Solemn Celebrations

Reading the obituaries one recent morning I said, Awww, Mrs. Book died! Leo couldn’t recall a Mrs. Book, but I reminded him of taking a ride last fall, looking for the West Haven Nature Conservancy, getting turned around on the back roads of Benson and West Haven, and stopping at a porch sale at Book Farm on Book Road. Oh, now he remembered. The conductor of the porch sale was the lovely and energetic 87 year old Mrs. Frances Book, as she told me in our brief acquaintance.

“Of course we bought a book,” said Leo.

“Of course,” I agreed, “and a jar of concord grape jelly.”

I wouldn’t have bought the jam – I love wild concord grape jelly, and would have to hide it from myself – but Mrs. Book told me she had gathered the grapes with her own hands and cooked down the juices, and I like to honor that kind of thing. I remembered all this when I read Mrs. Book’s obituary, wondering, as usual, at the weird conundrum with which all humans live – that our days are numbered, and when you’re 87 you must be even more acutely aware of this sad fact. But Mrs. Book had been cheerful and bright on her old fashioned screened porch that day, with a definite sharpness to her conversation – one sensed she would not be chary with her opinions, and that she had a great deal to do with that farm being as beautiful and prosperous as it appeared.

A few days ago I was taste-testing a new product I’d found at the Winter Farmers’ Market – Castleton Crackers, made and marketed by Whitney Lamy. She has three varieties – Rutland Rye, Middlebury Maple, and Windham Wheat, all made by hand with Vermont grown ingredients. It occurred to me that the tempting (and addictive!) things could host something sweet as well as savory. I went to the fridge, rummaged around in the back of it and pulled out a jar of grape jelly. As I opened the half-full jar, I realized that this was Mrs. Book’s jelly – there was her name on the label.

It is a solemn celebration, eating something that one of us has made who has since passed away off this earth, and it reminded me of eating my grandmother’s mincemeat the Christmas after SHE was gone. Though they’re gone they continue to offer nourishment. And yes, Whitney’s crackers and Mrs. Book’s jam have definitely become a part of me, all too bodily.

Buttered crackers and jelly – now there’s a childhood treat – eaten while hunched over a book at your grandmother’s kitchen table, perhaps with a big glass of milk straight from the cow. And I’m here to tell you it tastes just as good when you’re 63 as it does when you’re 13 – and, I’d guess, at 87, too.

...food with dignity...

It’s doubtful that I have any vegetarian readers left. Or, for that matter, any readers who prefer not to associate their cryovacced porterhouse with the animal it came from. Apparently the photo of the poor rabbit corpses with their livers exposed just did some people in. It was bad enough, the marrow bones, and before that it might have been the chicken feet, and so I promise you I will not talk about the pigs’ head here. Instead, I will concentrate on celeriac, turnips, rutabagas, carrots, and potatoes. We have fresh spinach, too, at the Winter Farmers’ Market, which has been growing all season, since August and with no signs of ending between now and March, which used to be the hardest month. But this year, March will bring us fresh-grown greens of other kinds, the result of farmers knowing they would have a mid-winter market for their products. Hooray!!

I know that if you are a vegetarian you don’t eat things as big and messy as pig’s head, but when you say, “well, I’m eating vegetables and I am not harming a thing,” I wonder if you’re not thinking what a relativist statement that is. Anything that has to eat to stay alive eats other things that might wish to stay alive or have always just trusted that they WOULD stay alive. Perhaps – what do we know – even the turnip – not to speak of the little forms of life that are eating it, too.

I was up at the Farm Show in Barre the other day and picked up a bumper sticker from Rural Vermont’s booth: It reads Food with Dignity. What that means will differ, I dare say, with each of us, but what it means to me is, if you’re going to eat meat, please have the grace to see it in the field, on the hoof, and perhaps even participate in the process of taking it from the hoof to the table. And then? Eat it all! Even the livers.

...but I don’t eat meat...

And if you’re vegetarian or vegan? I like the way Sheryl Rapee-Adams thinks and writes in her blog, entitled Furry Learning Curve, at http://network.bestfriends.org/Blogs/Detail.aspx?b=1323 Although she was vegan for years and now lives mostly vegan along with a couple of carefully-sourced dairy and egg products, it is much to her level-headed credit that Sheryl is not content to rest on vegan laurels. Instead, she is thinking about what she IS eating while she’s NOT eating animal flesh or by-products. In a blog dated October 30, called “Vegan or Local,” she looks at some vegan products and their sources and compares them to the organic animal equivalents that are locally available to her. For instance, the “natural buttery-spread” she used instead of butter. Along with some down-to-earth comments on corporations and tracing the backgrounds of each of the ingredients in the “buttery spread” – each of which come from yet another corporation – she wonders, “Who am I really supporting when I buy Earth Balance? Am I helping animals by using this product instead of local, organic, Vermont butter from goats and cows with whom I am personally acquainted?”

Then she looks at Vermont Butter and Cheese, the company that makes the (delicious) butter she considered switching to. “The dollars earned for producing Vermont Butter & Cheese products support a small, private company and its Vermont employees... Spending dollars on their products also creates a demand for small operations that care about the animals who live and die for the products.”

In a blog entry named, “If you love animals called pets, why do you eat animals called dinner,” she writes, “Perhaps the quote should be something like, ‘If slaughterhouses had glass walls, the current predominant system for farming and slaughtering animals would change overnight.’ In another, she writes about Barbara Kingsolver’s book, “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle,” in which Kingsolver pokes some rather rude fun at vegans. While providing a thoughtful review of the book, Sheryl takes Kingsolver gently to task for those passages: “I believe that Kingsolver's values are compatible with my own, and that her book can be a powerful (and delightfully written) teaching experience for everyone who wants to consume more consciously and live a little lighter on the earth. I feel sad because in belittling vegans, Kingsolver may have lost a chunk of her sympathetic audience.”

Sheryl’s a delightful and thoughtful writer. Check out that blog!

...a fowl roasting...

A pang of envy used to shoot right through me when I read of the bodies of food one might buy if one were Lyonnaise, and able to attend the winter street market in that smaller French city. A poultry seller had quail, pigeon, three kinds of chickens, duck, guinea hen, fresh magret de canard (duck breast), fresh duck and goose fat by the pot, her own duck gizzard confit, fresh gizzards, livers, and hearts, chicken wings, duck wings, necks of all the birds (for stuffing), various poultry and game carved and placed on brochettes for grilling, stuffed and tied rotis and galettes, rabbits – whole and parts – and, in season, small wild game of every kind you can imagine.

Oh, you might say, but she is not dealing with an American buyer. And if you did say that, then you would be surprised at the little knots of excitement at different corners of the Winter Farmers’ Market every Saturday, and if you wandered over you might see, as I did a couple of Saturdays ago, a woman considering a little corpse of a guinea hen, or Pintade, as it is called in France. It was, as seller Sue Carey explained, New York dressed, which meant that the little naked head and skinny legs and feet were still intact. The reason? To keep the fowl moist. Apparently this was the dressing desired by certain New York City chefs.

Ever helpful, I explained to the prospective buyer that they would be useful in making a stock of the bones once the pitiful, bluish little thing had been roasted. She glanced at me imperiously above her glasses and said, “I am NOT without cooking experience,” and went back to examining the fowl. I zipped my lip.

