Yellow Sky

On a yellow-sky day last week I got in the car, dropped the dog off for a bath and, wondering at precisely what point life had become stranger than science fiction, went to check out the blackberry patch at the top of the cemetery. I needed to find some reality. The patch was still there, it was still very hot, insects still hummed in the tall grass – it was a lovely, quintessential summer afternoon – except that the sky was still that ominous tinge of yellow. A breeder of anxiety, that yellow. A breeze came up – not so much breeze as sustained light wind that seemed to droop from the higher ridges of West Hill.

There was the patch, the long curving canes, the ferocious, flesh-tearing bear-claw thorns, but there was no reward of large, heavy, pendulous, juicy berries. None! I wandered through the whole area where I had spent so many humming hours last year picking those sweet drupelets to my heart’s content and found – nothing but weeds and bare canes. There were still the swales in the long grass where some large, tough-skinned animal seemed to have roiled about flattening some bushes, but why roil when there were no berries? It could not have been an ecstatic roil. The simmering bear-tension that I usually experience when picking blackberries on a hot day on an out-of-the-way hill , especially without my dog , and particularly in the bee-kept spot where I USED to pick before those berries, too, disappeared, did not replace the yellow-sky unease. In this place, today, no berries, no bears, no bees.

I got in my car, rolled down the windows, turned on the radio, hung my left arm out the window, and turned right at the road instead of left to go home. That tingly sixties feeling lifted me – was my hair cut in a DA (short for Duck’s Ass) as we used to say, cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve of my white t-shirt, and dual mufflers burbling away? How long it had been since I had, without thought, just “taken a ride”! It is simply not done anymore. As my carbon footprint engorged, I slowly drove the twisty little road, looking to left and right and noticing that, if there were no blackberries, the salmon-berries looked to be a big prize in a few weeks. The road curved down, met 140, I glanced at my watch – still almost an hour to pick up the dog – and took a right, even further from home!

“Squawk, Squawk, Squawk,” went the radio and a tinned voice unemotionally spoke the words tornado, heavy rain, hail the size of grapefruit, and ended with “This is a dangerous storm.”

This was the kind of yellow-sky weather that struck terror into our hearts when I was a kid growing up in southwest Michigan. I remember twisting around in a rope swing hung from high in a tree in an otherwise open field, leaning back as I spun and looking up at that pieplate high sky, so blue and at once yellow and, at the exact moment that wind came up, my father loping across the field at me, grabbing my arm and hauling me off to the southwest corner of the basement. He was terrified of tornadoes and had all the rules memorized – open the southwest windows a crack, huddle in the southwest corner of the cellar, if you don’t have a cellar go outside and find a eastnorth ravine in open country and lie in it. Once, driving past the cemetery when the wind had come up in a yellow sky, he skidded crazily to a stop, ran out into the graveyard and dove behind a gravestone – on the southwest side of it, of course. Another car careened to a halt and a woman ran toward him. “Get your own damned gravestone,” he is reputed to’ve hollered.

When we moved to Vermont, so long ago now that I consider myself a Vermonter, we delighted in the knowledge that there were no tornadoes here, and would get our bikes out and ride gleefully under yellow skies, taunting them and tasting the rain, when it came, in our teeth.

I pulled into a driveway, turned around and headed back to the village. I no longer felt comfortable or gleeful biting raindrops. There was something seriously out of whack with our weather, with our insane and criminal federal government, with our own Governor Gladhander, whose sole purpose seemed to be to veto any worthwhile legislation, from energy to healthcare to anything at all that might encourage diversified, sustainable, small farming; with a public so bloated and helpless that it could not find an effective course to govern its own government; with our entire industrialized food chain... ad infinitum.

So I drove to the Davenport Farm just south of Wallingford. It soothes the soul to visit a farm, quiets those nasties crawling beneath the skin to see that there are still people living the life and growing the food. I would pick some corn.

A Davenport daughter, Jennie, has posted the place colorfully – Park Here, Get Your Bags Here, Put your Money Here – $3 for a dozen ears. “You may drive Back,” and I drive on a farm track curving between the cows and sheep and horses. Another helpful sign with an arrow into a field, “This is not ready yet. Keep driving.”

I meet Alan in his old car and we stop to chat. He turns off his engine. A bag of corn is by his side. He tells me he eats six ears for supper until the season’s over. We talk about the yellow sky. “Yup, thought it was gonna rain but it held off till lunchtime, then still didn’t know if it was gonna rain, didn’t know if I should mow, so I spent the afternoon at Emerald Lake.”

“Jeezum Crow,” I say, “What a life!” He grins and starts up his engine and we move apart. The Davenports live several miles away, up on East Street in a mobile home, but they spend most of their time at the farm, the girls with their horses, Chris and Alan mucking up, milking, mending fence, planting, harvesting.

It doesn’t take long to pick a dozen ears of corn, but I stand there in the field remembering how high those stalks were when I was a kid and the cows broke through the fence into that tempting cornfield that was like candy to them. They would gorge themselves and bloat – their three stomachs are made for grass and can’t handle corn – and if we didn’t get them out of the maze soon enough they might die. I was little, though, and a corn-labyrinth spooked, half-ton cow would not be standing still and looking at me in her usual curious way.

