for all Pratico purposes

In a few weeks, we’ll have apples and winter squash littering our kitchens in bountiful and pleasant ways. But if the latter two descriptives are true, then the word ‘littering’ is not quite correct. Change that to ‘gracing’. But whatever. Today, what litters and at once graces our porches and kitchens is tomatoes. And really, it’s only the lucky ones of us – the ones whose gardens didn’t go into an extended sulk at the unprecedented amount of rain they were required to soak up – who have a litter of tomatoes to at once glory in and feel responsible to do something with.

...The Pratico tomato...

There are, as usual, exceptions to that rule, and I am one. My garden DID sulk, but I was the grateful recipient of a basket of Pratico tomatoes, which I talked about last year in an article called “Sex in the Garden” which dealt with, among other things, the Menduni and Pratico tomatoes.

If you’ll remember, the Pratico came from seeds given to Stephen Chamberlain of Dutchess Farm in Castleton by an elderly person at the Farmers’ Market one summer day, in the hopes that Steve would propagate an old family favorite. S/he said he’d developed them, part beefsteak, part paste tomato. Luckily, Steve did propagate them, thereby saving an incredibly ugly but luscious tomato. It’s a fat, long tomato tapering to a pointed blossom end. It has very little core, the shoulders are as tender and meaty as the rest of it, it has few seeds and jel, and lots of flavorful flesh.

...patsy...

After that article was published Ray Pratico, Jr. called me and offered this conjecture.

He thinks it was his great-uncle, Pasquale (Patsy) Pratico who developed – hybridized – the Pratico tomato. Patsy was the brother of Ray’s grandfather, Anthony Pratico, who started Pratico’s Barber Shop on Strongs Avenue next to Gill’s Delicatessen.

The brothers came from Reggio in Calabria, Italy, Patsy in 1918 and Tony in 1920.

Back in 1918, Pasquale escaped a horrendous depression in Italy and worked hard so that he could send back $35 for his brother’s passage. The depression taught him well. Ray remembers fishing with his Uncle Patsy on Lake Champlain, and when they caught an eel Patsy would bring it home to eat. “Fish that you and I would never consider eating, he would consider a delicacy.” He was a champion skeet shooter – learning when he was in Italy by being charged with taking a shotgun and shooting robins for the family’s dinner, “and he wasn’t to waste a shell by shooting only one robin, he had to shoot six at a time.” We imagined that they’d taste pretty good with a little tomato sauce.

Ray says that Uncle Patsy had a beautiful garden in his back yard at the south corner of Union and Forest in Rutland where he grew, not so much broccoli or cucumbers, but peppers “as big as my head,” and tomatoes – presumably developing, along the way, our precious Pratico – onions, garlic and eggplants, all the ingredients for a great sauce and parmesans. “And you did not want to be caught playing out in that back yard.” I did some exploring, and if what I found was Pasquale’s backyard and it is the same size it was then, I have to say it is truly tiny. But apparently Patsy planted every nook and cranny of it.

Anthony Pratico died in 1999, close to a hundred years old. Pasquale died in 1990.

Do they still have seeds for the Pratico tomato? Still grow it? Ray is uncertain, but he says, “Everyone buys Ragu, it’s cheap and it’s easy.”

I think I know where you could get some seeds, Ray, and continue carrying on a tradition.

...and grandmother menduni...

The Menduni had been saved from extinction by Claire Clarino, whose grandmother Menduni had brought seeds from her town in Italy called Chella, and had grown them until she died, when Claire took them over. “Claire saves seeds each year and grows them in her mother’s garden in Rutland, her ex-husband grows them in Key West where they climb to six feet or more, and a market gardener in Grand Isle grows large crops of them for sale,” I wrote then. They are a large, meaty plum shaped tomato, with excellent taste. Apparently they take a little longer to ripen, for I have not yet got my first taste of them this year.

...spreading the seed...

I saved seeds from the Menduni and the Pratico, and gave some to Paul Horton at Foggy Meadow Farm in Benson – he who was the giver, this year, of the basket of Praticos – and my friend Dana Squire in Virginia – she with a climate which allows her to plant the seeds directly into her – prolific – garden! – and Marilyn Burnham, gardener and cook extraordinaire, in South Wallingford.