Just by happenstance, standing along with us in front of the bowl of ice and guinea fowl, was Wendy Jackson from the Red Brick Grill in Poultney. One of their regular dishes is pintade, and she told us how to prepare it – with a little cider! “Won’t that wilt the skin?” asked my imperious predecessor, still worrying over her guinea fowl, head and feet attached. “Oh, my, no,” said Wendy, “and if you spoon the drippings over it a couple of times the sugar in the cider will make the skin even crisper!” I wasn’t convinced, but was curious.

There was only one guinea fowl left in the bowl of ice, and I snatched it up – a skinny, bluish thing wrapped in plastic, totally unprepossessing. And mine was not French Dressed.

For the Pintade: Wash under cold water, pat dry. In an earthenware casserole pour some cider, put in a grill to keep the guinea fowl above the cider (I used a flat pierced cast-iron piece that keeps a roast above the drippings in a cast iron frying pan. Be imaginative). Place the fowl on the grill, breast side up. Dab butter over it, sprinkle with salt and pepper. Place around it 2 parboiled carrots cut in chunks; 1 shallot, sliced; and 2 cloves of garlic, sliced. Sprinkle fowl with cider. Roast at 375 for 20 minutes, baste with drippings, roast another 20 minutes. It will be glazed and crisp on top, cruelly white on the bottom. Turn it over, baste, and roast another 20 minutes.

This 2.08 pound thing turned out wonderfully, the skin mahogany colored and substantial, very crisp, even the breast that was closest to the steaming cider/broth for the last 20 minutes of cooking. The meat was tender and flavorful, with a faint appley sweetness, slightly darker, and possibly, but only slightly, chewier than chicken. It was moist, in spite of my having roasted it a full twenty minutes longer than Wendy instructed. I liked this dish very much, and Leo, with his discerning tastebuds thought it tasted like chicken.

...not pig’s head, but...

Later, I was glad to know that I had not scored the bird with the feet and head attached, because I found out that the entrails were also intact, as one horror-stricken buyer later informed me. I was puzzled by this, because although I am familiar with the practice of hanging a game bird whole for a week or so, until it smells foul and the feathers begin to fall out – this is called “developing the flavour” – I had never heard of a plastic-wrapped whole fowl, and could not begin to tease out the reasons for it.

Nor could Chef Robert of Café Provençe in Brandon, although, of course, that’s the way he had learned as an apprentice, in France. “My first dish in cooking school was a duck – which I had to clean. I had never cooked before and it made me a little sick.” But he mused that on his last trip to France, “no guts,” in the French kitchen. Musing on, Robert said, “The Chinese age ducks, but they are gutted.” And then he tells me something really interesting. “When you roast a woodcock the body is left whole and when it is done the entrails are taken from it and mashed with butter to make a little mousse, which is served on a crouton along with the roasted bird. But that is because every time a woodcock takes off it poops. So the entrails are very clean.” Now I’d known that woodcock entrails are meant to be eaten on a bit of toast (they are extremely small birds) but now I knew why!

...it all evens out in the end...

“So yes, you should eat mostly plants, but if you’re going to eat meat, your meat should eat mostly plants. And I think that’s really a big part of where we’ve gone wrong with raising cattle in this country: feeding them grain”... Michael Pollan in an interview in Gourmet Magazine.

...wait, wait, wait. what about that pig’s head...

I told you. I’m not talking about it!

This column was published in the Rutland (Vt) Herald on 02/05/08

Waiter, There’s a Hare on My Plate

...a waskally wabbit...

I am not a stranger to rabbit. I’ve hunted them, actually, long ago when my distaste for guns was not what it is now. And I was a pretty good shot, too. Nevermind. It was my dad who brought them home from the field and hung them from their hind legs against the wall of the barn and pulled their furry coats off in one mostly whole piece. What a picture that brings to my mind – my dad in his red and black checked hunting pants, his square-cut, exceedingly capable hands wielding the knife. My mother must have cooked them, but I don’t remember eating them. She must have told me it was chicken and, the way my mother cooked, I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. We ate squirrel, too, with the same lack of differentiation. Gravy – red, brown, or, in my mother’s case, possibly white – covers a multitude of sins.

Jeff and Cathy McMurry sell rabbit, chicken, and sometimes eggs at their Sunset Farm booth at the Winter Farmers’ Market. Gazing down at the McMurry’s beautifully dressed, wrapped, and displayed rabbits brought memories to mind – the most recent, a walk up to the Victorian Inn at Wallingford a few years ago, and Soo whispering to Leo that Stanti had a limited amount of rabbit stew in the kitchen, which he had made for the family but was willing to serve Leo. Leo loved it – he savored the stew but he was no less pleased to be offered something ‘special’! And I was grateful, too, that the McMurry’s are offering us something different to go on our plates. A carnivore can get weary of the same ole, same ole – pork, beef, chicken, and sometimes lamb, although the fresh, free-ranged, grass-fed products of the Winter Farmers’ Market vendors offer revelations of full-bodied taste to anyone who is used to industrial, feed-lot meats.

So I bought a rabbit to experiment with. I knew I would be approaching Stanti for a rabbit lesson sometime in the future, but first, I wanted to try out my own rabbit intuition. I mistrusted my own ability to try out Jeff McMurry’s suggestion to grill it, and as I gazed down at the little pink body laid out on my kitchen counter I remembered the Red Brick Grill’s dish of rabbit ragu with porcini and their own house-cured pancetta. On the other hand, a strand of words in a NY restaurant review popped into my mind, suggesting that “cinnamon sweetens the delicate strands of pulled, braised rabbit,” and that was my inclination, too – a dark sauce, deep with the sweeter spices, perhaps sherry, possibly raisins. While I thought about the best way to proceed I discovered the liver and heart in the cavity, glossy and reddish brown.

The McMurrys are highly responsive to their customers’ ideas, desires and needs. When I expressed dismay that a glorious little chicken I bought from them did not have the giblets in the cavity, they immediately changed that practice. The livers are large, dark mahogany and evenly colored, healthy and extremely tasty. When I asked for some chicken feet the McMurrys came up with a ton of them, nicely cleaned. I spent an hour clipping toenails and paring off calluses afterward, and scrubbing them a little more, but now I have several packages – six yellow legs and feet per package – to add to my chicken bones when I make stock. And what a wondrous stock it is: from one 4 pound chicken, roasted, I simmered the bones and 6 legs and feet for possibly 4 hours, and ended up with a quart of very flavorful chicken jelly.

I was surprised to find the liver included with the rabbit, but I was glad to eat the whole of that little fella. Taking a life in order to eat, I feel, calls for wasting as little as possible. I put it, along with the heart, in a small frying pan with butter over very low heat for a short time, turning it once, salt and pepper, the same way I cook a chicken’s liver, and found it was delicious.

... in a chef’s kitchen...

Sure enough, there was Stanti, at the WFM one Saturday, bent over the case of frozen rabbits and chickens on ice, while Cathy and Jeff looked on. I’d known I’d see him at the Market, and I’d suspected he wouldn’t be able to resist the rabbits.

Since he first came to town – could it be almost 20 years ago??? – he’s searched out local foods, from cheeses to turnips. He attends markets, visits farms, and receives deliveries from local farmers. It’s the way he was raised and learned his trade in Switzerland, with the family inn and restaurant, the farm and the store. At first, when I saw the aerial photograph of that distant village, I’d thought it was Wallingford.