A cow is designed to forage on grass, which we can’t, because they contain as part of their stomach a 45 gallon fermentation tank, called a rumen, in which bacteria convert grass-cellulose into protein and fats. But industrial farms feed them grain, primarily corn, in order to make them fat and marketable as fast as possible – instead of having to be raised for 4 or 5 years to mature into beef, they can be force fed for slaughter at a little over a year. Several different antibiotics are necessary so they don’t die from the side effects of the corn. Too, feeding them corn and other grains acidifies their usually pH-neutral stomach, so bacteria that grow in this unnaturally acidic brew can also reside in ours. Bacteria that grow in a grass-fed animal’s sweet stomach cannot survive in our acidic ones. Those are good reasons to eat grass-fed beef.

Watching a cow eat grass is a fascinating thing – they wrap their tongue around an area of grass, gathering it together into a tuft, and then bite it off between their front incisors and dental pad. They lift their heads and stare off into the distance as they grind that grass down between their rear molars to begin the process of digesting it in one of four stomach compartments. Every once in awhile they bring it up again, chew it a little bit more, their jaws moving rhythmically side to side, then send it on back down. Then they dip their heads and wrap their tongue around another area of grass. I imagine they don’t look as happy and peaceful in a feedlot with thousands of others, eating corn, standing knee-deep in manure.

The sky is still yellow, the wind out of the southwest still blowing, but I’m feeling a little less anxious standing out in a cornfield thinking about those sweet things, cows.

Back home, I empty the ears of corn on the deck table.

This is not the first corn of the season, but it seems uncommonly good this year, so I’m still grilling it, leaving the husk on, just stripping off the tough outer green leaves and cutting off the tips of silk –neatening it up a bit – before throwing it on the grill. So far, this season, I’ve made a corn pudding, and some corn fritters like Leo’s mother used to make, and maybe I’ll freeze a couple of bags of it. We eat a lot while it’s in season, and not much at all the rest of the year because, well, it’s not very good and I hate to contribute to the cornification of our land and our bodies.

I read labels and try to avoid anything that is made out of corn grown on the 90.5 million well-pesticided and chemically fertilized acres of corn that are planted this year, but that is not so easy when something as innocuous and misleading as “natural raspberry flavoring” may come from that industrial corn.

Industrial meat is fed it and made of it, as well as soft drinks, breakfast cereals or snacks, vitamins, corn oil, citric and lactic acid, glucose, fructose, high fructose corn syrup, maltodextrin, ethanol – for beer as well as cars, sorbitol, manitol, xanthan gum, starches, dextrins, MSG. And that’s a short list.

Michael Pollan, in his Omnivore’s Dilemma says, “There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn.” It’s in toothpaste, cosmetics, disposable diapers, cleansers, wallboard and joint compound, linoleum, fiberglass, adhesives.

Dan Barber, a New York City chef and writer interviewed in Salon magazine, points to a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey and growing, “where oxygen depletion is so severe that very little marine life can survive there. The Gulf of Mexico's fishing industry has collapsed.” And he explains, “If you look at a map, you can trace your finger from the Gulf of Mexico up through the Mississippi River and right into Iowa, corn country. The chemical fertilizers leach into the soil and drip down into the Mississippi River. And people who rely on the Mississippi for drinking water and water irrigation are experiencing all sorts of problems. But the greatest demonstrable casualty is the gulf's dead zone.”

The really wonderful thing about those 90.5 MILLION acres and their conquering offspring is that they receive government subsidies under the farm bill. 200 MILLION acres of Corn, rice, soybeans and wheat, combined, account for 70 percent of the total subsidies allotted to farmers, and the biggest are corn and soybeans, which are used interchangeably in many so-called “value added” products. My anxiety is growing.

I finish grooming the last ear of corn and find a worm at the tip. I flick it out with the scissors. At least MY corn hasn’t been sprayed to within an inch of its life.

The sky is yellower than ever, the radio is tin-canning about the “dangerous storm” and the fire is ready. I throw the corn in the cooker and close the lid. I turn it a few times with tongs, and after twenty minutes or so it’s good to go. Just as we finish gnawing down 3 ears apiece there is that sudden deep-breath relaxation in the atmosphere, the thunder booms, the lightening cracks and rain begins to pour down. Anxiety dissipates and it is finally possible to take a deep breath and, more importantly, expel it completely.

Mexican people have long called themselves The Corn People, because of their dependence on it as the staple of their diet for thousands of years; but carbon analysis finds that North Americans are made of far more corn than Mexicans, though we ostensibly eat far less of it. The story of corn and how it has invaded our land and our bodies is truly the stuff of science-fiction.

But for now, just like the rest of the public, I’m bloated – with corn, at least – and want nothing more than to sit on the porch, breathe, and watch the rain.

Governor's Inn Corn Pudding

Deedy Marble gave me this recipe years ago. It’s based on her grandmother’s New England Corn Pudding. They had a lovely casual way of serving it at the Inn, in Ludlow, at the time – simply carrying the casserole around to each table and spooning it onto each diner’s plate.