Marilyn had no luck with them. They were fine until she put them into her rainy garden, and then they just stood right up and died. Dana, on the other hand, emailed me photos of her “thrilling” crop, saying, “I processed some last night – I don't usually grow plums – and what bliss to not have squirts going off in every direction. Delicious flavor. They will be featured all next month. They are huge – like 6" long!”

Paul Horton had good luck with germination, and planted about 20 plants, from which he and his partner, Sally Beckwith have “probably put up 40 pounds, and maybe we’ll get another 30 pounds.” They will not be widely available at the Foggy Mountain Farm stand at the Farmers’ Market this year, but he hopes for a larger crop next year.

In a couple of serendipitous asides, a friend gave Paul some tomato plants this spring that hailed from Providence, Rhode Island. By the time he got them they were rather sickly looking plants that he’s nursed along until they are producing some fruit that is now almost ready to taste. They are, he thinks, both a red and yellow Sergi Sicilian tomato, the red called Doro Rossi Lunghi, and the yellow P. Lunghi Gialli, and they are in appearance remarkably like the Pratico. Googling does nothing on this subject, but we wonder if they could possibly be from the same town in Italy, Reggio, each brought by different émigrés, a supposition that might hold a little more water if we did not already think that Pasquale Pratico ‘developed’ his tomato from beefsteak and plum tomatoes.

At the same time, a neighbor brought Paul some Jimmy Nardello pepper seeds, a multi-dimensionally sweet and intensely flavored banana-shaped pepper. They came originally from Seeds of Change, a company that was founded to save heirloom seeds that were in danger of dying out.

“This to me is really fascinating,” Paul told me, “because I think it’s really important that we have crops that we can save and share the seeds of, to reproduce these older varieties, because they’re reliable, and delicious, and because we need our own source of seeds without relying on seed companies.” Seeds of ordinary plants, like green beans, for instance, are getting much more expensive and even hard to get, other farmers have told me. Paul elaborated on that thought by saying, “More and more seed companies are being bought by big companies and the seed being hybridized and sold back to farmers.” It’s not good, we agree, when the seeds for our foods are all owned by industry!

That was the thought of Tom Stearns, the founder of High Mowing Seeds in Hardwick. In an article in the 9/03 Seven Days entitled Hungry Hardwick, Suzanne Podhaizer writes, “In 1995, [Stearns] began saving the seeds from his garden. ‘I was interested in having as self-sufficient a home garden as I possibly could,’ he recalls. After moving to Vermont, he realized he had more seeds than he could use, so he put together a miniature catalogue. In 2000, Stearns quit his day job to focus on his seeds full-time, and in 2005, decided to take the business national; with the economy in a slump and more people aiming to grow their own food, the move is paying off. ‘There’s a lot of people gardening who weren’t before,’ Stearns suggests.”

A little aside here – if you don’t follow Suzanne in either the online http://www.7dvt.com/ or the free hard copy of Seven Days, you should! She’s an indefatigable food sleuth, and what she doesn’t write about food from Middlebury to Montreal probably doesn’t merit writing about.

...saving tomato seeds...

Saving seeds, though, is a laborious process, especially if you want to save enough to take the product to market. So far, Sally and Paul are keeping most of the Praticos (the Mendunis aren’t quite ready yet) for their own use. Steve and Julia Chamberlain, too, keep most of their Praticos, though a few show up at the market. “Aren’t they the best tomatoes!” exclaims Julia, adding that it’s lucky for her that the tomatoes aren’t the gorgeous things that buyers expect. Steve adds that they’re poor yielding, too, and he can’t afford the time to train people to buy them for the taste. He mentions, though, that a Pratico relative from the Midwest, after reading the Sex in the Garden article, emailed Steve for some seeds.