He selected two rabbits and said, “Yes. Certainly,” when I asked if I could watch him prepare them.

When I walked in the kitchen door at the Inn, the two rabbits were laid out on a cutting board. Several small pans were lined up with the other ingredients. In a row, mise en place, were flour, butter, salt and pepper, chopped flat leaf parsley, garlic, chopped onion, diced carrots, diced celeriac, tomato sauce, and glace de veau (reduced veal stock). A container of white wine stood on the shelf above.

He speaks American with a Swiss or at least European accent, and so we haggled over the name for the pan he took down. It turned out to be a braissier – “how would you say it in English,” he mused – for braising, natch, and he put it over the fire and melted some butter in it. Placing the rabbit pieces on a flat pan and strewing them with salt and pepper and then flour – “You don’t have to drench them in it,” – turning them and treating that side to the same, he then placed them into the butter, pointing out that the side that would show on the plate – the smoother, outer side – should be lightly browned first and, turning them when they were, he began to add the prepared vegetables in turn, “about a cup of the onions, carrots and celery (celeriac) for one rabbit. Half a cup of parsley for a nice taste. It doesn’t have to be tomato sauce, but maybe concassee,” he said as he emptied the sauce over the vegetables. Just chopped tomatoes, or cubed, if you’re meticulous. He reached up and pressed the button for white wine and poured it over the vegetables, then tipped the glace de veau over – about a cup of each for one rabbit. “The nice thing is,” he said, glancing at me, “everything you can get at the Winter Market.” I considered this and realized he was right. “Right down to the wine,” I said. He nodded, pleased.

While we chatted, the mixture simmered and, after we tasted and found the sauce very pleasant and vibrant – marinara-like, with the almost metallic taste of white wine and tomatoes – I left, promising to return for a photo when it was plated for that evening’s diners. As I took the photograph that evening, three orders for rabbit came into the kitchen. Looks like the menu at the Victorian Inn at Wallingford may have a new and possibly frequent ‘special’.

...or please, take my duck...

It’s Sunday afternoon now. I have a duck sitting in the fridge. I got it at the Winter Market, of course, entered through the Rutland Area Food Co-op on Wales Street in Rutland on Saturdays from 10 to 2. I’ve prepared duck perhaps once in my life. I’m already thinking about its preparation, the tastes, the accompaniments, how to get as much duck fat as possible to save for frying other things... And then I wonder – perhaps I can interest Stanti in doing duck!

...Tell Tale Heart...

An article by Gordon Dritschilo in the Herald on January 12 was brought to my attention by one of our farmers. Entitled Census counting on Vt. farmers, it quoted the spokesperson for the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, who said, regarding the penalty for not completing the census form, “I’ve heard different terms... I saw at one point you can be arrested...” Not only is this incorrect, but it is significant that the first thing this spokesman for the Agency comes up with, off the top of her head, is punitive in an authoritarian kind of way. OUR Vermont Agency of Agriculture should consider themselves the farmers’ facilitator, should be helping our farmers to be more successful and creative in growing and raising food for their customers. Instead, this statement, while being more than a little wishy-washy, also contains an aura of threat, of authoritarianism and of paternalism.

In fact, what the article or law or whatever it is DOES say is: “(2) Refusal or neglect to answer questions: A person over 18 years of age who refuses or willfully neglects to answer a question, which is authorized by the Secretary to be submitted to the person in connection with a census under this section, shall be fined not more than $100.”

An often-forgotten fact about the government, its employees, and the political establishment, is that they are all public employees, that is, OUR employees – we pay their salaries and, in the case of elected officials, elect them – and their main job is not to be threatening and authoritarian but to work with the us – in this case with the farmers – in a partnership for everyone’s well-being.

Although farm census is not a new thing, and while it can be effective, it has always been a controversial action among farmers who do not wish to make themselves vulnerable to the long arm of a government that they might view as punitive. This is particularly true among present-day small farmers who rightly fear the partnership of the government with industrial-strength mega-farmers who wish, some think, to put small farms out of business. Control the food chain and you control the people.

That said, it’s encouraging that the Agency is working with farmers to get a mobile fowl slaughtering facility up and running, and a stationery slaughterhouse in southern Vermont. Rutland needs one, too, to replace the one that burned a couple of years ago. And hopefully they’re working closely with Rural Vermont on promoting a hemp industry and making farm fresh unpasteurized milk more available to people who want it. As a matter of fact the agency seems to be extremely active promoting local foods from our small farmers lately, which only makes a throw-away patronizing remark the more regrettable.

...on the subject of real food...

“But if real food – the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognize as food – stands in need of defense, from whom does it need defending? From the food industry on one side and nutritional science on the other. Both stand to gain much from widespread confusion about what to eat, a question that for most of human history people have been able to answer without expert help.” From www.MichaelPollan.com

this column originally published in the rutland (vt) herald 01/22/08

of Blackberries and Slugs

...control end...

My 2007 journal was entitled CONTROL END. At least that’s the first thing I read when I pulled it up on my screen – all caps, font size 26, bold – to remind me to skip to the end of the document so I didn’t have to read my January 1 entry every time I opened it.

It was a grisly one, that entry, that had Saddam Hussein hung by the neck until dead. It was a potent portent for the year – three hundred and sixty some odd days later that journal ended with Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, and all the pages in between could’ve been scribbled to black with the most depressing examples of dishonesty, meanness, greed, war, molestation, torture, death, short-sightedness, idiocy, knee-jerk vetoes of any good legislation that DID come along, the wrack and ruin of our country, our world, our planet... in no particular order.

But they weren’t! Instead they were crammed to overflowing with examples of courage, generosity, idealism, friendship, teamwork, energy, creativity, intelligence, problem-solving, and real accomplishment.

“How can this be,” you ask. “Did this insane world just make you stick your head in the sand?” I asked myself the same question and, for some reason, went back to a little story I’d told awhile ago about blackberries and slugs.

...blackberries and slugs...

You can’t find blackberries if you don’t go out and look for blackberries, if the idea of blackberries – their existence – has not been posited at the edge of some cow pasture early in your afternoon as a child, along some marshy, deeply hoof-pocked swamp; you can’t find them if you can’t imagine the hunt, if your blood doesn’t race the slightest bit at least and your saliva does not start flowing when you see them hanging heavy and black upon the thorny branch, if you can’t patiently back the evil, back-turned thorns that impale you out of your flesh; if, after noticing the swales of branches that have been trampled by something large and tough-skinned and hearing the neighborhood’s dogs baying, you don’t bend down and pick those downed branches with neoned peripheral sight, with eyes in the back of your head, with persistence in spite of the possibility of bears.

But most of all you can’t find blackberries if you don’t stop at the first blackberry you see, those first hard green and red pods, stop and find the few that are ripe, and the few beyond those and beyond and beyond into the morton-saltbox of canes and nature and ripening berries.

Likewise, you cannot find slugs if you do not bend over and look in likely places, and then the one you see will lead to whole other snail universes. Hell for that matter I imagine it is the same way with money, but I wouldn’t know, as I don’t have money in my blood like I do blackberries and slugs.

