They Laughed When the Girl Collected Their Chipped Enamelware — Until They Saw Her Farmstand Kitchen

PART 2:

 The dismissal was polite and it came from her uncle Ghard Yanichek who farmed the section to the north of them and came by on Sunday afternoons. He looked at the shelves in the back room that fall and said, “Marin, what are you going to do with all this?” And she said she didn’t know yet. He said, “You can’t sell cracked bowls.” And she said she knew that.

 He nodded and went back to the kitchen table. And that was the extent of it. He was not unkind. He simply could not see what she was building because she could not yet tell him, because she did not yet know herself. She only knew that the things on those shelves were worth more than she had paid for them, and that the reason they were worth more was that most people looked at the chip first and stopped looking.

 The way she described it years later was that she had learned to see the whole piece before she saw the damage. Freda had taught her that, though not in those words. Freda had taught her by picking up a bowl with a chip in it and saying, “Look here. The chip is on the outside lip. It doesn’t touch the food.

 It doesn’t change what the bowl does.” Then she set it on the shelf and used it for the next 15 years. That was the lesson. The chip is not the bowl. The bowl is the bowl. You need to understand what the kitchen at the Yanichek place looked like in 1987 to understand what Marin was seeing when she looked at those sail barn boxes.

Kfax County had been through a hard decade. The early 1980s had brought land values down and interest rates up, and a number of farms in the county had changed hands or been reduced, and the farm families that remained were operating with less margin than their parents had. The extension office in Skyla had seen more traffic in those years than it had in the previous 20.

And the co-op in Oyola had extended credit in ways it had not done before, and collected on some of it, and not on others. None of this was catastrophe. It was the ordinary grinding pressure of a decade that did not go the way anyone had planned and the families who came through it were the ones who had in one form or another held to the practice of not spending what they did not have.

Ingred Yanichek was one of those families. She had a paid for farm, a working kitchen and a daughter who was buying other people’s discards at $4 a box. Marin went to high school in Oscola and she was not a particularly visible student. She was not in student government or the homecoming court. She was in FFA because the FFA chapter had a food science component and she wanted access to the commercial kitchen in the vocational building which she got by asking the instructor, a man named Mr.

Beck with if she could use it on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons to run preservation trials. He said yes without asking many questions because she was organized and she cleaned up after herself and she did not bother him while she worked. She used that kitchen for two years to work out the process for a pickled pepper relish her grandmother had made from memory and never written down.

 It took her 11 batches to get the brine ratio right, which she recorded in the notebook as a ratio and a temperature and a processing time, not as a recipe. She was not interested in recipes. She was interested in process. The relish was not the point. The point was that she was learning to translate what Freda had done by feel into something she could repeat exactly.

 and the commercial kitchen was the laboratory for that translation. By the time she was 17, she had written down in the same notebook style she used for her enamelware purchases the process for seven preserved goods the pepper relish, a bread and butter pickle, a tomato conserve, a dried herb blend from the garden, a rendered lard with a specific smoke point she had measured, a dried bean mixture she called a soup start and a crab apple jelly that used the crab apple tree in the corner of the yard that nobody else had bothered with in

years because the fruit was small and sour and the tree was half shaded. by the old cottonwood. She graduated in 1991, and she did not go to college. This was not a financial decision, or not only a financial decision. She had been accepted to the 2-year program at the technical college in Columbus, but she had looked at the curriculum and decided that what it would teach her, she could teach herself, and that what she needed instead was time and a kitchen of her own.

 Ingred gave her the back room and the shelves, and said, “I’m not giving you the kitchen, but you can use it when I’m not in it.” Marin said that was fine. She was 20 years old by the time she had saved enough from a part-time job at the grain elevator to buy a used chest freezer for $60 and a commercial-grade food mill for $38 from the estate sale of a woman in David City who had run a catering operation in the 1970s. She put both in the back room.