Saving tomato seeds is a process of fermentation. Since Pratico tomatoes have very few seeds and little gel, lots of meat, you’ll have to do some digging. Slice the tomato in half lengthwise, maybe even into quarters. With a spoon, scrape the jel and seeds into a small bowl. Add a couple of tablespoons of water to the seeds. Cover the bowl with a piece of plastic wrap and then poke a small hole in it to allow for transpiration. Place it in a warm spot for two or three days, removing the plastic wrap each day to stir the mixture, then replace the plastic. There will be a layer of scum on top of the liquid when the fermentation process has separated the jel from the seeds, and destroyed many of the possible tomato diseases that might be harbored there. When this happens, pour the seeds into a fine kitchen sieve and rinse with water several times. Drain well and place on a piece of parchment or waxed paper and spread them into a single layer. Let them dry for maybe a week, stirring often. When they’re dry they do not stick to each other. To store them, wrap them envelope-style in parchment paper and label them with the name and the date.

...mfk symposium...

Lots of readers here seem to like MFK Fisher’s writing, and since this year she would have been 100 years old, the New School in NYC is hosting an MFK symposium on Sept. 22. It’s free for all students, only $8 for others, as I read it. Thought some of you MFK diehards would grab the chance. More details: A panel of distinguished guests celebrate the life of Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, master food writer, and discusses her relationships with other American food celebrities, including Julia Child, James Beard, and Alice Waters. Panelists include Amanda Hesser, food writer for the New York Time; Judith Jones, editor and author; Joan Reardon, author; and Kennedy Golden, Fisher’s daughter. Andrew F. Smith, editor of the Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink, moderates. This event is offered in conjunction with a short course, MFK Fisher: Poet of the Appetites, beginning September 15; please visit www.newschool.edu/food studies for more information. Tickets: 212 229-5488 or boxoffice@newschool.edu

...didn’t i already mention marilyn...

My friend and neighbor Marilyn Burnham will be the next guest chef on What’s Cookin’ Rutland at Peg TV on Monday, 9/15. Marilyn is the superintendent of the Vermont State Fair’s culinary competitions, among other things, and she will introduce this year’s apple pie winner, Barbara Taraska, of Wallingford and points south, chat with host, Whitney Lamy, about the pleasures and tribulations of baking for, organizing, and judging the fair’s food contests, and show us how she makes her own apple pie. Studio guests will taste apple pies from Marilyn, Barbara, and Whitney.

What’s Cookin’ Rutland is taped from 6:00 – 6:30 PM, doors open at 5:30, and members of the audience must be seated by 5:45. You may bring your own beverages, if you like, a $10 donation is suggested, and for reservations call the Chaffee Art Center at 775-0356.

...hungry bikers wanted...

Got this note from Shelby Hammond of Rural Vermont about the TOUR DE FARMS event that Rural Vermont is hosting with the Addison County localvores and VT Bike-Ped Coalition. Choose a 10, 25, or 30 mile bike tour with stops through Shoreham at various farms and orchards to sample farm fresh goods. It's on Sunday the 21^st at 10:30 a.m. meeting in Shoreham. It’s $15 per adult and $8 for 15-and-unders, and you pre-register by calling (802)223-7222 or email Shelby@ruralvermont.org.

I’ve just done some investigation into Shoreham’s vital farm scene, and hmmm, wonder if my old bike still works...

The article “sex in the garden” can be found at http://thriceshy.blogspot.com/2008/03/sex-in-garden.html

This post was published As Twice Bitten Column in the Rutland Herald here.

Of Mices and Spices

...Hypocrisy...

It is that time of year when we continually bait the mouse traps and wait for the snap, and then the flip-flop. A mouse, taken by the neck just as it prepares to enjoy an agreeable tidbit – it can’t be pleasant. But they become untenable, with their nibbling and constant leavings in our butter dish until, with growing dread, we finally bait the mousetrap, than which nothing has been found to be more effective if not humane, and find, next morning, the big mouse, the daddy mouse; the next, a smaller one; and finally, a hungry baby. A shame, but how do we live amicably side by side, the mouses and us.

Ironically, I bait the first mousetrap only hours after sitting at my computer and tearing up over the videos on the Humane Society website of the cows being mistreated so horribly by people who have lost their humanity – the videos that prompted the belated recall of 143 million pounds of beef. These are hard to watch, but I encourage everyone to take their sensibilities in hand and just do it, because it’s easy to KNOW what goes on in the big Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, from which we get most of the meat we buy in grocery stores, but we don’t FEEL it until we watch it. If we don’t immediately become vegetarian after watching, we will at least think twice about buying any but free-range meats that our accountable neighbors have raised. Because carnivores eat free animals, they don’t torture them.