The best way to kill slugs is to take the kitchen shears out with you and snip them in half as you see them. They ooze a big bubble of black innard-goo, but the killing is clean and quick and I have no trouble picking a tomato in the drizzle to eat as I continue with my grizzly task. Slugs are at once sticky and slimy. You always know when you’ve grabbed one hidden under leaves when you’re weeding or stepped on one barefoot in the dark, from the sticky residue that makes your fingers stick together, your foot kiss the floor, and shreds of grass and old leaves and dirt build up on the shears to make you remember to wash them before snipping herbs into a pot au feu.

I spent a lot of satisfying, bee-humming, bear-fearing hours picking blackberries that year. I piled the blackberries on a platter with some goat cheese and chocolate and took them to a party. I served them up with a silver spoon into everyone’s palms, telling them I’d braved bears for them.

As for slugs, they had been posited in my mind by that first hunt, but I tried not to notice them afterward, for there was no earthly good in seeing them. I could never decimate their numbers. I could only try to find out what it was in my garden that attracted them, and then try to change that climate so that they would make their living elsewhere. It reminded me of R. Buckminster Fuller’s admonition: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." I wanted those slugs obsolete but as yet I hadn’t found the new ethos to make them so, so I ignored them. I concentrated on the blackberries.

...the right climate...

Of course you can’t find blackberries, or slugs, in January; the prerequisites are in their nature as well as ours: They must be in season; the climate must be right; the cycles of vegetation and climate and use correct.

My journal is not a pure moan of despair because last year I was lucky enough to fall in with some good people, hard-working, forward-thinking and energetic volunteers, whose collective eye was on the prize of a stronger local food supply for the community, who laughed instead of cried when things got tough; who, when faced with an insurmountable brick wall, did not collapse back to the starting point but simply fell back a few paces and patiently took another route. For progress became like climbing a tree – just because your current route doesn’t get you to the tippy-top doesn’t mean you drop back to the ground – only to the next effective branch down.

Some of these people work full time jobs and volunteer in the crevices of them; some are free-lancers and work their volunteer time in between their own deadlines; some are retired or have a partner who makes the living; and some just believe so whole-heartedly in what they’re doing that they design lives that will encompass it.

These are persistent people, who stay on track by consistently referring back to their starting goal, their “mission statement,” people who know that seven times out of ten they’ll learn something if they listen hard enough, and that most good ideas will only get better with a little more input. They know that there are times to be a leader and times to follow; and that true teamwork is not the usual corporate demand for a flock of sheep to follow each other over the lip of a crevasse, though they might agree with these words from a woman named Kathy Sierra: “Most truly remarkable ideas did not come from teamwork. Most truly brave decisions were not made through teamwork. The team's role should be to act as a supportive environment for a collection of individuals. People with their own unique voice, ideas, thoughts, perspectives. A team should be there to encourage one another to pursue the wild ass ideas, not get in lock step to keep everything cheery and pleasant.”

These are people who know that courage is more invigorating than fear, and perhaps it was that climate of fear and frustration on the political front that mobilized volunteers last year. It’s as though a giant military/industrial maelstrom has hit the earth and grows ever more destructive, and in the face of it we toil together to create our own small existence under the radar, recognizing as we do it how much we have missed the sense of community that is created in times of great and absorbing struggle.

...yammer and response...

Leo brought home a carton of Black Box cabernet sauvignon this weekend, and I broke out a little pat of sharp and creamy camembert-type cheese from Consider Bardwell Farm in Pawlet to add to the jollity, and we spent a very pleasant time nibbling and sipping while I put together a Sunday night supper.

I had: cod, that was frozen, brought back from Maine when I visited my sister; marjoram from Gail Edwards at the Common Ground Fair; three leeks, the last ones grown at Foggy Meadow Farm by Paul Horton, who is missed at the Winter Farmers’ Market these last couple of weeks; a head of garlic grown by a friend; some inexpensive white wine from the Castleton General Store; Amish Country butter that I got at the Co-op; eggs from Kilpatrick Farm at the Winter Market; and the end of a loaf of Bear Mountain Honey/Oatmeal bread. Oh yes, and fenugreek that I picked up in Brooklyn at Sahadis’ a few weeks ago. And some rice noodles. Cilantro, from the Co-op. I had a documentary called The Cheese Nun on my computer, a fire snapped and crackled in the fireplace, and I was feeling pretty mellow. I decided I would make a brothy fish soup.

I slivered the leeks and swished them in cold water and then put them to melt with the chopped garlic in a mass of butter over very low heat. Since I’d taken the cod out of the freezer in the afternoon, I’d been thinking of a new year’s resolution commentary I’d heard on NPR, a strident young woman bemoaning the need to use the word “local” in front of every food item, and the practice of naming farms and farmers on menus. She didn’t like “sustainable” either. “Couldn’t we just Eat,” she despaired, “Food?”

I looked downright affectionately at my leeks and my garlic, all my edible goods. Monsanto – some call it Monsatan – had not TOUCHED it. And I knew it! And I LIKED that, thank you very much!

I added a little white wine to the leeks, sprinkled on some marjoram and some fenugreek (didn’t know what that would do) stirred, covered, and let them get really quite soft. Then I added some more wine, a little water, the rice noodles I’d boiled for 5 minutes, layered the cod over, and let it cook, covered, until it lost its translucency.

Ladled out into deep bowls, a slightly beaten egg stirred into each bowl, chopped cilantro over the top, hot and crisp croutons on the side, Man it was good!

...peering closely...

Once you start paying very close attention to your food, once you get right down to eye-level and peer back into its shadowy apparatus, you will see more and more instances of the government and agribusinesses with their thumbs in your bowl. You will see how lightly drug, food processing, insurance, and medical companies’ CEOs and other employees flit back and forth between industry, lobbying, and chairing or advising government food and drug agencies. You will see that what began as a footpath leading to public safety has become a highway with no exits – because they would just complicate things – that leads to our complete subjugation. Control the food, control the people.

Our government needs to go back and check out its mission statement, and then sustain the vision, not ram it down our collective throat. And if that mission was to protect the public health, then they’ve got a few branches to back down.

...about those slugs...

I was listening to two farmers at the Market this summer comparing the pH of their soils. They talked about harmful insects and how neither one had any. I asked about slugs. Oh no, they didn’t have Those. They were kindly, but I could tell they were aghast! I slunk away and called Rob Barker to come and dance in my treetops, trim them up, and let some sun in, which he did. I cleaned up my gardens spic and span when the growing season ended, and although I didn’t test my soil, I did dust limestone all over it. But I think letting a little sun in is a good thing. We’ll see, come spring and summer, and then we’ll go from there.

first published in the Rutland (VT) Herald on 8 january, 2008

Henceforth? Tourtière!

Every culture, every country, every cuisine, has some kind of meat pie. Just think of that old nursery rhyme, “Four and twenty blackbirds baked in....” one. Think of calzone, knish, pizza, shepherds, chicken pot, steak and kidney, pasty, empanada...

The first time my neighbor and friend Ginette Turgeon mentioned tourtière, my ears pricked right up and I peppered her with incessant questions about the thing. She told me she’d grown up with it in Québec, that it was a French Canadian meat pie enclosed in two crusts. That only enflamed my curiosity, perhaps because mincemeat pie, as my grandma made it and as I do now, is one of my favorite things in the world. Mincemeat, not many people know, is beef, or venison neck meat if Grandma had her way, chopped up with suet, apples and raisins, with brown sugar, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and pepper added, all simmered together until done. About two hours. Enclosed in two crusts and baked.

