Back when you couldn’t buy yogurt in the grocery — unless my mother had made a batch that week — a Mother’s Day memory

Yogurt was not something you could buy in a typical grocery store 40 or 50 years ago.

You certainly couldn’t find it sweetened, pre-mixed, in 30 different flavors in little plastic cups.

In fact, most people had no idea what yogurt was. But I did. Because my mother made it. And sold it. And we ate it. Along with her coarse, nasty, raw-wheat-germ bread and muffins.

That was bread in our house those years. No white flour — except for the occasional birthday cake. No candy at home, except on Christmas. No toasted wheat germ. Just raw wheat germ. Which has a bitter flavor and aftertaste. Toasting the wheat germ degrades its nutritional value. Think my Dad got that from Adele Davis. Or J. I. Rodale.

We had brewer’s yeast drinks daily — which I still like. And a handful of carefully chosen vitamins laid out for us. And raw sunflower seeds for snacks. And for treat, “wheat germ candy.”

Wheat germ candy was wheat germ and powdered milk and honey mixed together and pressed out in a cookie tin with unsweetened shredded coconut sprinkled on top, chilled, then cut into squares. (Sometimes it also had sesame seeds in the mix.)

I still make something like that — using only wheat bran and oat bran and unsweetened shredded coconut and raw sunflower seeds and a sprinkle of salt, ginger and cayenne, and mash it all together with honey. (And sometimes I add sesame seeds and chopped walnuts and almonds. I don’t use powdered milk in it. Suppose I could substitute vanilla whey powder, but it doesn’t need it.) Want my recipe?

And we had soy beans at every meal except for breakfast.

Years later, when I was an editor and writer at Rodale, I always meant to ask Maria Rodale if they ate like that in her house when she was growing up. Always slipped my mind when we talked. Think I’ll email her and ask.

Recalling this because it’s Mother’s Day weekend and I was thinking about my mother and remembering helping her carefully load glass quart jars of homemade yogurt into my little red wagon. I think I was 4. Maybe I was 3.

She made yogurt about once a week on the kitchen stove in quart glass canning jars. And we’d pull it in my wagon to the grocery in downtown Yellow Springs, Ohio, because my mother didn’t drive.

This was smack in the middle of the 1950s. We happened to be living in a vibrant little enlightened enclave where people not only knew what yogurt was but a few even wanted it. And my mother was able to sell maybe eight quarts a week through the local grocery — I think it was called Wilson’s. It was the only grocery in town.

Yellow Springs was one of those artsy, offbeat little villages. Still is. Home of Antioch College. We’d first moved there to the Glen Homestead in the Glen Helen Nature Preserve. Our neighbors in the woods were the families of the experimental community known as The Vale. The Vale was a tiny, semi-communal Quaker intentional community* – one of several world-wide influenced by the writings and teachings of Arthur Morgan, a Utopian genius, reknowned college president and mastermind engineer of the Tennessee Valley Authority Project. (Which, by the 1950s, he renounced as a big mistake, my father recalls. The TVA was a masterful series of dams and waterways for flood control and navigation and rural electrification in seven southern states, built in the 1930s.) The Vale was founded and managed by Arthur Morgan’s son, Griscom, and Griscom’s wife, Jane, in 1946 and incorporated in 1960.

The Vale and Yellow Springs were rich with Unitarians and Quakers and social activists and the free-thinking professors of Antioch and had quite a few vegetarians and “health nuts” as they were known back then and many brilliant eccentrics and experimenters of all ilk.

It was a great place to be a little, highly impressionable, me.

I have fond, early memories of the people and the woods and the Vale and wish I was still in contact with some of them. For the most part, I have only little-boy memories of faces of people like Billie Eastman and the Morgans, and of course, Peter and Winnie Jensen who I played with, and little Tommy Blanchard who hit me over the head with a baseball bat. (And maybe that explains a lot…)

My family stayed in touch with the Jensens and they tended to come visit us wherever we were living. Even after we moved to San Diego in 1963, they visited every couple years — sometimes staying in their vintage schoolbus camper at Silver Strand Beach.

Am glad I pulled my Toyota motorhome off the turnpike while crossing Ohio in 2001 and headed down to The Vale and got to visit again that summer evening with Dave Jensen who, I didn’t realize at the time, had only a few more months to live.

Odd, the memories that come up on Mother’s Day. It started with yogurt. Which was spelled “yoghurt” back then.

I don’t think yogurt became readily available in typical grocery stores until the mid-70s.

I don’t miss my mother’s crumbly, bitter black-strap molasses-flavored raw-wheat-germ bread. But she made a good, sour yogurt.

Yogurt-making days were always frantic. And steamy. And long. The temperature of the bottles must be carefully controlled during the yogurt-making process. Let it get too hot and it kills the culture. Too cool and the milk doesn’t “yogh.”

My mom was constantly checking the temperature of the water and turning the flame up or down or awkwardly carrying the heavy huge kettle filled with its double rack of cultured milk-filled canning jars and scalding water across the kitchen to cool on a counter for a few minutes and sort of moaning as she did, worrying she would drop it or that I or my little brother would get in her way and trip her. Never happened, that I recall.

More about the Intentional Community movement.

Global Freeloaders - rooms, beds available in the Vale and Yellow Springs.

The Glen Helen Ecology Institute: Spring in the Glen.

PHOTOS of the Glen Helen Preserve.

History of the Fellowship for Intentional Community from the Anarchist Communitarian Network.