The half a pig I had just acquired had been content during his life – his owner had warmed up the neighbor’s milk and fed it to him and his two doomed compatriots, and she had woken in the middle of the coldest nights to warm water to give them to drink. She had fed them the best of food, and scraped their bristly backs until they oinked with pleasure. She adored them, but she was admittedly relieved when it came time to say goodbye. They were a LOT of work.

I thought of the life taken, especially when I was up to my elbows mixing sausage meat, rendering lard, or looking over the butcher’s shoulder to make sure he was cutting it up the way I wanted it done. After watching the videos, and seeing one of his kind trapped in a cage, the size of which exactly conformed to his body, where he would spend his entire short life, raging insanely at the bars in his misery, I was glad that mine was raised kindly, but still I had no appetite for pork for awhile, nor anything else, not even a turnip.

So where is my cruelty line drawn if – even in desperation – I set a mouse trap? Is it okay just because a mouse is smaller than a pig, a cow, or even a chicken? What I’m doing here, of course, is posing the question of whether or not our quibbling decisions about what KINDS of things to eat or kill actually do not all come down to size. Small, indeed infinitesimal, animals eat vegetables, and when we eat vegetables we eat the teensie things, too. Anyone who has ever pondered the limits of time or space perhaps recognizes that universes exist not only outward towards the stars and immensity, but inward to infinitesimally smaller worlds, and there is reason to assume that the inhabitants of each assumes itself to have the right to continue to exist. A pig, a rutabaga, a microorganism, stardust, you, I... The mouse!

But back to my mousing conundrum. Responses from various friends, many of whom live in old houses like mine with inexhaustible crevices and passageways for small critters, recommend keeping a cat. While I admire cats from a distance, I do not admire their litter-filled accoutrement. Furthermore, given a choice between a playful guillotine with claws and a nice crisp trap, I’d head towards the trap any old day. Nor does being glued to a piece of sticky paper for an interminable length of time attract me. Ditto eating poison, no matter how cheese-flavored, becoming desperate for water and smelling up the walls for, as one person told me, “a really very short amount of time.” Considering.

BANG! goes the trap. Using garden gloves and kitchen tongs I toss them off into the snow under the crabapple tree. And I tell you, those little bodies have disappeared within an hour or two, or at least by next morning, because we live in a world of hungry carnivores, all of whom eat to live. At least the mouse does not go to waste. What more could anyone ask?

...appetite redux...

The Wallingford Locker is looking really good these days, from the inviting new sign painted by Donna Wilkins, chief honcho and artist of Foggy Creek Folk Art, and the gracious porch/walkway, to a larger selling floor, and yes, their new local products! “Look! Look what we’ve got!” Donny shouted when I walked in the door the other day, pointing toward the back freezer: Free-range, grass-fed Black Angus beef from Pawlet’s Maple Tree Farm, processed by Locust Grove in Argyll, New York.

Yes! I crowed.

“We’re just trying it out, seeing if there’s a market for it,” he grumbled. “It’s expensive,” he groused.

Way to sell me, Donny! Let’s hear WHY I should buy this expensive beef. Maybe because it’s eaten grass or hay up to the very end of its happy life; it’s not shot full of antibiotics and hormones, opens a pathway to healthy food that will become less expensive as more is sold and infrastructure, such as slaughterhouses, is built to satisfy demand; pays the farmer a living wage, encourages other people to become farmers, keeps farmland open and free of development, improves the health of the soil. Oh, and by the way, it really IS delicious.

Donny’s wife, Holly, was positively beaming about carrying more local products. Gorgeously decorated cookies, for instance, from the Mt. Holly business, A Dozen Eggs. And from what I gather, the Locker will be the only place to get Burnham Hollow Pies now that the store has closed on Woodstock Avenue. They continue to carry Stonewood Farm Turkey products, and eggs from upstate. But the new product the whole Keeler/ Hagenlocher gang at the Locker is most excited about is one they’ve created – Wallingford Locker Cob-Smoked Cheddar Cheese! Now that should be a big-seller!

...yoo hoo, brunch is on...