If tourtière didn’t sound more exotic, it was interesting in that it was connected – there was boiling meat, and sweet spices like cloves. It differed from mincemeat, and put it in a whole other category, that there was whipping, and a potato, and no sugar. “Not sweet. No,” Ginette said. “It is a savoury pie.” But, like mincemeat again, “and we eat it at Christmas and at New Years and at no other time.”

Many years have flown by since that first conversation, and though Ginette and I have talked about tourtière several times during those years I had never tried making it. This year I was spurred on by a reader and neighbor, Mickey Best, asking about tourtière last spring and lamenting that she could not seem to make it taste the way it used to. I remembered this lament when another friend and neighbor, Lowell Klock, came back, from spending Thanksgiving in Quebec, with a sample of creton. Creton is a kind of spread or pâté made of ground pork of which Canadians eat slices, with toast, for breakfast. And it seemed to be made, upon investigation, in the same way that tourtière is made – by boiling (well, simmering) ground meat with seasonings – though not enclosed in pastry.

I looked up recipes on the web and combined a few and made it. I liked the idea I found of simmering the ground pork in milk, quite a lot of milk. Some recipes had no spices – I went with the classic four – cloves, cinnamon, allspice and pepper – not a lot of each. That was about it. Sauté the meat until the red is out – until it’s gray – add the spices, and the milk just to cover, some salt, and let simmer for about 2 hours. I scraped it all into a container and refrigerated it. It was very good, but not quite as formed, as... stiff, as the slice that Lowell had brought home. I found out later that some people add the marrow of roasted pork bones to give it more gelatin, which gives it more form.

So that was a success. We ate some with toast, I gave some to Ginette (but none to Lowell – I’m sorry. Next time) and the rest I used as a filling in pizza dough, thereby making a creton calzone. Talk about mixing your metaphors, or, in this case, cultures and cuisines.

I’m not sure if Lowell brought that bit of creton home because she was intrigued with it or because she knew I would be. Probably a little of both. Having lived in exotic places and being well traveled, she owns a learned appreciation of exotic and just plain fine – meaning the best ingredients, well-prepared – food. Ginette, I suspect, like me, owes her passionate sense of food to the intense family that fostered it; that and being pretty well traveled herself. There is something of the historian to this curiosity about food, an appreciation of cultures’ unique yet connected influence on and interpretation of raw ingredients. Mrs. Bomblatt would no doubt agree if she were not but a fictional character. With Mickey, we all four end up in Wallingford, Vermont from our own different directions, focused on a Canadian dish of what is, essentially, boiled meat.

Damned tasty, though, if we do say so, in a way to which much of today’s food cannot begin to aspire: in its history, its outdated necessity, and the almost-from-Marco-Polos-era – or at least 17^th Century France – way of spicing meat with sweet spices – the better to preserve it longer, or at least smell like it; in the use of milk, I think, as the original simmering medium to make a kind of gravy of the very meat!; and the pastry enclosure to render that creton handy to transport down into the mines or up into the pastures. At which time, enclosed in pastry, it becomes pasty, tart, burrito, well, you get the point. Tourtière is not quite as handy to carry, but the pastry crust does make it more festive at the table.

Having a pound and a half of ground beef on my hands, I decided to make a tourtière out of it instead of pork, a legitimate decision because most surmise tourtière was a way of using leftovers. In fact, a cipâte, from Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, widely thought to be a predecessor of tourtière, uses several different kinds of meat, notably wild ones, each layer separated from the next, sometimes by pastry. Gaspé, being a fishing area, makes a salmon pie or tourtière, as well as a chicken one. The Québécois version sometimes uses veal and/or beef in addition to pork.

Adding a little lard to the heavy pan to grease it, I cooked the ground beef, with a chopped medium-sized onion and several cloves of garlic. When it was gray and limp – how appetizing! – I added ¼ teaspoon each of cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice and pepper, maybe a teaspoon of salt, a rather large potato cut in 1 inch chunks, poured in enough whole milk to cover it – about a cup and a half – brought it to a simmer, put the cover on and let it cook for about 2 hours, until it was thick and most of the milk had been absorbed. Then, remembering, however vaguely, Ginette saying that she beat it, I mashed it with a potato masher to get out all the clumps of meat until it was of a rather fine consistency. Then I corrected the seasonings – it needed a little more salt.

I made my usual crust of 2 cups flour, a little more salt than usual –a heaping teaspoon of flaky seasalt, 1/3 cup butter and 1/3 cup lard, and 1/3 cup water or a little less. Once the pastry was rolled out and filled with the cooled meat, I glazed the top crust with 1 egg yolk mixed with a little cream, and baked it at 450 for 15 minutes, then 350 for another half an hour. With all due modesty, I have to say that crust was the best one I’ve ever made. Man, it was toothsome!!!

I had a feeling I should serve the tourtière with gherkins, the traditional accompaniment to creton, but I didn’t have any, so I dolloped several things around it – horseradish made by Mama K (another Wallingford neighbor), and spicy mustard, and put pickled mustard seeds on top of it. Then I put a line of Greene’s Gourmet of Vermont all natural Texas Chipotle medium around it, and it was to that line to which my fork gravitated. The sauce is HOT, but chock full of flavor, first from the chilis, then the lime but not tasting of lime, maybe garlic. But those are some flavorful chilis, and an end of a toothpick touch of it on a forkful of tourtière was as though made in heaven. You can get this sauce at the Farmers’ Market as a rule. Next day I ate tourtière with Maya’s homemade kimchi, and that was awfully good, too.

But to get the ultimate low-down on tourtière, I asked Ginette if I could stop by and observe her technique. She makes half a dozen pies and freezes them without baking them, then takes them out one by one during the holiday season to bake. Her whole family looks forward to them. Knowing how these things work, she had made one tourtière for me to see the finished product – and a beautiful thing it was – while on the stove bubbled the makings for another five or six pies.

She was using ground pork, about 1 ½ pounds per pie, with one large onion and 5 to 6 cloves of garlic, chopped pretty finely, adding 1 teaspoon of salt and some pepper, which she cooks just until the meat loses its red color, then covers this with the water, not milk, about 1 ¼ cups, and simmers it for about an hour and a half or until reduced and almost creamy. Only then does she add her spices – about ¼ teaspoon each of cloves and cinnamon, and simmers it another 20 minutes. Remember, this is for one tourtière.

And Ginette does not kid when she says she beats it – she gets out her handy hand-mixer and whips the meat, for some time. “I whip it to not a fine texture, not exactly a spread,” she says, “but so it is all even, and until the water is all incorporated. I don’t like coarse!”

Only when she approves its texture, does she add the potato. “I use one very large potato, russet, starchy, for each pie, and I cook it and mash it without any butter or milk before I add it to the meat.” She dollops in the potato and whips it into the meat, and then checks the seasoning. “Oh, more salt!” she exclaims, “and a little more cinnamon.” She sprinkles more salt, and we taste, and she sprinkles a little more salt. “Now, what do you think? It’s perfect, eh?” And it was.

