No Room for Lazy People - Linda (Dicker) Montague
New Ipswich Historical Society
FINNS: An Oral History of Finnish-Americans in New Hampshire’s Monadnock Region
Excerpted from FINNS: An Oral History... by Patricia Kangas Ktistes, 1997, all rights reserved.
Linda (Dicker) Montague
There was a coffee grinder in our sauna when I was young. It was in the first room when you entered, which was the dressing room. There was a full-sized, wood-burning cooking range in that room. And of course they had the traditional benches up against the walls and pegs so you could hang your clothing. There was an old black wringer washing machine in the sauna room where the cooking range was; an early electric one. I remember the thing running when I was a kid. Mummu [grandma] would come up and do her own laundry. If she needed some hot water, she’d boil it on the stove.
Other than keeping that room warm for anyone who was getting dressed or resting before or after sauna, my grandmother would use that stove to do her canning of garden vegetables and fruits, jelly making and all that type of thing.
When she was doing the canning, Mummu stored an extensive number of canned goods down in the basement. We had a great many canning jars and she would put all this stuff up. And after Mummu died, my mother would point and say, “All these shelves would be filled with jars.” At that time, the family ate tomatoes the old-fashioned way, and had them stewed alongside the main dish.
And she’d make various pickles, chow-chow, that type of thing. I think she canned anything that was at hand. Back in the old days, Mummu didn’t run around in automobiles the way we do now. She had the time to put up home-grown food for the family. There were grapes on the property. If you headed out to our cow barn and walked to the edge of the field, there was a huge grape vine. Mummu used to make jelly from these Concord grapes. I remember one time my mother making jelly; the bag containing the crushed, parboiled grapes hung in the crabapple tree right behind the house where we used to have a swing. They were in a huge cheesecloth bag, which subsequently turned purple. She had this hanging up, dripping into a big pan so she could harvest the grape juice.
Sounds like my Mummu, which I pronounced Moomoo. My mummu died in 1959, I still have the last pair of mittens she made for me. My grandparents lived off the land with 8 cows, a bull, a few chickens, a pig, an apple orchard, and a blueberry patch. The farm was sold to the Montagues. Not sure if it was Linda's husband family, but Dr. Montague was a well-known scientist who founded a company called Precision Biomarkers which did DNA testing for markers associated with different diseases. Ollie and I visited him 20 yrs ago. The old house is now a guest house and the dairy barn was converted into the main house.