Preserving Summer

...subsistence thoughts...

If you were to pick up a book called The Polish Officer by Alan Furst, you might open it at the bookmark towards the end and continue to read of one of the last clandestine operations in the book which takes place at the farm of a peasant during World War II. It had been visited recently by an enemy operative who introduced himself as a politruk. When he has gone, the peasant says, “I can understand most Russians when they speak, we all can in this place. But what is a politruk?”

“It means political officer,” answers the Polish Officer.

The peasant shrugged – “That was to raise life to a level where it only pretended to exist,” the omnipotent storyteller explains, digging deep into the peasant’s practical brain wherein life was seen as a series of steps performed to get food on the table, protect the farm from the enemy, and survive.

“...to raise life to a level where it only pretended to exist,” I read again and again, then lifted my eyes from the page, a picture already forming behind them of lines of cars creeping around the new fast-food faux Mexican restaurant located in one of Rutland’s malls. This was surely an instance of pretense – “what will make life seem important for the next 3 hours?” we might ask. “Why, a hard-won machine-made taco. Let’s go!”

Which just goes to prove that we take our challenges where we can get ‘em, right? But to sit in lines, spewing hard-won gasoline and ethanol from the mid-west’s hard-used acres and wasting precious time? I wonder how many of those of us found idling in line we might see at another time at the Farmers’ Market, or sweating in our own garden, or, heaven forefend, helping out in a farmer’s field, or even standing at our own kitchen counter putting black beans to soak to cook the next day and refry the next? Not many, I would guess.

...ah, but how profitless this line of thought...

If, on the other hand, you were to pick up a book called An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, written by one of the finest writers in English, Elizabeth David, and much of her subject regarding food, you might turn to page 113 of the Penguin softcover edition to a section called ‘Mafalda, Giovanna, Giulia’. There, under Mafalda, you will find a simple – though labor intensive – and lovely treatment for fleshy and sweet, autumn red peppers, and how to preserve them, using not an iota of vinegar.

Peppers and eggplant are alkaline, that is "sweet", and most people, in order to preserve alkaline foods, add an acid, such as vinegar. I'm here to tell you that Elizabeth David, Mafalda, Myriam Gaignard, and Marcella Hazen do not find that necessary, with careful technique. Read on

It is, or will be, the perfect thing to do to remove yourself from profitless thoughts.

David is in Italy, in the village of Anacapri, early ‘50s, and Mafalda, who, with her husband ran a small restaurant there at the time, has given David several of her Southern Italian recipes. But David especially covets one for preserving red peppers, which Mafalda serves as an antipasto, “beautiful, brilliant scarlet strips of tender sweet peppers lightly sprinkled with olive oil and parsley and chopped garlic.” Mafalda bids her come back in the summer and she will show David how to make them. Next summer David lingers for weeks while Mafalda waits for the peppers to become thick-walled and meaty and sweet, and finally they are deemed ready.

Mafalda chars the peppers over a charcoal brazier, while David impales hers on a long handled fork and turns them over a gas flame until the skin is blackened and can be scraped or rubbed off. Put them into a paper bag for 15 minutes or so after they have charred, to let them steam a bit and lift that skin off. Every bit of blackened skin must be peeled and scraped and rinsed off, and the stems and cores and seeds are scraped out and discarded. Then the peppers are sliced into half-inch strips.

Mafalda packed hers into emptied wine bottles because in Italy at the time “...it would be thought wasteful to buy special preserving jars; she tied the corks with a piece of string...” However, you and I, and indeed Elizabeth David, use(d) small preserving jars –wide-mouth half pints work well.