450 degrees

2 cups whole kernel corn , cooked

8 tablespoons flour

8 tablespoons sugar

4 whole eggs (large)

1 teaspoon salt

1 quart whole milk

4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted

Stir flour, salt, sugar and butter into corn. Beat eggs slightly and combine with milk. Combine milk and corn mixtures and pour into a buttered 2 quart baking dish. Bake, until nicely browned, about 45 minutes, stirring with a long-pronged fork 3 times during baking, breaking the surface as little as possible.

First Published in the Rutland (Vermont) Herald on august 28, 2007

It Takes a Commitment

...handmade, homemade, pretty good, but where’s the tomato...

Consider the restaurant. I don’t find myself going out to eat very much with food as the destination, but mostly for “doing lunch” or “grabbing a bite” before a show at the Paramount or during Friday Night Live, or after a gallery opening, with friends. When I do make it a point to go to a certain restaurant, it’s because I expect to find something on the menu that intrigues me.

The other day I “did lunch” with my visiting friend Dana at The Back Home Again. I like their food – it’s simple and filling and not too expensive, and the venue is convenient and intriguing. I love all the hand-smoothed curving, carved wood and splotches of leather, and windows in odd places, and the little nooks. And I adore their fruity mate’ – quite often I stop in on a hot day and carry out a humongous one to a meeting. I admire the Tribes’ energy, their ability to get things done in their own idiosyncratic way. Case in point, they have developed a good-tasting spelt bread that is higher in protein and lower in carbohydrates than wheat bread, and it’s something that others have despaired of doing. They even grow much of the spelt on their farm in Bellows Falls. It’s all very hand-made, down-home, and pretty darned good.

That day I asked for their special, a grilled cheese made with Cabot Cheddar, and asked them to grill a “juicy slice of tomato and one of onion – fresh from the field, of course,” with the cheese. To my surprise the waiter couldn’t “be sure the tomato is local.” I was dumbfounded: “Don’t you get your produce from local farmers at this time of year?” I asked. He didn’t know, couldn’t swear to it. “The problem is that local tomatoes are irregularly shaped, we can’t get uniform slices out of them, and there’s a lot of waste.”

I let it go, and ordered the grilled cheese/tomato/onion anyway. The tomato was pale pink and hard. I was saddened at this. It’s a damned shame when a local eating place can’t put a slice of fresh tomato on a summer sandwich.

That evening I was slicing tomatoes that Dana had brought from her Virginia garden. They were utterly delicious.

But irregular. The little bottom belly-button was lopsidedly close to the stem end.

“Look,” I showed her accusingly. “Irregular,” I shouted. “Can’t slice that!”

“Toss it in the compost,” she crowed. “Useless.”

We ate it, slobbering voraciously, over the sink.

A day or two later I was watching Vermont Public Television’s Feast in the Making, which showcases chefs who use local foods, farmers who provide it, and people who eat it. A segment on Vermont Herb & Salad Company in Benson briefly flashed a list of their customers. I rewound and paused, and there, before my very eyes was the name of the Back Home! That led to me check out their website, where I found these words: “At the Back Home Again Café we use organic and locally produced ingredients whenever possible.” That was what I had assumed before talking to the waiter. I must say I’ve seldom had to do so much backwards investigation to disprove my point and vindicate a self-maligned entity. I made one more call and achieved vindication. Mea Culpa, I guess, my dear Back Home, but where’s my tomato?

VPT’s Ann Curran tells me, “We'll begin the series [Feast in the Making] anew
on Wednesday, Sept. 19, at 7:30 p.m. Programs repeat the following
Saturday at 12:30 p.m.” Catch it if you can!

***

Nevertheless, it is disturbingly true that most restaurants do not find the opportunity to serve much local food. High price and the lack of a central distributor are the factors most often cited. It seems to me that a savvy entrepreneur will solve the latter problem very soon. Or perhaps one of the existing distributors will take up the slack – Vermont Fresh is out there. Burlington Foods. A few others I’m not acquainted with. As for high price, we’re used to cheap food which almost always comes from big, farm-bill-subsidized industrial-agriculture somewhere out in the mid-west or west if we’re lucky, China and Chile if we’re not. Increasingly, I am aware that it’s useless food, dead food, not only full of bad things like hormones and pesticides and chemical fertilizers and antibiotics, but lacking in the good ones, like vitamins and minerals and omega-3s and enzymes and CLA and substances that we do not even know we need.

What is our responsibility here? Why, for those of us who can even POSSIBLY afford it, to feed the local farmer by buying his product until he is strong enough to feed us all. It is an abomination that poor people can more cheaply buy Twinkies than a bunch of carrots. The new farm bill deals very little with these issues and, if passed, will delay for another five years the impetus to deal with them.

***

It is doubly heartening, then, to listen to chefs who are totally enamored with fresh and local food.

Three Tomatoes’ Keith Paquin guesses that 90% of their food is gotten direct from the farmer, and he sings a siren song of producers’ names: Apple Hill, Vermont Herb & Salad, Singing Cedars, Boardman Hill, Vermont Fresh Pasta, Red Hen Breads, Maple Meadow Farms Eggs, King Arthur Flour, Cavendish Game Farm.