Come this Saturday to a Winter Brunch Fundraiser held by Rural Vermont at the Winter Farmers’ Market in the back of the Co-op. We’ll be serving dishes inspired by Rural Vermont’s Local Foods Cookbook including Butternut Squash Soup, Vegetarian or Meat Strata, and Maple Apple Crisp, and of course most of the ingredients will come from market vendors. Full spread, $10 or individual items $3 to $4. All proceeds benefit that wonderfully effective organization, Rural Vermont. 802/223-7222. Brunch 11 to 1; Winter Market 10 to 2.

...nice spices...

The tastes, no matter how minute, of morels, wild leeks or ramps, fiddleheads, dandelion greens, hover in our comparatively near future. It is my considered opinion that even homeopathic amounts of whatever is in these foraged foods are important to our health and well-being, and so I imagine that is true also of some tastes that recently tempted me, and are available year around, dried, at any well-stocked health food store or Co-op to make Five Spice Powder. Measure out 1 oz star anise; 1 oz cassia or cinnamon; 1 oz or 5 tablespoons Sichuan peppercorns (smells like orange peel); 1 oz cumin seeds; ½ oz. cloves; ¼ oz (black)coriander seeds (or seeds from about 5 or 6 pods) and put each, separately, into a flat-bottomed pan over low heat, shaking occasionally, until they give off their aroma. Pour them into a bowl once they’ve reached the odiferous point and let cool. Then grind in a coffee grinder or mortar with pestle. Use on ... well, anything. I made up a new snack of dipping dehydrated banana slices in the spices and eating them with a few roasted peanuts. Yum! Normal people use Five Spice to flavor rice, lentils, yogurt, and other foods to give an eastern or middle-eastern taste. I was reminded of it vis a vis braised pork belly.

...MFK Fisher on cauliflower...

“There in Dijon, the cauliflowers were small and very succulent, grown in that ancient soil. I separated the flowerlets and dropped them in boiling water for just a few minutes. Then I drained them, and put them in a wide shallow casserole, and covered them with heavy cream and a thick sprinkling of freshly grated Gruyere, the nice rubbery kind that didn’t come from Switzerland at all, but from the Jura. It was called râpé in the market, and was grated while you watched, in a soft cloudy pile, onto your piece of paper.”

This is another instance where it is necessary to read the author’s words in order to make a dish turn out as succulently as it should. I KNOW how to do it, but if I don’t read MFK’s words first it doesn’t work. She continues:

“I put some fresh pepper over the top, and in a way I can’t remember now the little tin oven heated the whole thing and melted the cheese and browned it. As soon as that had happened we ate it. The cream and cheese had come together into a perfect sauce, and the little flowers were tender and fresh.”

Darn Tootin! This is a perfect dish, all we need for supper, with the leftovers for lunch!

...what’s cookin’ rutland...

After months of work, trial and error, lines in the sand, and misfortunes that threatened to bring the project to a standstill, a small group of civilians working with PEG TV has managed to get Rutland’s first cooking show, featuring – what else – local food, on air.

PEG TV built a dream kitchen – that wide granite counter needs to be in MY kitchen – that will be available to anyone who lusts to become the next Julia Child – Whoops! Catch that chicken! – after signing up for a video training session, that is. But What’s Cookin’ Rutland is the name of the regularly scheduled show we’ve all been working on, sponsored by Chaffee Art Center and featuring Whitney Lamy as the host and Greg Cox as the regularly visiting farmer, with guest chefs – both home and restaurant – to be taped before a live audience on the third Monday of each month. Well, usually. May’s taping will be on the 12^th. Our own Randal Smathers, Managing Editor of the Herald, will be cooking with the Localvores on March 17^th. You can get tickets for it by calling the Chaffee at 775-0356. Suggested donation, $10.

Now, besides that first taping, the show will be seen on Channel 15 Saturday evenings at 8PM and intermittently throughout the month. You can also catch it online at pegtv.com through their streaming video service, or download it by clicking video on demand.

The first show, featuring Clarke Congdon, chef at Sabby’s, winner of last summer’s Iron Chef Contest, should be available as we speak!

This column was published in the Rutland (Vt) Herald on03/04/08