Pack the peppers in, fill those jars up, add half a teaspoon of sea salt to each and a couple of basil leaves, screw down the tops, and place the jars into a flat-bottomed pan big enough to hold all the jars without touching. You won’t have that many, maybe 3 or 4 half pints, because preparing the peppers is so labor-intensive. You can wind a dishtowel or a rope of crushed newspapers among them so they don’t jostle each other as they cook. Cover completely with cold water. “Bring to the boil and continue boiling for 15 minutes. When quite cold, remove from the pan and make sure that the tops are screwed as tight as they will go.” David has kept these little bottles “well into the following summer,” but I found one hiding behind other jars in the basement last winter that had been put up several years ago. I arranged them on a plate, touched them with garlic and olive oil. They were such a treat! Full of the scent of red peppers and basil, and the taste, too! I don’t know of anything that speaks in February of the taste of summer as fluently as these.

Still feel like getting in the ole car and motoring down to circle that quik-stop? Maybe not.

...now let’s think about eggplants...

Vinegar is an effective preservative, but often it overpowers the preserved, which is one reason I like the pepper treatment, above, and also the process of lacto-fermentation, where foods are pickled in their own fermenting juices, creating much more complicated and at the same time subtle tastes than pure vinegar does. I wrote about it last fall and you can find it here: http://thriceshy.blogspot.com/2007/12/cabbage-minus-zero.html

However, there are many more – and almost forgotten – ways of preserving foods without the addition of vinegar, and many of these ancient ways can be found in a book called Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning. It’s prepared by many different old-world cooks and gardeners under the rubric of The Gardeners & Farmers of Terre Vivante, and published by Chelsea Green in White River Junction.

Years ago I discovered how luscious strips of eggplant can be when aged, raw, a few days in olive oil – they turn silky and creamy. But I can’t lay my hands on that recipe, which claimed to be not a preservation technique but simply preparation. Ever since, I’ve been looking for a way of preserving eggplant in olive oil, or permission to, without the addition of vinegar, the taste of which overpowers that of the eggplant, and in Preserving Food I found one. This is it:

Vegetables Preserved in Oil: Eggplant

2 pounds very small eggplants
coarse salt
5 cloves of garlic
12 pearl onions
1 sprig of thyme
1 bay leaf
black peppercorn
1 quart of olive oil
Slice the eggplant into rounds and place them in a bowl with a handful of coarse salt, toss them, and marinate for six hours in a cool place.

Drain and dry the eggplant with a clean cloth. Add the seasonings and toss. Pack the eggplant firmly into canning jars, cover with oil, and close tightly. Leave the eggplant to marinate at least one month, after which you can serve it as an appetizer.

This recipe is offered by Myriam Gaignard, in Coulans-sur-Gee, France, and it’s one I’m going to try!

...that said...

If you feel you need a bit of vinegar to ensure the keeping of preserved eggplant, note that Marcella Hazen in Marcellas Italian Kitchen, performs this technique with the addition of a few tablespoons of wine vinegar, and packing the eggplant with garlic, eggplant, mint and hot peppers. The eggplant can stay in the bowl shedding moisture overnight, if needed. It can be cut in strips, and it will halve its quantity after being wrung out in clean towels. Pack the eggplant down as you pack the jars, completely cover with olive oil, and Marcella claims this will keep for a year.

...sour grapes...

Maybe it IS just sour grapes. Why spend all those hours in the kitchen to get a few little jars of delicious condiments? Aside, of course, from the very sensuous activity that it is, handling and slicing and charring and steaming the luscious peak of the season foods; and aside from the pleasure they provide now or will provide in the winter months when we rediscover them and pry off their lids and present them to our families and friends – the scents and the flavors and the memories.

But who says that’s not just as great a waste of time as driving around in cars and eating industrial food? Well, I guess we do, don’t we? You and I, and I guess we’ll keep right on! But one of these days we’re going to be driving by Taco Bell and notice that there’s not one car in front of us, and just maybe we’ll let curiosity get the better of us and stop by and try it out. Hope nobody’s lookin’!

Before the Night Hits...

Since I begin to dread the Winter Night as soon as the summer days begin to shorten at the end of June, and my dread builds as the evenings grow cool and then downright cold, it’s always with a burst of relief and appreciation that I realize we have these two months of energetic brilliance to enjoy before the Night really hits us. Brisk and loaded with color, with baskets and pans and boxes and bowls full of glorious foods, rescued from the garden on frost-fearful nights or just because this is peak season, these days bring contradiction and imperative, both to get out and enjoy the last of this vitamin D sunshine and to stay inside chopping and simmering chutneys, jams, butters and sauces as the piles of fruits and vegetables first grow then dwindle down into preserves.