And though Hans Entinger of Country Man’s Pleasure does not buy directly from farmers, he does buy from Black River Produce, for their fish of unparalleled quality, and also their produce which, when possible, they get from Vermont farmers. But I have reminded him of something, and he says, thoughtfully, “I should! I should get out to the Farmers’ Market.”

I am very well acquainted with my friend and neighbor, Chef Stanti’s penchant for shopping locally – you’ll see him at the Farmers’ Market if you get there early enough, selecting vegetables and berries and cheeses to serve at his Victorian Inn at Wallingford, and he seeks out the best Vermont grown eggs and chicken. And butter: “Vermont Butter and Cheese makes a very, very good butter! With sea salt. Very outstanding,” He gets 100% of his produce locally, in season, most of it from Boardman Hill Farm.

I don’t even have to call Chef Robert (Hobare) at Café Provence in Brandon to know what a relentless seeker after local products he is. But I did anyway. “Tomatoes from Woods Market, goat cheese that I buy from Blue Ledge Farm, veal from a local man who brings it to me every two or three weeks; most of the vegetables from Nora’s Secret Garden from May to October.” He gets winter produce from the people at Black River Produce, who get much of it from the Vermont Fresh network.

“The majority of our provisions are local,” Robert says. “When someone comes from New York City or Boston and stops in and asks for a nice meal, I think we should be able to offer them local products.”

I tell him my story of the pink hard August tomato. He’s more forgiving than I am. “It’s a big decision when you decide to use local products, because we pay more than for California products and it’s a lot of work because we need to take advantage of it when it’s in season. It takes a commitment.”

“I think you’ve given me my title,” I said with satisfaction.

These, of course, are not the only restaurants who use a preponderance of local foods: north, south, east and west I can think of more that I didn’t consult, but you will notice that they are almost all relatively high-end restaurants.

I am not sure if it’s for lack of commitment that less-expensive restaurants don’t use more farm fresh foods, or if the time and money expense is just something their clientele will not accept. Or perhaps it’s that when you become passionate about your ingredients you become heedless of expense and your customers begin to pay a little more for the quality. Do they think it’s worthwhile? I guess they’ll let you know in the long run.

***

Conspicuously missing from these chefs’ litanies are most free-range meats, and that’s because there’s no central way of getting them, they are expensive, and they aren’t available not-frozen. Meat is a seasonal product when it’s grass-fed and not factory-farmed, and most of the northeast’s slaughtering takes place in the fall. Even well-aged beef won’t survive that long.

As for expense, I just read an anecdote from David Kamp, author of The United States of Arugula, that Niman Ranch, known for its high-end free-range meats, contracted with a fast-food restaurant to provide Niman pork for its carnitas, resulting in a dollar increase in the price of each carnita. “To everyone's surprise, the Niman connection was not a loss-leader but a bottom-line enhancer – sales of the carnitas burritos went up by 250%. Another indication that it's not just NYC and Berkeley freaks who care about better-quality food.” So money is not always the deciding factor. I would pay 50 cents extra for a sandwich with a local tomato on it.

Sometimes, at least in the case of meat, you have to travel for good food, or IT has to travel to you. In a New York Times article, “Food that Travels Well,” James E. McWilliams cites a study that found that “lamb raised on New Zealand’s clover-choked pastures and shipped 11,000 miles by boat to Britain produced 1,520 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per ton while British lamb produced 6,280 pounds of carbon dioxide per ton, in part because poorer British pastures force farmers to use feed [grain]. In other words, it is four times more energy-efficient for Londoners to buy lamb imported from the other side of the world than to buy it from a producer in their backyard.”

McWilliams goes on to argue for a looser interpretation of “Local”, advocating a hub-and-spoke system of food production and distribution, “with the hubs in a food system’s naturally fertile hot spots and the spokes, which travel through the arid zones, connecting them while using hybrid engines and alternative sources of energy...” The Brattleboro Co-op has a large section of its meat department dedicated to Wolfe’s Neck Farm in South Freeport, Maine. From chicken to beef and everything in-between, it’s comparatively local, free-range, and a delightful product. Vermont meat producers and distribution entrepreneurs would do well to look to their example.

***

By the way, those Virginia tomatoes had no carbon footprint whatsoever, since Dana simply brought them with her on the flight, as she did about a peck of – are you ready? – Virginia peaches! They were divine, those peaches – we ate them out of hand, juicily; we grilled halves of them alongside a Boardman Hill pork roast; I fashioned a nifty fruit-fly trap – everyone needs one with fresh peaches in the house; made a salsa for a cocktail party, and then used the rest of them in Leo’s birthday cake.

Lacking a source of Virginia peaches, you can pick up New York ones at the Co-op. And if you haven’t done it yet, stop by and look at the Co-op’s new and exciting produce department, the result of new produce manager Dennis Duhaime’s hard work and ingenuity. When you’ve caught your breath, give Dennis a well-earned pat on the back!

Peach and Tomato Salsa

Peel four peaches by placing them briefly in simmering water and then stripping off the skin, halve them to the pit around the middle equator, then thinly slice vertically, and gently remove the slices from the pit into a bowl. Add a large tomato, peeled in the same way, cut in bite-sized chunks. Mince ½ to 1 jalapeno pepper (to taste), ¼ large white onion, 1 large garlic clove, and a handful of cilantro leaves and add to the peach/tomatoes. Sprinkle with sea salt (1 tsp.), a grind of pepper, and a bit of balsamic vinegar. Let this meld together for an hour or two before dipping it up with water crackers or tortilla chips.