“What did you serve with it,” she asked. I went on and on about what I’d tried, and that I’d settled on Greene’s Hot Chipotle Sauce, and returned the question to her. “Plain,” she said decidedly. “I like mine plain, but Gaeton likes zucchini relish with it.” I recalled Ginette mentioning last summer that she always made a little zucchini relish for her husband Gaeton to eat with tourtière come Christmas. I recalled that in my research traditional sides are pickled beets or green tomato relish.

At my request, Ginette flipped through her books – most of them in French – to find the recipe she uses for creton. It calls for 2 pounds ground pork, two onions and 2 cloves of garlic, chopped, 2 cups water, 2 teaspoons salt, to be simmered together for 1 hour; at which time 1 cup of milk, ½ cup of oatmeal and ½ teaspoon of allspice are added and cooked for another hour. That’s whipped, too, before being packed into a dish and refrigerated.

The oatmeal I had not heard of before, but that and the potato in the tourtière are thought by food historians to reflect an Irish influence. Looking for the original recipe for something? You’d probably have to go back to the apple in the garden of Eden.

Well, that’s about all I know about tourtière, as well as creton. I’m glad I finally know it, though – it’s delicious, it’s beautiful and impressive, it’s traditional, it’s easy to prepare, can all be done ahead, and it will be a glad addition to my holiday table henceforth!

Originally published in the Rutland (VT) Herald on 12/18/07

the Unbearable Whiteness of Baking

Mrs. Bomblatt woke with foreboding. “Cookies? Bah! Humbug!"had been her less than gracious response last night, when her eight year old daughter reminded her that it was time for that marvelous tradition known as Making and Decorating Christmas Cookies With Your Children, or Creating Total Havoc with Flour and Confectioners Sugar.

Mrs. Bomblatt knew this to be an activity perpetrated by Mary-Poppins-like mothers who shared it gently and graciously (there was that word again) with their children, dressed all the while in clean, unrumpled Alice Blue dresses and white pinafores, their blond hair swept impeccably into soft chignons.

Mrs. Bomblatt knew her own limitations. There was a medieval edge to her food sense, she feared, a touch of the arcane. Much to her consternation, a friend had once suggested that if she’d lived in an earlier age she would have been burned for a witch, just because she loved the quirks of food, the historic pattern of it. She had a feeling for the ethos of the people who performed the intricate processes before her.

And holiday food was no exception. Mrs. Bomblatt liked to steam a plum pudding, stew mincemeat with real meat, preferably venison, spend extraordinary amounts of time finding a free-range goose to roast, soak a southern ham in the bathtub for days, or hang a locally smoked one in a cool dry place for a month, scraping off the mold before baking it. And while, for most people, eggnog meant pulling a cardboard carton out of the dairy case and adding liquor to it at the appropriate time, wasn’t that just too simple for her taste! She liked to beat up fresh eggs and cream with sugar, weeks or months ahead of time, add a liberal amount of dark rum, and let it mature in a crock in the cellar (refrigerators are so... mundane, she thought) to let it mellow for weeks or months, stirring occasionally and testing by the spoonful. Once, she had tasted it, diffidently, at Easter, and it was very good, in her opinion, and, to her surprise, she had survived. That was when she began to consider how Mr. Bomblatt’s beloved Bailey’s was made; how all those little European towns thrived in spite of drinking old eggs.

Mrs. Bomblatt had realized long ago that she’d never make old bones as a cook if she didn't do something to liven it up. Her family, on the other hand, could stand a little more ordinariness, something they could count on. Cookies were, as her daughter would say, something Mrs. Bomblatt could not possibly add a hot pepper to. But making Christmas cookies involved time! Great, massive quantities of time, and if she knew herself, those quantities would be short on quality.

Mrs. Bomblatt threw back the covers and planted her feet on the chilly floor, girding herself for battle, for today would be the day to play Saint Mary of the Cookies and she feared she would find herself once again eminently unfitted for the part.

Sure enough, later that afternoon:

"Why are you swearing, Mom?" Lizzie asked with equanimity, sitting on the counter, all knobbly knees and elbows. "Santa will hear you and leave you a lump of coal!" She laughed. Outside it was frigid and snowy, but inside all was cozy chaos and flour. They’d been at cookie baking for a nice quantity of time — about fifty hours, Mrs. Bomblatt thought.

She glared at her daughter. "I'm just perpetuating an old tradition among the wimminfolk of our family," she said, yanking the silverware holder out of the dishwasher (she was her mother). "You're lucky I'm not slamming doors and crying."

Lest the reader come away with the wrong idea, Mrs. Bomblatt would not ordinarily act in such a way except that a truly monumental misfortune had befallen her – she had misplaced the rubber spatula! Or, rather, someone had taken it! Or it had taken feet and walked away! Her daughter was staring at her rage in fascination. Mrs. Bomblatt considered kicking the step-stool; resisted kicking the cat; found herself frozen in mid-exasperation by some kind of rational maturity. Shame on me! she thought.

She centered herself. She’d looked everywhere at least three times, and wouldn’t look again. The problem could not be solved by brute action – Mrs. Bomblatt took a deep breath and put her faith in civilized problem solving. There were several ways to go, i.e. Sour Grapes – She didn’t need the stupid thing, would use her hands; Give Up and Kick The Stool – Mrs. Bomblatt caught her blood pressure by the shirt-tail as it shot up in anticipation; Pass The Buck – "Well, if you think YOU can find it (she was her aunt) then do!". She did not so much decide on as burst out with the latter.

Balletically, Lizzie dropped off the counter, gracefully sweeping flour with her. Mrs. Bomblatt opened her mouth and shut it quickly. Lizzie glanced back at the resulting squeak and opened the refrigerator door. "Here it is," she said, yanking the cursed thing out of the chilling cookie dough.

I think I will go away, far away, and lie down with a cold compress on my head, thought Mrs. Bomblatt, until the season of harmony and grace has ended.

Whom did she think she was kidding? Once started, the process of fourteen thousand tasteless gingerbread boys demanded to be completed. One quarter ton of sugar cookie dough must be pressed out of this silly little contraption, although once baked it would have melted back into shapeless blobs anyway. Ah well, Mrs. Bomblatt began to pack the dough into the tube and, sure enough, when she tried to screw it out in the shape of a poinsettia a blob emerged.

"Here, Mom," Lizzie took the cookie press from her mother. "You just relax. Let me try."

"Hmmmph," grunted Mrs. Bomblatt, crossing her arms (therefore looking and sounding just like her grandmother). "I don't know how you expect to be able to do it,"she snapped, regretting the words before they were out of her mouth, "...if I can't." Lizzie turned the screw handle and pressed out row upon row of perfect poinsettias until the thing was empty, then she unscrewed the cap, removed the pattern, inserted one of a Christmas tree, and packed the tube full of batter again.

Mrs. Bomblatt perched on the stool, arms still crossed, chagrin fading to something more easily assimilated. Was she recognizing a very faint pattern here? A very long process? She could hear her grandmother saying contentedly, "Cookies? We'll let your mother do the Christmas cookies. She does such a nice job of it." My Goodness, Mrs. Bomblatt thought, her eyes widening in relief, It’s like twins – it skips a generation!

"What a beautiful job you're doing," Mrs. Bomblatt crooned, patting her glossy chignon, smoothing her snow-white pinafore. "Let me know if you need some help with the icing," she said, heading down cellar to stir the eggnog and... make sure the taste was developing properly.