She was beginning to see the shape of what she was building, though she still could not have named it clearly. The arithmetic first, then the rest. In 1992, Marin sold her first goods at the Kfax County Fair in Oyola. She had a card table, a tablecloth from the backroom shelf, and 11 products. the seven preserved goods from the notebook, a dried apple ring she had added in 1991, a corn relish she had developed that spring, a smoked salt she had made in a cold smoker she built from a salvaged metal cabinet, and a length of

stove pipe, and a small croc of rendered lard with a paper lid tied with twine. She had invested by that point a total of $214 in equipment, jars, lids, labels she printed at the library, and raw materials. She sold $187 worth of goods in two days. She came home $27 short of her total investment, which she recorded in the notebook.

 And she was not discouraged by this, because the number she was watching was not the single event figure, but the inventory figure, which told her that she had sold through nearly everything she had brought, and that the constraint was not demand, but production. That was the year she understood what the enamelware was for.

She had been buying it for 5 years by then, and the backroom shelves held 43 pieces in various states of minor imperfection, and she had been using them in the kitchen for preservation work and storing them when she wasn’t. But in the fall of 1992, when she started thinking about what a permanent selling operation might look like, she walked into the back room and looked at those shelves and saw for the first time that she had been furnishing a kitchen, not her mother’s kitchen, a kitchen that would be shown, a kitchen that would be

the thing people came to see as much as the thing they came to buy. Here is what Marin knew that the county did not. She knew that the enamel wear on those shelves was not damaged goods. It was patentated goods. The chips and the scorch marks and the replaced lids and the hairline cracks near the rims were the record of a working life.

 And a working kitchen that had been used for decades looked exactly like those shelves. A brand new kitchen looked like a hardware store. What she was building was not a store. It was a demonstration. A working kitchen made visible. And the enamel wear was the evidence that the work had been going on for a long time.

She had paid across 5 years of sale barn Saturdays a total of $67.15 for those 43 pieces. She had seen comparable pieces in similar condition selling at antique shops in Columbus and Lincoln for between $4 and $12 each, which put the retail value of her collection somewhere between $170 and $500.

 She had bought them because they were cheap and she had kept them because they were functional and she was only now in the fall of 1992 understanding that they were also beautiful in the specific way that used things are beautiful which is that they carry the evidence of their own history. Stop for a moment on the roasting pan. It was the first piece she had bought in the spring of 1987.

 The one with the scorch mark on one end. She had used it every fall since then for roasting tomatoes before she ran them through the food mill for the conserve. The scorch mark from 1987 was still there, and next to it now was a faint discoloration from the tomato work, a faint rust red shadow that the enamel had absorbed over six seasons.

The pan was not damaged. The pan was documented. Every time she used it, it became more itself. She spent the winter of 1992 and 1993 drawing plans, not architectural plans. She did not have the money for a building project, and she was not thinking about a building yet. She was thinking about the farm stand, which in Kfax County in 1992 meant a table at the end of a driveway on a Saturday morning, and she was thinking about how to make that table into something that would bring people 9 miles out of Oscula on a gravel road.

The answer she kept returning to was the kitchen. If people could see the kitchen, they would understand the goods. If they could see the enamel wear on the shelves and the crocs on the counter and the cast iron on the stove and the jars in rows on the table, they would understand that what they were buying was not a product.

 It was a continuation of something. She talked to Ingred about it in February of 1993. She said she wanted to open the back room to the public to set it up as a working kitchen that people could see into while they shopped at the table outside. Ingred thought about this for a long time, which with Ingred meant she was quiet for about a minute and a half.

Then she said, “You’ll need a window cut in the wall.” Marin said she knew that. Ingrid said, “I’ll help you frame it.” That was the extent of the conversation. The window cost $44 in materials, which Marin recorded in the notebook. She and Ingred cut it themselves over two Saturdays in March, a 30-in opening in the south wall of the back room that looked out over the driveway and the yard, and they framed it with the same scrap lumber the shelves were made from, and they put a shelf in the sill wide enough to hold six jars. When the window

was done, Marin stood outside in the yard and looked in. She could see the shelves of enamel wear, the food mill on its stand, the chest freezer with the paper labels she’d taped to the front, the crocs on the counter, the row of hanging ladles and spoons on the wall. It looked exactly like what it was, which was a kitchen that had been working for years.