Peach & Blueberry Upside Down Cake:

For the topping (in this case, the bottoming): In a 10” cast iron skillet melt 1/3 cup butter over low heat. Turn off the heat and sprinkle with ½ cup brown sugar. Peel six peaches (see above), halve them, gently twist each half in opposite directions, remove the pit, and place round side down on the sugar. Sprinkle blueberries in the spaces between the peaches.

For the cake: Heat oven to 350 degrees. Into a mixing bowl stir 1 ½ cups of cake flour or 1 1/3 cups of regular flour, 1 cup sugar, 2 tsp. baking powder, ½ tsp salt. With the mixer going slowly add 1/3 cup room-temp butter, 2/3 cup milk, 1 tsp. vanilla and 1 Tbsp. lemon juice. Beat 2 minutes medium speed. Add an egg and beat 2 more minutes. Pour the batter over the fruit and bake 40 to 50 minutes. Immediately run a knife around the inside of the pan, place a serving plate over the pan and turn upside down. Leave the upside down pan for a few minutes to allow the cake to loosen. When you remove the pan use a spatula to patch up the top of the cake. Serve warm with crème fraiche or unsweetened whipped cream.

***

There used to be a restaurant up on the mountain that was said to’ve been the place that chefs and cooks at other restaurants would eat when their shift was over, or on their days off. Presumably that was because the chef’s chef at this restaurant prepared very simple things very well, and served something out of the ordinary, a terrine, a pate’, a pot-pie, a rabbit stew, something other restaurants did not find it worth their while to have on the menu because the average customer didn’t order it, or so they assumed.

Food Arts is a magazine for and about the restaurant industry that offers some great ideas for flavor combinations and techniques. “Semolina dusted sweetbreads with wild mushroom ragout, lardons, sorrel puree, & frisee,” is one that jumped out at me recently. I am intrigued by that. I would pay good money and time for it. But they’re not going to make it just for me.

First Published in the Rutland (Vermont) Herald on August 14, 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

The Name Game

A rose is a rose is a rose is a merganser: It may smell as sweet but the nose isn’t listening – it knows there’s a duck in there somewhere. Suggest to your dining partner that he’s just swallowed a slug without the pretty shell, and the haughty chef may decide to delete escargot from the menu, the better to avoid further unpleasant incidents.

So what’s in a name? Clarification – what IS this thing we’re naming. Hope and ego – what do we WANT it to be. Marketing, of course. And, to the perceiver, memories, sensation recalled, color, tastebud angst or pleasure, love perceived or anger translated. Or simply mystery: the scent of dianthus – pinks – is, to me, haunting in a most pleasurable way, yet I cannot recall any wonderful thing happening among them; only that, even when I was a small child, they called to me and I vaguely assumed they called from a past life.

... two farmers and a tomato...

I went to the Tuesday market in Depot Park to talk to Greg Cox and Steve Chamberlain about what’s up in farmers’ lives these days; how they keep connected with other farmers and with trends and developments in farming and in food.

There at Steve’s Dutchess Farm stand I found the first tomatoes of the season – pints of red cherry tomatoes and big unripe tomatoes piled like sleek slumbering piglets in their basket. I took the last pint of cherrys and was about to pass over the unripe ones when the half of my brain that has any sense at all said, “Just a sec, Tomato Woman, those are NOT unripe, they’re green!” A black cast iron range loomed before me. Sizzling lard, a bowl of whisked-up egg, a mound of crushed saltines on a sheet of waxed paper; those green rounds dipped in each, browned and crisp on the outside, custardy and sour within, the salt shaker – Fried Green Tomatoes. Life, bitter and sweet, on a plate. These green tomatoes were ripe and rife for Fried Green. If I were Steve I believe I’d put up a sign that suggested that very thing – sometimes the imagination needs a nudge to consider the divine.

...Rutland Farmers’ Market...

The Rutland Farmers’ Market, itself, has a little name intrigue. When it started back in the ‘70s it was called the Rutland County Farmers’ Market, and it stayed that way until the early ‘90s when a small group splintered off to become the Vermont Farmers’ Market. I’ve said before that the farmer is a noble being – nowhere did I say that as a group they are not overly independent, crotchety and – tsk tsk – too often guilty of ignoring the maxim, United We Stand – so important to struggling groups like small farmers.

Over the years the two groups have seen some back and forth movement by individual farmers according to issues, so much so that I no can no longer keep them straight, and to my mind they are one market. To their credit, they’ve all found ways to fit together well under the larger tent of the Rutland Farmers’ Market, and, this year, it seems, they will gain yet another name when they initiate the Winter Market in the rear of the Co-op building and continue to widen our access to local food.

Everyone I talk to agrees that this summer the Market has reached a new breadth of vitality, with vibrant and colorful produce and splendid crowds of appreciative shoppers. With thirty years of experience behind it, the Market is flourishing because it is in the position to provide what an increasing number of us want and need – organic and sustainably-grown local food.

