. What foods do you cook, how much do you have left over, what restaurant meals do you gravitate towards, what foods do you really like eating – write those in your spreadsheet and how often you eat them. Meat counts, as do candy and beverages. Don’t forget to include the seasonings you use most.

Then you need to calculate quantities. How many pounds of potatoes do you eat a year? Carrots? Tomatoes (as sauce, canned, in soups…fresh is only for in season)? Beans? How many quarts of tea, coffee, fruit juice, etc. do you drink? Add it up, figure out how you’ll store them, then inventory and store them to use throughout the year.

Be sure to add in extra for feeding guests and planning for emergencies and disasters.

I’ve posted before about organizing dry pantries, refrigerators, freezers, and spice cabinets. There are also a number of good books about organizing these spaces. Check them out and decide how you want to organize and store your foods.

To give you a rough example: I love potatoes. Baked, boiled, mashed, fried, au gratined, creamed, potato salad… my family eats about 200 pounds of potatoes a year. We grow most of our potatoes in huge plastic trash bags – approximately 30 pounds per bag, about 8 bags a year. We keep them in the bags outside covered up in straw throughout the winter and dig out what we need all year long. 60 pounds of peas, green beans, whole corn off the cob, and carrots, canned up into pint jars (or 55 store bought cans of each) lasts a year. If you’re buying the canned goods, you don’t have to buy them all at once, but you can save by knowing how much you’ll need for a year and buying in bulk. You can even buy those huge cans of vegetables and recan them into smaller jars. Or you buy the frozen in huge bags and rebag them into serving sizes.

Now that you’ve determined what you eat, how much you eat of them in a year, when you’ll buy them or put them up, and where you’re going to store it all, now we get to the meat of the post: managing it all.

Setting up the pantry actually prepares you for managing it. What you’ll buy and what you’ll grow or can yourself determines somewhat the timetable on which you will replenish your pantry, and so determines how much you purchase or put up at a time. On a calendar (a paper one or a computer one, it doesn’t matter), mark out the dates you’ll shop for the food, the harvest dates for your home grown foods, and the dates you’ll put up the different foods (assuming you grow and put up food). If you raise animals for eggs, milk, or meat, or hunt for your larder, be sure to mark the hunting seasons and slaughtering dates. If you don’t have the equipment to slaughter and butcher your meat, you can take them to processors who will do it for you. If you buy shares in a dairy cow or purchase quarters or sides of cows or pigs or venison or buffalo or ostrich or buy free-range poultry, mark the dates your rancher slaughters them for your pick-up (and mark the payment dates if you pay in installments). If you buy shares in a CSA, mark both the payment dates and the pick-up dates for your produce.

Then, on the marked dates, perform the actions you marked: shop, pay, pick up, hunt, butcher, put up.

If you’re already in the kitchen butchering and putting up food, you might as well make a few prepared foods, too, to put up for later convenient eating. If you’ve invested in a pressure canner, you can put up your own soups and chilis and spaghetti sauces and such. If not, you can make and freeze them. A good freezer is a good investment for annual food storage and eating.

This takes care of the provisioning of the pantry. Mark what you have and where they are located in your inventory spreadsheet.

If you are an advocate of the once-a-month-cooking method, use the spreadsheet to mark what meals you’ve prepared ahead and where you’ve put them. It doesn’t have to be frozen meals, although most once-a-month methods rely on freezers. You can also can meals like stews, chilis, and casseroles,and I've known people who layer "meals" in a jar to can for later - all they need to do is add a salad or fruit and bread for a ready-to-eat meal that blows TV dinners away..

When you plan your meals, consider first what you have in your pantry. Make meals that use what you have on hand. Done right, you should only need to shop for perishables like milk once every week or two. If you only use milk as an ingredient and not as a beverage or for cereals, then you can freeze the milk in portion sizes and only have to buy it once every three months. Most firm cheese can be frozen, too, reducing the number of times you have to shop for it. The goal is to eat as much out of your pantry as possible.

Mark your spreadsheet when you use food from your pantry so you know what to replace and when. Your calendar will be useful for planning shopping trips. Coordinate your inventory spreadsheet with your provisioning calendar so you always know what you have on hand.

Before computers, the pantler had to remember all this in their head, or handwritten in notebooks. Today, we can use calendar programs with reminders and spreadsheets a faster and more reliable way to manage a pantry and keep it stocked – and a more flexible way to accommodate taste changes, seasonal specials, and lifestyle changes.