 She went back inside and wrote $44 in the notebook and added it to the running total. That was the arithmetic first. Here is what happened next. She opened the farm stand on the first Saturday in May of 1993, a morning that was cool and bright with the kind of light that makes a gravel road look silver.

 She set the card table in the driveway and put out what she had. 19 jars of various preserved goods, a basket of dried herb bundles, four crocs of lard, and a handwritten sign on a piece of cardboard that said Yanichek Farm Kitchen with the road number and a small arrow. She had told no one except her mother and Ghart, who had looked at the window in the wall of the back room and said, “Huh?” and then gone back to his truck.

 Seven people came that first Saturday. She knew three of them. She sold $61 worth of goods. One woman, a stranger who had seen the cardboard sign on the county road, stood at the window for a long time, looking at the shelves of Enamelware, and then asked Marin if the kitchen was her grandmother’s. Marin said it was, and also mine.

 The woman bought two jars of the tomato conserve and a bundle of dried sage and stood by the table for another 10 minutes asking questions about the pepper relish and Marin answered them as she would answer any question about process which was directly and without embellishment. The story of the farmstand window traveled that week the way stories travel in a county like Kfax which is from the feed store to the co-op to the cafe on the main street in Oscola.

 And what it said was that the Janichek girl had cut a window in her mother’s back room and was selling preserves out of it. This was reported with mild amusement and mild curiosity in roughly equal measure. Ghard heard it at the co-op and said, “She’s been at it a while,” which was the most he said about it publicly. Nobody laughed.

 It was not that kind of story. It was the kind of story that makes people say, “Well, I might drive out and see that.” And some of them did. By the end of the first season, which ran from May through October of 1993, Marin had sold $833 worth of goods. Her costs for the season, including materials, jars, labels, and the $44 for the window, came to $311.

The net was $522, which she recorded in the notebook and then sat with for a while because it was the first time the arithmetic had come out clearly in her favor on a seasonal basis. And she understood that the constraint was still production and that production was constrained by the size of the kitchen and the number of hours she had in it.

 She spent the fall and winter of 1993 and 1994 thinking about the production problem. The kitchen in the farmhouse was Ingred’s kitchen and always would be. What Martin needed was a dedicated space, and the only candidate on the property was the old summer kitchen. A frame addition off the back of the house that had been used for canning and butchering and laundry in the years before the main house was modernized, and that had been used as a storage room for the past 20 years.

 It was 12 ft by 18 ft. It had a concrete floor that was sound. It had a wood burning range that had not been used since 1971, but that Marin looked at carefully and decided was structurally intact, and it had a south-facing window and a door that opened to the yard. The renovation of the summer kitchen took 2 years and cost $940, paid in pieces as she earned it.

 She did the work herself with Ingred’s help for the heavy parts. She replaced the window sash for $60. She rebuilt the flu on the range for $112 in materials after watching a man named Gus Ruska do the same job on a similar range at a neighboring farm and asking him enough questions that she understood the principle.

 She ran a single cold water line from the house for $38 in pipe and fittings. She put in a used commercial sink, porcelain on cast iron that she found at a salvage yard in Columbus for $45. She built new shelves from dimensional lumber, sealed them, and moved the enamelware collection from the back room to the summer kitchen shelves, piece by piece.

 Setting each one in its place the way you set a book back on a shelf you’ve built for it. She added a prep table made from a door blank set on saw horses and then on proper legs, she welded herself after borrowing a welder from Ghart. She wired a single overhead light from the house circuit for the cost of the wire and a junction box, which came to $22.

 The total when she added it up in the fall of 1995 was $93760. The summer kitchen had a door that opened to the yard and the yard faced the driveway. And she put the card table in the same place it had always been. But now when people came to the farm stand, they were standing in the yard of a working kitchen, not at the end of a driveway looking at a table.