I know you all feel the same – in late July my friend Lowell emailed me “We've had the most wonderful spinach and broccoli from Foggy Meadow of Benson, and good corn and blueberries from Woods. How shall I exist when all this good stuff is over? I say this every year and survive – but...”

Yes, we shall survive, and we shall eat lots of local foods this winter – especially with the Winter Market and the Co-op keeping them available to us – and then May will, presumably, appear again.

...in a foggy meadow...

I remember walking into Depot Park on the first Market day – the Saturday before Mother’s Day last May – my heart swelling up the way it always does at the sight of these people I’ve known for so many years, and their wonderful early-season produce, working my way down the truck line, saying joyful hellos and catching up, when I was stopped in my tracks.

Speaking of hellos, HELLO, what was this? A new vendor, Foggy Meadow Farm, had set up across from the truck line; a large set-up, of bounteous greens and purples and reds, leafy mostly – from the micro-greens that I would use all summer in salads, and scattered here and there to complement, say, a cheese or salsa, both in beauty and taste, to the mature, most perfectly frilled green and red lettuces, laid out and mounded in beautiful pattern.

“My Goodness!” I said, rather abruptly. “Who are You?” I had not seen Foggy Meadow in their growing stages, not heard of them before, and here they were full-blown as though puffed from a hookah. I rubbed my eyes like Alice.

Paul Horton, it seems, is not a man who goes through growing stages. He and Sally Beckwith have owned their Benson hill farm for four years, lived there three, and farmed organic vegetables for two, selling at several farmers’ markets, including Middlebury, Dorset and Rutland.

I say hill farm advisedly, as I learned when I visited them later in the summer – the old farm house set on the north side of the road, behind and above it the scratching chickens and grunting pigs, and across the road below, and slanting down, an old barn and a patchwork of fields and, um, patches, outlined with irrigation ditch and pipe and scattered, it seemed artfully, with farm implements and machines, some ancient. It’s quite a sight anytime, particularly when created by a man who until a few years ago managed production systems for a publisher and a woman who designed databases. But perhaps that’s the source of their joy and success in what they do now, bringing those organizational and pattern-making talents into an area in which it is possible to love and feel at home – the farm-garden.

An avid organic gardener by avocation before he decided to make it a vocation, Paul appears to see farming as a cheerful challenge, a puzzle to be solved with a little creative diligence: when the town of Benson didn’t seem too keen on digging a trench across the road in which to lay his irrigation pipe, he contacted utilities companies and had them pound a conduit under the road like a horizontal well – that’s the way they lay their own lines, he reasoned – and then snaked the irrigation line through it.

In another instance, as we were walking through a field of leeks he reached down and measured the size of one. “Almost ready,” he said. “I want a buck fifty for these, so they have to be big.” Later I realized that two of his leeks were as big as the three that other farmers were banding together for $3 a bunch, and he pointed out that by growing them large he had decreased his handling costs, time, and aggravation.

Problem solving! It’s a real kick for some people. I’ll bet even now he’s noodling over how to get in the truck line next year.

It’s good to have people like Paul and Sally as part of our food community. Welcome them, won’t you?

...they pasteurize almonds, don’t they... The ubiquitous “They” – The US Department of Agriculture – has determined that all California almonds must be pasteurized (100% of our almonds come from California). However, in this case it seems that it was not the USDA that decided to kill the mosquito with a piledriver, but the Almond Board of California, who worked quickly after a 2004 outbreak of salmonella attributed to almonds to protect their industry from even the faintest mainstream taint, and made it a law that almonds must be pasteurized. Almonds are pasteurized either by steam or by propylene oxide (PPO), a chemical that has been banned by hot rod and motorcycle racing associations where it had been used as fuel. It’s also used for weed control. PPO is a known carcinogen. Pasteurized almonds apparently don’t taste or look differently from their raw counterparts, and are not required to be labeled “pasteurized”; are, as a matter of fact, continued to be labeled “raw”.