Some of Mrs. Bomblatt’s favorite cookies – made each year, forever after
this embarrassing little episode, by Lizzie.

Basler Brunsli

(Heart Shaped Chocolate Almond Spice Cookies from Nick Malgieri )

60 cookies

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups whole natural almonds (or hazelnuts or both) (8 oz)

1 1/2 cups sugar plus additional for coating work surface

6 ounces fine-quality semisweet or bittersweet chocolate, chopped

1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ground cloves

1/4 cup egg whites (from about 2 large eggs)

In a food processor combine almonds with sugar and pulse until ground fine. Add chocolate and pulse until ground fine. Don’t over process because the chocolate will melt. Add spices and pulse twice. Add egg whites and pulse until mixture forms a stiff dough, adding 1 teaspoon water if necessary.

Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper or foil. On a surface coated with additional sugar press out or roll dough about 1/4 inch thick. With bottom of a fork held facing down and tines touching dough at a sixty degree angle, score dough about 1/16 inch deep by pulling fork across in a series of parallel vertical lines. With a 2-inch heart-shaped cutter cut out cookies and transfer to prepared baking sheets. Press dough scraps together and cut out more cookies in same manner. Let them stand, uncovered, for 3 hours before baking.

Preheat oven to 325 degrees

Put cookies in oven and immediately reduce temp to 300 degrees. Bake 10 to 15 minutes, juggling cookie sheets, or until cookies are just firm, then cool on sheets or racks.

When cool, store for up to two weeks in an airtight container.

Grandma’s Ice Box Cookies

Grandma made two kinds of cookies and one was this oblong, brown, nut-studded, rich, thin bar. Mrs. Bomblatt had absolutely no idea why you needed a whopping tablespoon of cream of tarter, but you do. She keeps a pan of this dough in the fridge and manages to bake them off when needed. Grandma used black walnuts and so does Lizzie when Mrs. Bomblatt e can get them.

Ingredients:

2 cups brown sugar

1/2 cup lard or solid shortening

1/2 cup butter

1 tablespoon vinegar

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 eggs well beaten

4 cups flour

1 tablespoon baking soda

1 tablespoon cream of tartar

1 1/2 cups walnuts or pecans

Cream together the brown sugar, shortening and butter, stir in the vinegar, vanilla and eggs. Whisk together the flour, soda, and cream of tartar and beat into the sugar/butter mixture just until combined, then stir in the nuts.

Line a bread pan with plastic wrap, pack the dough into this, smooth the top, cover with the plastic and store it in the fridge overnight. Next morning, or evening, preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Slice the dough into 1/4 inch slices and bake for about 12 minutes.

Rose’s Peanut Butter Cookies w/Chocolate Navels

From Rose Levy Beranbaum’s Rose’s Christmas Cookies. “They are very peanut buttery yet exceptionally light, with a lovely ‘sandy’ bite.”

Ingredients:

1 cup (5 oz) all purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/8 teaspoon salt

½ cup (3.75 oz) light brown sugar

¼ cup (1.75 oz) granulated sugar

½ cup (4 oz) unsalted butter

1 cup (9.25 oz) smooth peanut butter

½ teaspoon vanilla extract

Into a small bowl, sift together the flour, baking soda, and salt, then whisk. In a food processor with the metal blade, process the sugars for several minutes until very fine. Cut the butter into a few pieces and add it with the motor running. Add the peanut butter and process until smooth and creamy. Add the egg and vanilla extract and process until incorporated, scraping the sides of the bowl. Add the flour mixture and pulse it just until incorporated. Scrape the dough into a bowl and refrigerate for at least 1 hour or overnight.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.Roll 1 inch balls of dough between your hands, set them 1 1/2 inches apart on a cookie sheet, then make a depression halfway through the center of each with your index finger. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes, until set, remove from the oven, and immediately place a small chunk of chocolate into the little navels. Let the cookies cool on the sheets for a few minutes until they are firm enough to handle, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

Betty’s Russian Teacakes

Put these in the freezer and let them pile up, batch by batch, and don’t tell anyone how delicious they are frozen. Lizzie usually makes them in double batches. Originally from the now classic Betty Crocker’s New Picture Cook Book (1967)

3 1/2 dozen cookies.

Ingredients:

1 cup soft butter

1/2 cup sifted confectioners’ sugar (run it in the food processor to get the lumps out)

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 1/4 cups unbleached flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup finely chopped nuts

Into the bowl of a food processor put the butter, sugar and vanilla, and mix thoroughly. Add the flour and salt and pulse. Add the nuts and pulse. Chill.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Roll the dough into one inch balls. Place on ungreased baking sheet. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes. While still warm, roll in confectioners’ sugar. Cool. Roll in sugar again.

Cabbage Minus Zero

If your dog has an ancient brain, vestigial memory, he will bury a bone and go back one day and dig it up and lie down over it and hold it in his paws and nurse it until it’s gone, licking and sucking and sometimes chawing until it is lace and finally disappears. He buries the bone not so it ferments, not so the earth will make its elements work on each other until they are more available to his digestive system, which is what happens, but because something, a hunch, tells him to. My dog’s ancient brain has been pretty much bred out of him. Nevertheless, he has little or no interest in a fresh bone. If I give him one on June 1^st, he will disdain it, nose it a few times over the next month as it lies in the grass under a hot sun, and finally find real interest in it about the 4^th of July. A winter bone can lie there till hell freezes over and then thaws, at which point he might find it fascinating.

Makes you glad to be a civilized human, doesn’t it? But wait a sec: you pick a cabbage out of the fall garden. It might be sleeting, you might have to lift the protecting blanket and shake the snow off it before you break off the cabbage. Now what? Eat it at ground zero? Probably not. And no, you can’t leave it on your counter or even in your fridge to eat next month, for even if rot doesn’t set in, the quality – the flavor and nutrition of it – will degrade. No, you have to do something with it – immediately, if not sooner. What do you do? Grandma used to cut out the core and shred the cabbage, salt it until it wept, wring it out, and apply a dressing of light cream, vinegar, a little sugar. That’s pretty much ground zero.

Next step is to heat it. I like to put some good amount of butter in the pan (natch!), melt it over low heat, then add the thin wedges of cabbage, salt and pepper, cover it up and leave it over very low heat on a back burner for a long time – an hour, maybe. Turn it once in awhile as the cabbage melts and golds. The long low heat doesn’t excite cabbage’s bitter buds but calms them into sweetness. A touch of vinegar when you eat it.

That’s the way with cabbage. You heat it, it’s a plus, an addition.

Let’s go the other way – don’t heat it, slice it up in slivers and put it to work, encourage it to make the most of its innate self. You’ve heard of sauerkraut? You know how it’s made? Think about it – it’s buried in a crock with salt sprinkled over it, pounded down, weighted, covered, and let work!

The process is called lacto-fermentation, and the key to it is salt, which allows “Lactic microbial organisms – similar to those that curdle milk – to develop spontaneously and convert the natural sugars of the vegetable into lactic acid. This environment rapidly acidifies, to the point that it becomes impossible for bacteria responsible for food spoilage to multiply.” This is from a little book called Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning, put together by The Gardeners & Farmers of Terre Vivante, in France, and published by Chelsea Green in White River. It’s a treasure trove of old techniques of preservation that get left out of modern cookbooks but that were – until quite recently, the middle of the 19^th century when heat sterilization (canning)came into wide use – the prevalent forms of food preservation. They include drying; preserving with salt, oil, sugar, alcohol or vinegar; cold storage, and fermentation.