 The door was open. They could see in. The enamel wear was on the shelves in the order she had acquired it, which meant the oldest pieces were at eye level in the center, and the newer pieces were to the sides, and the effect was of a kitchen that had been accumulating itself for decades, which it had.

 The wood burning range was not the primary heat source for cooking. She used a twoburner propane unit for daily work, but she fired the range on farmstead Saturdays because the smell of a wood fire in a kitchen on a cool morning is a specific thing that does not require explanation. The story that traveled the second time was different from the first.

 The first story had been the Janite girl cut a window in her mother’s back room. The second story was, “You ought to drive out there. It’s not what you think it is.” This is a meaningful distinction. The first story was about an oddity. The second story was an instruction. By the summer of 1996, Marin was selling out of most products by noon on farm stand Saturdays, and she had added three new items.

 A dried mushroom mix from the timber lot at the north end of the property. A fruit butter made from the crab apple tree and a smoked cornstck concentrate that she put up in 4 oz jars for 50 cents each, and that people bought in quantities of four and six. She had also that spring begun taking orders for holiday boxes, a collection of six to eight items packed in a wooden crate she made from pallet lumber priced at between 14 and $22 depending on contents.

 The arithmetic for 1996 gross sales from the farm stand and holiday boxes came to $4,070. Costs for that year, including materials, jars, labels, crates, propane, and a replacement food mill she bought used from a restaurant supply house in Omaha for $90, came to $1,063. Net was $3,07. She recorded this in the notebook, which by 1996 was the third notebook in the series, and she wrote the figure $3,07 on the first page of the fourth notebook as the opening balance.

 Ghard came by that fall, and Marin showed him the fourth notebook. He looked at the opening balance figure for a moment and then he looked at the summer kitchen through the open door at the shelves of enamel wear and the range and the crocs and the jars in rows and he said you’ve been at this a while she said 9 years he nodded he did not say anything about the cracked bowls that was the arithmetic here is what it took between 1993 and 2001 Marin Janichek ran the JaniC farm kitchen farm stand every Saturday from May through October and took holiday

orders every November and December. She did not advertise beyond the cardboard sign on the county road, which she replaced each spring with a new one, and a listing in the Kfax County Fair program that cost $3 per year. She did not have a telephone line dedicated to the business until 1997 when she had a second line put in for $11 a month.

 She did not have a website. What she had was a kitchen that people could see into and a product that tasted like the kitchen it came from. And those two things together were sufficient to build a customer base of, by her own count in the 1999 notebook, 214 regular buyers in Kfax County and the surrounding counties, plus an additional 43 buyers who had found her through the fair listing and drove from Columbus or Lincoln or Omaha on a Saturday morning to pick up orders they had called in.

She added products slowly, one or two per year, each one developed in the notebook before it went to the stand. She dropped products that did not move. She kept the smoked salt, the pepper relish, the tomato conserve, the bread and butter pickle, the crab apple jelly, the dried mushroom mix, the fruit butter, and the cornstck concentrate as the permanent line.

 She added a dried bean soup kit in 1997 that became the second best seller after the pepper relish. She added a compound butter in 1998, wrapped in parchment and tied with kitchen twine that sold out every week she made it. She added a fermented hot sauce in 2000 that she had been testing for 3 years before she was satisfied with the consistency.

 The enamelware grew with the kitchen. She had stopped buying it at Sale Barnes by 1995, not because she had stopped looking, but because the shelves were full and the kitchen was in use and there was no more room. She had 81 pieces by then, acquired over eight years for a total of $131.40. She had used every piece at some point in the production work.

 The roasting pan was still in use every fall for the tomato conserve, and it had accumulated another eight years of faint rust red shadow from the tomato work, and it was entirely itself. Now, a pan that had been used for a specific purpose for a long time and showed it. In the spring of 2001, a woman named Karen Voss drove out from Lincoln on a Saturday morning.