According to the Center for Disease Control, food borne diseases cause approximately 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths in the United States each year. In the almond outbreak, a total of 33 people were hospitalized, lots of people had tummyaches, no one died. Wouldn’t it be an intelligent reaction to check out how almonds are being warehoused and packaged, marketed and delivered, rather than to stomp the entire industry with pasteurization? Our food system should be helped by the USDA and a knowledgeable public to recognize that it should celebrate the diversity and originality of our products and knowledge and totally abhor the idea of uniformity and lack of choice.

...which brings us to milk...

It made sense to react to the inane news of mandatory pasteurization of our almonds by revisiting the issue of raw milk by speaking to Amy Shollenberger at Rural Vermont, the organization that was instrumental in making it legal for small chicken growers to sell their chickens to restaurants and neighbors earlier this year. I had heard rumors that Rural Vermont was working to make unpasteurized milk more easily available to consumers. She said that Rural Vermont is still “in the homework stage, working with legislators” to allow farmers to sell unlimited quantities of raw milk from their farms (they’re limited to six gallons per day now), and to advertise (which they’re not allowed to do) and to deliver milk to the consumer after it is paid for in an arrangement something like the produce farmers’ CSA – Consumer Supported Agriculture – wherein customers subscribe to a farmer’s harvest at the beginning of the season and receive a box of vegetables and fruit, sometimes other foods too, once a week, of whatever is in season. “It’s important to have a relationship with the farmer,” Amy told me, “and pre-purchasing the milk makes it so you would have to at least seek out the farmer.”

...pasteurized livestock?...

Amy was also very hyped about the appearance of Mary Zanoni, legal expert, farmer, and anti-NAIS activist, today, at The Abbey, way up north, in Sheldon at 1:00 pm and at Ilsley Library, Middlebury at 6:30 pm. She’ll keep to the subject of animal registration tomorrow, Wednesday, at the United Church of South Royalton at 7 pm.

NAIS is the National Animal Identification System, which the USDA is pushing, and which small farmers are resisting, saying that the costs of knuckling under to the system are prohibitive, and that the aim of the whole thing is to aid industrial animal farmers and to, indeed, put small farmers out of business. See and hear Zanoni to learn more.

It’s amazing that you can still buy a raw egg.

... what we’re eating now...

Fresh, yet fall, beets. I forego the balsamic vinegar and also the teaspoon of sugar, and use, along with a little olive oil and salt and pepper, raw cider vinegar, with misgivings, yet when I taste them later they are perfect, the beets sweetening their coating, yet sharp, yet sweet.

Katherine Clark of Montpelier is cooking crookneck squash or, rather, her husband is. She writes: “I am convinced that crookneck is by far the best variety of yellow squash. It has a nutty complex flavor that is much better than the standard yellow squash... You never find them because they are ugly and bumpy and people think they are gourds. Bill cooks the squash in our house. He cuts up crookneck in non-uniform small chunks (so that the faces won't stick to each other while cooking), and cooks them in a non-stick skillet with a small amount of butter for a long slow time so that the liquid evaporates and the flavor intensifies.”

I ran with Bill’s technique, sautéing crooknecks or any other summer squash for as long as two hours. The good ones keep their shape, lose their water, and get all caramelly and absolutely wonderful.

Katherine’s on a quest to get people to like ugly vegetables, or vegetables they don’t think they like – like rapini, turnips, fava beans – so that farmers don’t quit growing them. “I adore rutabagas and don't understand why they aren't hugely popular. I like to roast them in the oven with olive oil...and rosemary.”

I’ve never cooked rutabaga much, but I will this year. That sounds like a wonderful way to expand our winter local foods repertoire.

