Solstice Food: Sustainable Regional Food for Winter

Winter has arrived in the northern hemisphere. With it comes the smells wafting out of the house: the smells of good home cooking. Winter is a time to celebrate regional specialties and the recipes that have been passed down through the family over many years. It's a time for soul food and solstice food.

Long before the current focus on local food, people ate locally because there was no other alternative. An orange in the winter time was like orange gold, amazing and special, fit for a Christmas stocking. From this cooking, regional specialties developed. If yours was a potato farming community, you'd better believe that these specialties focused on the wonders of the potato. If yours was a dairying community, well, milk was on the menu.

If you're hankering for some down home specialties, this is the right season to peruse old family recipe books and the museum piece recipes from your local area. Don't have any old family recipe books? Wouldn't you know, there's a cookbook for that. In the US, Linda Stradley's I'll Have What They're Having: Legendary Local Cuisine cookbook is a compendium of what is local in your region.

Still lost for ingredients? If you live in the UK, there's a web site for that. Historical Foods is another compendium of the delicious, this time in web format. Head back to Stuart, Tudor, or Victorian times and eat what was on the menu for their traditional feasts. There's even a section on the Dark Ages with a recipe for Elder Ale. Although we hope we won't end up in the Dark Ages at Christmastime, this does give a new meaning to historic and regional food, minus the side of feudalism.

Are you creating your own blend of family traditions from a mish-mash of cultures, all transported to a new place? Take a hint from regional recipes and create your own. What's sustainable this time of year? Turn to preserved foods, preferably those preserved yourself during the summer and fall bounty: canned peaches, stewed dries pears, beet pickles. The list is endless. Foods that love to live in cold storage are also sustainable, whether they're apples preserved from the fall or kale and parsnips still thriving in the chilly garden soil. And as it is the season to share, creating homemade everything is also on the sustainable goodie and gift list.

Tis the season to revel in what is local, even if it is not yet familiar. This winter, try creating a new family tradition using food created by your own community.

Image: flickr.com