She was a food writer for a regional magazine, and she had heard about the Janik farm kitchen from a woman in Columbus, who had been buying the pepper relish for 4 years. She arrived at 9:30 and stood in the yard for a while before she went to the table, looking at the open door of the summer kitchen. Then she went inside and looked at the shelves.

 She picked up one of the sauce pots, one of the original pieces from the 1987 sail barn purchase, and turned it over and looked at the bottom and set it back. She bought a holiday box’s worth of goods and drove back to Lincoln. The piece she wrote ran in the magazine that August. It was not a long piece. It described the farm stand and the kitchen and the enamel wear on the shelves, and it said that the goods tasted like they had been made in a kitchen that had been working for a long time, which was because they had been.

It named the pepper relish and the tomato conserve specifically. It did not quote Marin at length because Marin had not said much. The one line Corin Voss quoted was from when she had asked Marin about the enamelware, why she kept it, what it was for. Marin had said, “It’s the kitchen.

” The magazine printed that as the closing line of the piece. The story that traveled after the magazine piece was different again from the two before it. The first story had been an oddity. The second story had been an instruction. The third story was a fact stated in print, and it traveled differently because it was not moving. mouth to mouth but hand to hand.

 A page torn from a magazine and left on a counter at the feed store in Oscola. A copy mailed to a cousin in Kerney. A photocopy on the bulletin board at the co-op. By the following spring, Marin was receiving phone orders from buyers in seven counties and from three buyers in Omaha who had seen the piece in the magazine and wanted the holiday boxes shipped.

 She shipped them in the pallet lumber crates with newspaper packing and charged for the shipping, which she had calculated to the scent. The farm stand in the summer of 2002 was not the card table in the driveway anymore. She had built a low counter from dimensional lumber against the south wall of the summer kitchen with a shelf above it and a display surface at the front and she had put a second table in the yard for overflow and on farmstand.

 Saturdays there were between 30 and 60 people in the yard at any given time between 9 and noon. She had hired for the first time a part-time helper, a woman named Selma Radka, who lived two miles down the road and who had been buying the pepper relish for six years, and who said one day that she would rather work there than not.

 Marin paid her $11 an hour, which she had calculated as sustainable at the current sales volume with a 5% margin for error. Ghart came to the farm stand that summer for the first time, not to visit, but as a customer. He stood in the line at the counter, which was not long, and he bought a jar of the pepper relish and a jar of the tomato conserve, and a bundle of dried herbs.

He paid without negotiating, which in Kfax County is its own kind of statement. He looked at the enamel wear on the shelves for a moment before he left. He did not say anything about it. He did not need to. Marin was behind the counter and she watched him look at the shelves and she handed him his change and said, “Come back in October when the mushroom mix is in.” He said he would.

The arithmetic for 2002. Gross sales including farm stand, holiday boxes, and shipped orders came to $11,040. costs, including materials, jars, labels, crates, shipping, Selma’s wages for 14 Saturdays, propane, and a used chest freezer she bought to replace the original one, which had finally given out after 12 years, came to $4,63.

Net was $6,977. She recorded this in the seventh notebook and sat with it for a while because it was the first year the net had crossed five figures in the gross column and because she had been at it for 15 years by then and the summer kitchen was full and the enamel wear was on the shelves and the roasting pan was in the oven every fall and the notebook was on the shelf next to the food mill and the whole thing was exactly what she had been building since she was 14 years old. Though she had not known it then

she knew it now. Here is what Maren Janichi knew at 30 years old. Standing in the summer kitchen of the Janichi farm in Kfax County, Nebraska in the fall of 2002 that the county had not known when she was 14 and buying chipped enamel wear at the sale barn. She knew that a kitchen is not its equipment. A kitchen is its practice, and practice accumulates the way enamelware accumulates piece by piece, each one carrying the evidence of what it has done.