Steve is particularly enthusiastic about his membership in an informally named Networking Group that includes several New York and Vermont farmers who join together to buy seeds and supplies, tour each other’s farms and, in general, share their knowledge. That’s where he met Paul Horton, of Benson, whom he invited to join the Rutland Market. This year Paul’s Foggy Meadow Farm shines with an artist’s palette of produce at the Saturday market; and that’s surely not the only way in which we are all indebted to Steve’s networking.

...RAFFL...

Up at Boardman Hill, Greg is holding forth to a customer about good food for low-income people. “Crap calories are cheap,” he says. “We have to teach people that paying a little more for good local, organic, food is worth it. And we have to figure out more ways of getting that food to people who are stretched.” Greg is, at heart, the original philosopher farmer. The organization in which he is perhaps most notably involved – chairman of the board, as it were – is RAFFL – Rutland Area Farm & Food Link.

RAFFL! What a great name – straight on, utilitarian, but amusing at the same time – kind of raffish, with the connotation of ‘taking a chance’ and, it would seem, unmistakable.

RAFFL has many routes to meet its goal of linking farmers and their food to consumers, but the most immediate one is to find land for incubator farms and community gardens. “We’ll provide the land and the advice and some communal machinery while novice farmers learn to farm. When they get their feet under them, when they’ve learned and have some success, they’ll start looking for their own land and a new wannabe farmer will move onto that incubator land.” Greg is gleeful when he adds, “We’ll be seeding new farms all over the county.”

The seed for RAFFL itself, came to Tara Kelly and India Burnett Farmer when, in their jobs with the Rutland Regional Planning Commission, they realized that all the towns around had “preserving our agricultural heritage” as one of their major goals, and yet none had concrete plans to reach that goal. What Tara and India saw as RAFFL’s mandate was not just conserving open agricultural land but making that land viable for active agriculture.

With that mandate came a string of corollary goals when a board of directors was collected and heads put together. India relinquished her job with the RRPC and became RAFFL’s coordinator; and just recently her main job has been finding that large piece of land, close-in to Rutland, not used by other farmers, to become the base for an Intervale-like Community Farm and Agricultural Resource Center. (I can’t believe it – there’s no R in there.)

A little riff on RAFFL, here: Tara tells me that lots of people mistakenly call it the Rutland Area FOOD & Farm Link. “It all depends on your point of view,” she says, “and most of our calls – where can we find fresh corn; who has u-pick strawberries – come from consumers. But we really wanted to stress the Farm connection, and Farm does come before Food.” That would be Rutland Area FARM and Food Link, thank you very much.

The demand for services is outstripping India’s ability to give the time and assistance needed, especially with the almost full time job of finding land. Perhaps a school calls and wants to know how to access local food for its cafeteria. Systems are not yet in place, a broker is needed to support the ordering and distribution of local food. More funds need to be raised. Etcetera.

The need for this organization is overwhelming, and their 2004 startup was none too soon. Pick up their green tabloid-style Locally Grown Guide for more information. It will be somewhere in almost every store you visit. Have them find it for you, and suggest they display it in a more prominent place if it’s hidden.

...the Co-op...

One of the most basic links in our Rutland Area Food Chain is the Co-op; you know – the building on Wales, just off Washington. Rebecca Rubin was the first manager back when it started in the mid-‘90s as the Rutland Area Food Co-op. A couple of years ago the name was changed to Rutland Area Food Co-op dba (doing business as) Rutland Natural Foods Market, and that is still its legal name. However, it is being changed, as we speak, to Rutland Natural Food Market: The Co-Op. No matter. Really. Whenever you hear any of these names – and most often it will be just The Co-op – you will know it is the store on Wales Street where you can buy local and organic and sustainable food and sundries and drinks. You can join up for $10 a year and be a member – getting a small percentage discount – or not: Everyone – member or not – is welcome to shop there.

With Becca back as manager and with a long-overdue public consciousness of the importance of eating local, sustainably grown food, the Co-op is in the throes of exciting growth, planning to accommodate the Winter Farmers’ Market in its back theater space this winter, expanding its retail and office space, and, incidentally, looking for funding. Join it. It’s an investment in your safe and healthy food future. And always think of it as OUR Co-op. That’s the nature of a co-operative, that it belongs to all of us and all of us are responsible for its success.

As a matter of fact, invest in all these places, the Farmers’ Market by shopping at it and getting to know the farmers; RAFFL and the Co-op by using them, volunteering for them and, at the risk of being crass, giving money to them if you can afford it.

...life itself...

All of these food intimacies may seem cloying and tiring, too time-consuming to deal with the earnest people who are drawn to the cause of good food, whose edges are not ground down by corporate sameness but remain prickly. But then consider all of the nameless and faceless and edgeless people who are manufacturing the industrial and international food that fills our large stores, of the thousands of fingerprints on that food, the numerous laxities likely in its manufacture, the tremendous carbon footprint of its importation, and we might find the time.

In a recent trip down US 81 to North Carolina I saw enormous food processing plants and warehouses that covered numberless acres of former farmland, and that were preparing to ship, in the long convoys of humongous trucks that clog the highway, overwhelming amounts of – to borrow Greg’s word – crap, that is becoming, increasingly, a non-sequitur in our brave new world.

