Although the farm-to-table movement may seem commonplace now, Beth Linskey remembers a time back when it wasn't so easy to get milk and eggs from your neighborhood farm. But she was committed to locally sourcing ingredients for her preserves company, Beth's Farm Kitchen, which she founded in her kitchen in Stuyvesant in 1981 starting with strawberry jam. Now the company offers 90 varieties. Somewhat of a legend in our area, she offers the best tastes from Columbia County farms to NYC farmers' markets. I was a caterer in New York City in the 1970s, but the tax law changed, so the corporate business I had came to an end. I had been buying from the Greenmarket Farmers' Market for my business for years and decided to take the fruit that they didn't use to make jam. This was before people were rescuing food, so there was fruit that was left at the end of the market each day. I had never made jam before, but I could cook, so I figured it out. I made chutney right away because it was a little more challenging. I used the New York Public Library to find all my recipes. In Columbia County, we have a lot of farms and the Hudson River keeps it pretty temperate, so the orchards do very well along the river. I now go to orchards to get my fruit, because I buy large quantities, like a thousand pounds of strawberries. This year, we purchased 30,000 pounds of locally grown fruit from farmers I know. I made a lot of connections from the Greenmarket and from many years of talking to farmers.
We make our jams in small batches. We cook them in pots, not steam kettles and they cook very fast, so the presence of fruit is felt. When you open the jar you really smell the fruit. We make strawberry, raspberry, black currant, red currant, gooseberry and quince. Cherrycot is cherry and apricot; neachycot is nectarine, peaches and apricots mixed, because I love apricots. Our strawberry rhubarb is pie in a jar! We have amazing chutney and we now make a ketchup, barbecue sauce and a spicy ketchup, because we try to stay up on the trends. When we first came here we would have to bring food from the city with us; there was no place to buy bread, we had no bakeries. There was no place to buy quality local food. The farm-to-table movement was just beginning, but things have changed immensely. I buy local and it's always been local.