 She knew that the chip in the bowl is not the bowl. She knew that the scorch mark on the roasting pan is not damage. She knew that the things people discard because they are imperfect are sometimes the most useful things available because imperfection has already been discounted and usefulness has not changed. She had paid $131.40 40 cents for 81 pieces of enamel wear over 8 years.

 And she had built a kitchen around them that was by the fall of 2002 producing nearly $7,000 of net income per year from a 12×8 ft room on a2 acre farm 9 mi east of Oyola. That was the proof. It was not delivered in a speech. It was not delivered at an auction or a public meeting. It was delivered in the arithmetic of the seventh notebook and in the line of people in the yard on Saturday mornings and in the way Ghard had stood at the counter and paid without negotiating.

The proof was the kitchen itself visible through the open door, the enamelware on the shelves in the order of its acquisition, the oldest pieces at eye level in the center, the roasting pan in the oven, the wood burning range fired on Saturday mornings, the smell of it coming out into the yard where people were standing in line.

 In the fall of 2004, a young woman named Dagy Angel came to the farm stand on a Saturday morning in September. She was 19 years old and she had driven from Columbus where she was enrolled in the culinary program at the technical college and she had read the magazine piece and she wanted to see the kitchen. She stood in the yard for a long time before she went to the counter and then she asked Marin if she could ask her some questions.

Marin said she could. Dagy had a notebook, a spiral one with a rubber band around it. And she asked about the pepper relish brine ratio and the processing time and the smoke point of the rendered lard and the source of the dried mushrooms and the method for the fermented hot sauce. Marin answered each question directly, as a process, not as a recipe.

 At the end, Dagy looked at the enamelware on the shelves and asked about the roasting pan, the one with the scorch mark and the rust red shadow from the tomato work. She asked how old it was. Marin said, “I bought it in 1987, 17 years.” Dagy wrote that down. She asked, “Does it still work?” Marin said, “It’s in the oven right now.

” Dagy came back the following spring, and asked if she could work there on Saturdays. Marin said yes. She paid her $11 an hour, the same as Selma. And she taught her the same way Freda had taught Ingred and Ingrid had taught her, which was by doing the work in front of her and answering questions directly and not explaining anything that the work would explain on its own.

 Dagy worked three seasons at the farm stand and then went back to Columbus and finished her program and opened a small food operation of her own in a rented kitchen space in a town east of Columbus, making preserved goods and selling at a farmers market. She named it what she named it. The first thing she bought for the kitchen was a set of mixing bowls at an estate sale, cream colored with a red stripe, two of them intact and one with a chip on the pore spout.

 She paid a dollar and a half for the three. She wrote the figure down in a notebook. Marin heard about this from Selma, who had a cousin in that town, and she heard it the way you hear news that confirms something you already knew, which is quietly and without surprise. She was in the summer kitchen when Selma told her, wiping down the prep table after the morning’s work, and she said, “Good,” and went back to what she was doing.

 The Yanichek farm kitchen ran every Saturday from May through October for 22 years after that first season. Ingred died in 2009 at 73 and the farm passed to Marin who had been running it for years anyway. She did not change the kitchen. She added one piece of enamel wear to the shelves that year, a blue rimmed soup bowl she found at the Kfax County sale barn in the spring of 2010, chipped on the outside lip, sound on the inside for 60.

 She set it on the shelf next to the ones she had bought in 1987, and it looked like it had always been there, which in the way that mattered it had. The roasting pan is still in the summer kitchen. It sits on the second shelf, left of center, next to the colander with the chipped foot and the coffee boiler with the mismatched lid. The scorch mark from 1987 is still there.

The rust red shadow from 37 seasons of tomato work is there too, a record written in the enamel of what the pan has been used for and how long. The pan cost $1.70 as part of a $4.30 30 cent purchase at the Oyola sale barn in the spring of 1987 when a 14-year-old girl set it on a tailgate and wrote its retail value in a notebook and drew a line between what it cost and what it was worth.

 The line between those two figures is the whole story. The pan still goes in the oven every fall.