Something else I just discovered is the very small – Little Ben – pumpkin. “We’ve been having good luck with these,” Paul Horton told me last week. “Just bake them, whole, at 325 degrees for about 45 minutes. They’re really good.” I took two of them and grilled them for about half an hour. When I sliced them open the seeds were easily scooped out, and the pumpkins contained a sweet nutty meat. Great taste and texture!

I make Elizabeth David’s tomato soup. I can remember it almost word for word, yet when I make it without getting out the book and re-reading it there’s something missing. As she said, “For all its simplicity and cheapness, this is a lovely soup, in which you taste butter, cream, and each vegetable, and personally I think it would be a mistake to add anything to it in the way of individual fantasies.” Don’t you love that word, “fantasies,” as though you or I could not and should not entertain them?

So I get out my French Provincial Cooking and the book falls open to Potage Crème de Tomates et de Pommes de Terre. It calls for the white part of 2 leeks (only one of Foggy Meadow’s though), ½ pound of tomatoes, ¾ pound potatoes, 1 ½ ounce butter, a little cream, chervil or parsley. You melt the butter, soften the leeks in the butter, add the roughly chopped tomatoes, cook a little until they begin to give off their juice, add the diced potato, a seasoning of salt and a little sugar, cover with 2 ½ cups water, bring it to a boil and let it simmer “steadily but not too fast” for 25 minutes. Put it through a food mill, she says, but I put it all in a blender and pour it back in the pan, in which I’ve heated about ½ to 1 cup of heavy cream. Just before serving sprinkle with chopped chervil or parsley.

But when I open the book and read the recipe, even then I don’t make it exactly as she says – I do indulge in some of my “fantasies” and it tastes better than if I hadn’t read it but made it closer to her instructions. What do you make of that? I make of it that life is more mysterious than we can comprehend.

This column was first published in the Rutland (Vermont) Herald on September 25, 2007

Simply Summer

...Salad Days...

Driving through Virginia that burgeoning summer was like driving through a market basket – the countryside absurdly aburst with fat tomatoes in ruby and amber tones, tall, tessellated corn in chartreuse shades, royal eggplants and pale green okra and peppers of all vibrancy, sweet onions of gold and ivory, and that’s not even speaking of the bushels of scented peaches – what is that indescribable color of pink and gold? – piled to toppling in roadside stands. All the usual high-season stuff: We couldn’t wait to stop at a restaurant and gobble up the countryside.

But the kind of restaurant that is easily accessible to travelers does not, as a rule, serve what I wanted to eat that day, which would have been a nice combination of the very foods I’d seen in the fields – a salad in other words. Mixed lettuces topped with green beans that had, perhaps, been fussed over a bit – steamed and then laid crosswise on a grill to pick up some char stipples and smoke and then cooled; half a tomato that had been sprinkled with garlicky olive oil and salt and grilled until softened, and slices of grilled zucchini. Thinly sliced sausage or chicken, or even tuna could complement the greens and vegetables. All mounded up, a simple vinaigrette over all, with thin-sliced bread, topped with an herby chevre, grilled briefly, just until slightly crisp on the bottom and oozy on the top, leaned up against the sides.

It would have been refreshing and nutritious, a satisfying feast for the eye and the tummy. And it need not have been expensive for the cook to make, could all have been prepared beforehand and assembled in seconds when ordered. A win-win solution.

At home we would sit down to a platter of buttered corn, with a squeeze of lime and a sprinkle of chili powder; or a platter of just-off-the-vine tomatoes, sliced and scattered with torn leaves of basil, with maybe a few thin slices of fresh mozzarella tucked between. Or Okra, or even squash blossoms, dipped in egg and cornmeal and swiftly fried.

Any of those dishes would have been sumptuous at the end of a hot day on the road – the essence of summer food, just simple and cool.

