My friend Sharon called up one day and asked me if I had some canned water chestnuts on hand. I didn’t, but she was in the midst of making a Chinese dinner and found she was out of this particular ingredient and the store was closed. Sharon went to the social refrigerator looking for what she needed.
I didn’t invent this term. An anthropologist friend told me about social refrigerators. She spoke mostly about the past when people raised much of their own food, and guaranteed a continuous supply of fresh beef, pork, mutton, lamb, and veal by taking turns at butchering and distributing among those with whom they shared a social refrigerator. You can see evidence of this in account books and diaries from the 1700s and 1800s when people write such things as “borrowed a quarter of lamb of Mr. So-and-So.” Or “sent a loin of pork to our son and family.” Well, Mr. So-and-So didn’t get back the same quarter of lamb as he lent, at least I hope not. He did receive an equal weight or value of some fresh meat when his neighbor killed an animal. A nice gesture in hot weather when one could roast a whole leg of lamb fresh out of the social refrigerator and eat it without worrying about it spoiling.
I have thought different times how our community has a few social refrigerators running, as probably do other communities. For example, there were four moose permits on Islesboro last year. But many more households benefited from those permits when the hunters returned laden with meat and shared it around. Same with deer meat. If you shoot as many deer or moose as you can, you might end up with more meat than you want, even frozen. You can trace connections of friendship and family by seeing where the meat goes.
There are eggs, fruits, and vegetables in our social refrigerators, sometimes even whole dinners, when someone cooks up a little more than they need to take to someone who is sick or shut-in, a naturally-occurring meals-on-wheels. There are leftovers in the social fridge, too. When the golf club restaurant closed at the end of the season, odds and ends of very useful stuff ended up at the Baptist Church Thursday Mission lunches. So did some extra lasagna from a fund-raiser.
So far this year I pulled a bag full of ripe plum tomatoes out of the social fridge and I put in some pickles. I will return carrots for some Delicata squashes I “borrowed” and we’ve traded some deer meat for permission to forage on our property for it. I needed a couple cups of sugar when I was making jam last month and when I tried to return it, my neighbor said, “No, don’t give it back to me, because some time I will want to borrow something from you.” It’s a way of keeping something in the fridge, but never worrying about whether it will spoil.
Sandy Oliver cooks and writes on Islesboro.