Perhaps you’re haunted, as I am, by the headline last week announcing that China’s food and drug czar had been executed as a symbol to the world that China recognizes the fact that they can’t ship tainted food. What kind of food could come out of a country that is capable of such an ineffective and barbaric act? Add to that the remark I heard dropped casually by an industry executive the other day, that “China owns the global garlic market,” (Garlic!) and you realize anew that the fight for real food is the fight for life itself.

...and finally, invest in some Fried Green Tomatoes...

Slice one tomato per person into thick, ½ inch slices. Dip into flour, then beaten egg, and then into seasoned flour, cornmeal, or crushed saltines. Fry in a mixture of lard, butter, and/or olive oil. Adjust the heat to achieve a crisp golden crust and a custardy interior. Salt liberally. Eat. You can do okra the same way, and eggplant, too. John Martin Taylor, in Hoppin’ John’s Lowcountry Cooking recommends putting the sliced vegetables into ice water for about 30 minutes before frying. And I have more suggestions in my book, Tomato Imperative! that is available at the Co-op.

I adore fried okra, and pickled okra and okra straight off the plant. But most people equate okra with slime and don’t buy it. A farmer or two at the market grew it for a couple of years. I was one of the few who bought it, so they quit growing it. No okra now to learn to like, to broaden and brighten our palates.

They built it but we didn’t come.
And that’s the name of the game!

This Twice Bitten Column appeared in the Rutland (Vermont) herald on July 17, 2007

Peas: Paean and Pleasures

It’s the simmery, bee-droning season to take a child by the hand and toddle out to the garden and show him peas, fresh and plump-podded, and how to pull one off the vine and how to unzip it, to show him the tender pale peas all crowded into their pod-cradle, how to eat one, to watch his eyes grow wide, his fat little fingers grow grabby. And then to pick him up, if he’s small enough, to prevent him – in his sudden, scrambling enthusiasm – from pulling the shallow-rooted vines out of their dirt.

Lysander, who’s one and a half years old, is coming to visit this weekend and I hope at least a few peas have filled out their pods enough to taste. And I hope that the black-caps – wild black raspberries – have enjoyed our recent hot and humid and sunny days, and not been discouraged by today’s coolness, enough to have – at least a few – turned dark and sweet enough for him to enjoy. Strawberries still ripen in their small patch, so surely he’ll be in time for the last of those.

These are events, involving gardens and tastes, and who knows what else, that children remember all their lives, if not as detailed memories then as sensory mysteries associated with the food. Lysander’s older friend, Jarett, still looks for cherry tomatoes at my house, no matter the season, for on our first meeting we toddled out to the garden and feasted on them. “Let’s take a look around the garden,” he’d say in November, reaching for my hand. “Let’s find us a few of those little baby ‘matoes.” He’s eight now, though, so last time he was here we sampled cilantro, chard, and a little bulb from the top of an Egyptian onion. He found them “interesting”.

You have a million of those sensory memories of your own, of course, as do I. Wandering down to the swamp’s edge to pick huckleberries with Grandma – how fast that old lady (fifty if a day) could tuck up her skirts and how wide her stride as she fled toward home from a snake slithering through the undergrowth. Galloping on my own after her I felt the limits of her love. Or following my piano teacher and sometime babysitter, Mrs. Minshell, along the paths of her strawberry plants, she telling me to keep between the rows, not to step on the strawberries or even to pick one yet, and then, “And I’ll know if you do, because I have eyes in the back of my head!”

“You do?” I said, wonderingly.

You don’t have to be a child to form these sensory memories. Once, long ago, my friend Carol spent a good long hour or so of a community lawn sale sitting on my front stoop shelling peas from her own garden into a big green bowl. Plink, plink, they went, slowly covering the bottom of the bowl. She’s never going to fill that bowl, I thought. But steadily she worked, and steadily the emptied pods towered beside her; slowly the peas mounted in the bowl. That night she served them simply steamed in a lettuce leaf, a pad of sweet butter topping them, salt and pepper, in that same green bowl. The bowl was at most half full. It was a beautiful sight, the peas delicious, and my realization, that something as precious as fresh peas should never overflow, one I’ve never forgotten.

That memory reminds me of M.F.K. Fisher’s paean to peas in An Alphabet for Gourmets, when she recalls a difficult feast enjoyed with family and friends over a campfire on a Swiss mountainside where she and her husband were building a house. I rummage on my bookshelves and settle down to read the passage. “...what really mattered, what piped the high unforgettable tune of perfection were the peas, which came from their hot pot onto our thick china plates in a cloud, a kind of miasma, of everything that anyone could ever want from them, even in a dream. I recalled the three basic requisites, according to Fanny Farmer and Escoffier [they must be very green, they must be freshly gathered, and they must be shelled at the very last second of the very last minute], and again I recalled Sidney Smith, who once said that his idea of Heaven (and he was a cleric!) was pate’ de foie gras to the sound of trumpets. Mine, that night and this night, too, is fresh green garden peas, picked and shelled by my friends, to the sound of a cowbell.”