That was in 1994, thirteen years ago, back in the ice age of local food consciousness, but not a whole lot has changed, or if it has changed it hasn’t changed for the better. On a recent trip through Virginia all the same names loomed at each rest stop, not beckoning but threatening – If you’ve got to eat you’ve got to eat here, and it will surely be tired, old, over-processed stuff that will slide down your gullet just above your hunger and just below your ire. We could have been in Detroit or the middle of Idaho – there would be the same names and the same industrial food. Oases of desert in the middle of a garden. How strange we have grown.

There was one bright spot on the recent trip. In Staunton, Virginia there were two unfamiliar names on the tall signs shooting up at the US 81 exit and we chose that of Mrs. Rowe’s, where we had the perfect breakfast. Beautiful, calm surroundings, excellent service, local food from eggs to bacon to homemade apple butter, bread and biscuits. Grits. Scrapple. Reasonable price. We left rejuvenated. If you’re driving south try to pace it so you’re in Staunton, VA at mealtime – breakfast, lunch, or supper, when you could order real fried chicken.

Mrs. Rowe’s is not an example of a change for the better – it is an example of a restaurant that did not, in the first place, change for the worse. They’ve been in business since 1953. The world changed, not they.

... a little summer soup...

Elizabeth David began writing about food after the second world war. I have all of her books, most in the Penguin edition, and all of them are beginning to fall apart. They have recently been reissued in new editions by the New York Review of Books. I may have to invest.

This is her Sorrel and Lentil Soup. She details it in her elegant and simple way in Summer Cooking.

“Make a puree with about ¼ lb. of brown lentils cooked for 1 ½-2 hours in about 3 pints of water, adding the salt towards the end of the cooking. Put the lentils through the sieve, add enough of the water in which they were cooked to make a thin puree.

“Chop a handful of sorrel leaves (about ¼ lb.) fairly finely, cook them in the lentil soup for 10 minutes. Immediately before serving stir in 2 or 3 tablespoons of cream. Enough for four helpings. This is one of the best of the sorrel soups.”

(Sorrel is a lemony-tasting green. If you don’t grow it I don’t know where you’ll find it, and I don’t know what you would substitute – there’s nothing like it. The leaves seem to melt like a Cheshire cat into an omelet or a soup, leaving only the taste but not a grin. My aged sorrel plant had been a part of the family for many years, when it suddenly bit the dust last year. This year I planted two different varieties and they’re going great guns. You can have a couple of handfuls for the asking. I’ll even give you a few seeds so you can grow your own.)

Summer Cooking was originally published in 1955. Somewhere between then and now some of us lost our respect for food. I believe it may have stemmed from those who believed the scientific speculation several decades ago that future nutrition could be gotten from capsules and forget those pesky family dinners and all the work and nasty angst they entailed. Everything would be minced and freeze dried and shrunk, vitamins added (and where would they come from), and stuffed into a gelatin capsule, which would leave a lot more time to do other things, such as... well, as... Well, I can think of a million things!

But did we ever think who would grow and mince and freeze and shrink and stuff? And who would make the gelatin capsule? Large chemical companies? Ah, there lies the rub. Healthy and flavorful food does not come from Monsanto.

Why in the world would we ever want to take the pleasure, the hard work, the camaraderie, the creativity, the art, the craft, the earned expertise, the localness, the terroir, the supper-time harvesting and snip, the sheer voluptuous textures and colors and scents and, yes, conversation – even the bickering – out of eating.

...making the most of it...

Take a white platter and strew over it a few handfuls of micro-greens that you most likely have got from Farmers’ Market on Saturday. Snip a little sorrel on them if you like. On top of those, at one end of the platter, place a round of Blue Ledge Farm’s Camembrie. You have let it come to room temperature for an hour or so, and it will be nice and oozy and creamy when cut into. Mound a pint or so of fresh-caught blueberries (or blackberries in the near future) near the cheese, but don’t be too neat about it – strew them around. Break up a bar of really good dark chocolate and place it on the platter. Serve with crusty bread or crackers to good friends or those you would like to be friends, as appetizer, dessert, or entire meal. Drink a hearty red wine, too.

We eat, therefore we exist. We might as well make the most of it.

First Published in the Rutland (Vermont) Herald on July 31, 07