Opening a 25-lb sack of dried lentils, I carefully clipped the string in just the right spot so I could pull it off in a long piece, coiling it up afterward. I use this string to truss whole chickens, tie up plants in the garden, and tie bundles of grape leaves for the freezer.
My grandmother's kitchen drawer had a ball of string that she'd saved from sacks and packages to reuse at a later time. Any newly received string would be wrapped around the ball. And the ball would grow and shrink throughout the year, depending on if she was accumulating new string or using up her stash. She used the string to tie packages to be mailed for the holidays (back when you could use string for packages), to tie the legs together of whole poultry to be roasted, to tie up roasts to form a compact lump of meat for even roasting, to tie paper-wrapped sandwiches for the lunches of my grandfather, my uncles, and my mother, to tie waxed paper squares on top of opened cans of food as makeshift lids, and to mark straight lines in the vegetable garden so her seeds would form neat rows. It seemed that string had endless uses.
In my grandmother's time, a lot of packages came either tied with string or the opening sewn shut with string. I come across far fewer sources of free string than she did. However, I do find extra large sacks (25 or 50-lbs) of dried beans and lentils, rice, and onions sewn closed with string. And I always save that string for reuse.
I'm finishing up the summer gardening season, and until I opened this sack of lentils, all of my string had been used in tying up plants to their support stakes. I have now replenished my stash of string, enough for several roasting chickens or perhaps a Thanksgiving turkey.
Did your mother or grandmother have a ball of string in a drawer for reusing?