“Oh, how esoteric,” you might say. But lots of foods we eat everyday take advantage of fermentation. Chocolate, for instance. In an October 29^th New Yorker article called “Extreme Chocolate”, Bill Buford says “Fermentation has been around forever. It is older than cooking. It was probably the first method of food preparation. Fermentation transforms grapes into wine, grains into beer, wheat into leavened bread. It transforms a raw ingredient, often valued for its nutrition, into one valued for its taste. It yields vinegar, yogurt, sauerkraut, cheese, prosciutto, vanilla, and pickles.” Of course, cacao pods are also fermented, a process Buford describes robustly, to yield, finally, the silky bitter thing we call chocolate.

Without undue thought about the matter, I made a couple of small batches of sauerkraut this fall. I was surprised by the sweetness and velvety texture of it, and how well it accompanied roasted or grilled meats. A taste of it alone in the middle of the afternoon proved satisfying, too.

Suddenly, as though my ears had been unstoppered by the doing of it, people were TALKING, in the most ravishing tones, about sauerkraut and the more varied Asian counterpart of it, kimchi, a fermented vegetable mix, usually based on cabbage but with the addition of other vegetables such as carrots and onions. Its spiciness can be scorching or mild with hot peppers, its Asian origin told in notes of ginger or fennel or seeds of cumin, coriander or cardamom. It’s as individual as the maker.

Potter, Maya Zelkin, served kimchi as part of a little spread she put out for her pottery studio opening in Shrewsbury in October. As I nibbled it appreciatively she told me she’d made it from her own garden produce and in a fermenting crock like the one I was at that moment looking at and wondering what that unusual object was. She had taken a fermentation class given by the Flack Family Farm of Enosburg Falls a few years ago at a NOFA (Northeast Organic Farming Association) conference, and based her execution of the crock on one she’d seen there.

The crock holds 2.5 gallons of vegetables, considerably more than I had been making at home, and the covering weight is a halved disk that fits, half by half, through the narrow top to cover the vegetables to weigh them down. “You don’t need a lot of weight,” Maya told me.

A bowl-like top fits upside-down into the lip, or gutter, of the crock, the lip is then filled with water, which creates a seal that allows the fermenting gases to escape but keeps air and dust out and prevents the formation of kahm yeast, that slimy stuff that isn’t harmful but is a little distasteful.

The crock is both beautiful and utilitarian, and suddenly I was a little more excited about making kimchi.

Maya said that I might visit her one day for a kimchi-making session if I would provide the cabbage. We would need 12 pounds, and I arrived in her kitchen a few days later toting just two heads of cabbage, because one of them weighed a humongous 10 pounds! A pot of soup bubbled slowly on the back of the wood range and Maya was prepping ginger, carrots, garlic, onions, and daikon radish to grate, a bowl of sea salt and a package of dried hot pepper stood by, as she handed me a sharp knife and a teensy cutting board and bid me get busy on that cabbage!

As we chopped and grated and chatted, she told me she’d made several batches of kimchi already and stored it in canning jars in a cool spot in the basement.

“Really,” I said, surprised at this, thinking of it as a condiment, “and why do you make so much?”

“As a preserving method, this is just so superior to canned. I realize it’s not good for modern commerce, doesn’t have a long shelf life, but it means I don’t need to buy California greens in February.”

“So we need to be careful,” I said, “or the USDA will decide that lacto-fermented vegetables are dangerous to our health and outlaw them!” We both had a rueful chuckle at that!

As a matter of fact, there is a caution in the Terre Vivante book, saying that “The USDA and the FDA recommend that all fermented foods should also be canned in a hot water bath to protect against botulism,” but they add, “There is good reason to think these recipes are safe without canning.”

We plunged along in our dangerous task.

Much of the big cabbage was revealing itself to be made up of numerous baby cabbages that grew from the same stem and nestled in its structure like babies in a womb. I munched on one and offered one to Maya, which she declined. “I’m not much for raw vegetables,” she explained. “I think traditional cultures didn’t eat a lot of vegetables, except for fermented ones.” She went on to explain, “I think the emphasis on raw salads is really not good for you – after all, we’re not cows!” I looked around and tossed the little half-eaten baby cabbage in the compost.

I’d sliced about a quarter of the cabbage, Maya had a nice pile of grated additions, so we put them into the crock, sprinkled 2 tablespoons of gray sea salt – Maya was using slightly less salt with this batch, 6 tablespoons altogether, for the 15 pounds of vegetables – and a half teaspoon of hot pepper powder on them, and I took the big pounder that had been carved out of a stick of firewood and began to pound.

It wasn’t long before the last layer of vegetables was pounded down. Maya fit each half of the weight on top and pressed them down onto the solid vegetables – the kimchee was juicing up nicely – and fitted an incongruously vivid bowl over the top onto the lip. The original top cracked in the firing, but she found this bowl fit perfectly. Carefully she poured water into the lip. “This was the first fermenting crock I made, and the lip is a little shallow, so I refined it in the following ones. But this is good enough for me.” Too, this crock was the smaller of the two sizes she makes, holding 1.5 gallons of vegetables, a size she finds most useful for her needs.

The task completed, we cleaned up and I gathered my things to go. “Come back in three days,” she bade me. “It should be done by then.”

My mouth was agape. Three days! “Oh, yes,” she crowed. “Bring some canning jars.”

Sure enough, three days later I returned home with my jars of delectable, juicy, sweet and spicy kimchi.

The following Saturday I bought daikon, carrots, cabbage, onions and a bulb of fennel at the Winter Farmers’ Market at the Rutland Area Food Co-op, and made a small batch of kimchi for myself. Of course I didn’t have Maya’s fermenting crock, but I could get along with a small crock I did have, my little coffee-cup plate to cover it, liter jar full of water to weight it, and a cheesecloth covering. It’s been two weeks now, and my small batch of kimchi is beginning to taste pretty good. It’s a little dry, I think because of evaporation, but quite tasty. But I’m thinking that when Maya gets back to making pots again next spring I might have to splurge on my own Zelkin fermenting crock!

Preserving fall vegetables might seem a little off-season for a December column, but the mind-blowing success of the indoor Winter Farmers’ Market puts the lie to that thought! When the prospect of a winter market began to take hold last summer, farmers began to plan for fall and winter crops. So far their planning has been fruitful, and the market is bursting with produce. Talking to Sally Beckwith of Foggy Meadow Farm last Saturday, I learned that the cabbages are still in the ground, picked at opportune moments during the week, and have probably benefited appreciably, as the parsnips have done, by the nip of raw weather making them sweeter. The spinach, though not actively growing, has roots still securely in the ground waiting, with no loss of freshness, to be picked and sold at the market.

Fresh or fermented, even cooked – never have our food choices been so broad, so festively presented. Why, I feel as instinctively happy as a dog with a fresh juicy bone in its jaws, just beginning to dig a hole to bury it in!

Potter/artist, Maya Zelkin Pottery, wood fired stoneware and porcelain, Coldham Road, Shrewsbury, VT 05738, 802/492-2045 or mayazelkin@gmail.com

published in Rutland (Vt) herald December 4, 2007