Peas are so... so perfect, so round, so green, so sweet, so rare, so... labor intensive but so worth it. I grow Petit Pois, the French strain developed for small, tender, tasty peas crowded into small pods. We eat them mostly out of hand, wandering out to the garden several times a day, picking a handful, then sitting in the hammock and podding them, tossing the pods into the compost pile, and eating the peas one by one. That’s on the best of days, admittedly. Sometimes I use the sprouts, blossoms, and tendrils in sandwiches or as a garnish in salads, or the pretty white buds on beets.

I flip through my library and find that Thomas Jefferson planted nineteen varieties of peas. I think it’s no wonder, for he was a passionate man. A friend of Jefferson’s said that for dinner on Sunday you must cook the peas on Wednesday with a large amount of butter and then cook them in more butter each day until Sunday when they would have absorbed their own weight in butter. I think what a waste of good peas! Might’s well just eat the butter.

I find that if you’re English you boil them, if you’re French you cook them in butter in a pot lined with lettuce leaves, with a sprig or two of mint added. They can be creamed with new potatoes, small onions and baby carrots. In Apulia you pour some olive oil in the bottom of an earthenware pot, put in the washed peas ‘wet’, add salt, a sliced new onion and some leaves of mint. Perhaps you would use them as a dressing for pasta, and often one or two hot chilli peppers go into the pot with the sliced onion. This is according to Patience Gray in one of my favorite books, Honey From a Weed.

William Woys Weaver writes, “in the days before we shipped hither and yon, rich folks raised these little-bitty varieties in greenhouses as a winter luxury.” Indeed, people became quite crazy about them back in the seventeenth century. In 1692 A lady named Madame de Maintenon, wrote in a letter to the Cardinal of Noailles, “The question of peas continues. The anticipation of eating them, the pleasures of having eaten them, and the joy of eating them again are three subjects that our Princes have been discussing for four days… It has become a fashion indeed, a passion and a life style issue.” I find an adaption of that quote on the web, and I doubt that the term “life style issue” was au courant in 1692. The rest is correct, though.

I’m disappointed to see that the sorely missed Laurie Colwin does not mention peas in any indexable way, nor does James Beard in any memorable way; and Edouard de Pomiane, writing in the 1930s, has this to say about Buying Local: “Young peas, freshly picked, have a wonderful flavour and scent, but after a long journey in a confined space they lose nearly all their charm. This applies in greater or less degree to all vegetables. They should be bought fresh and prepared immediately.” He was referring to peas grown in Morocco for the Paris market, which puzzles me. But he goes on to detail peas cooked in lettuce leaves with butter, and then peas sauced with double cream, which sounds quite nice to me, and finishes with peas and new carrots cooked together. Nothing earth shattering.

But Camille Glenn, in The Heritage of Southern Cooking, writes, “If I were asked to name the greatest fresh vegetable dish in the whole wide world, I believe it would have to be Fresh Green Pea Pie... It has a succulence, flavor, freshness, elegance, and charm – and one doesn’t meet it every day.”

This is Glenn’s technique. Cook 3 cups of shelled peas with sugar and salt in boiling water until tender; drain. Add four ounces butter, chopped parsley, salt, and white pepper. Toss gently to absorb butter, adding more as needed for a soupy sauce. Pour into pie tin lined with flaky butter-crust dough; top with dough. Brush with cream; bake until golden. Serve warm.

And then, the strangest recipe of all, for Medieval Pea Soup with Ginger, Saffron & Almonds, pops out at me. It was adapted from the 14^th century chef Taillevent, by James Peterson in his Splendid Soups: Sweat onion and ginger in butter. Add blanched peas, roasted blanched almonds and chicken broth. Bring to a simmer and cook a few minutes. Puree, then press through a food mill. Thin with broth and season with saffron soaked in water and a little almond extract. Yum. Though the poor tender subtle pea may get lost in this mélange without an expert touch.

It seems that my pea column is ending. I head out to the garden and find that, indeed, Lysander shall have his peas this weekend. I am pleased.

While I’m in the garden I gather the makings for A Garden Sandwich:

Take two slices of good bread. Butter one slice and mayo the other. Lay slices of crisp, fresh radish on the buttered side. Sprinkle with sea salt. Lay thin slices of tomato (if you have it) upon the radish. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Strew with sliced shallots or green onions, or green rounds of Egyptian onions. Smother with a mound of mixed fresh lettuce and herbs — I like lettuce, arugula and a few fronds of cilantro. Cover with the mayo'd bread and eat it on a shady porch with fresh lemonade or hot green tea. Carnivores could sprinkle the tomato layer with crumbled bacon, but not too much. It doesn't need it.

I take my summer sandwich and sit on the porch, waiting for Lysander.

This Twice Bitten Column appeared in the Rutland (Vermont) herald on July 3, 2007

A Pail of Milk

A pail of milk slung inside the kitchen door at dusk, steaming a little if the air is cool, still a little frothy on top from zinging into the bottom of the pail; gotten from the doe-eyed, sweet-faced little Jersey cow eating her green grass all day, ambling along from sun to shade to sun again, and finally munching her way back to the barn, lugging her evening udder swinging heavy against her legs.

That particular pail of milk is a memory and, though it is a sweet, sweet memory, I had no desire, whatsoever, to drink a glass of milk icy from the refrigerator, poured out of a pail or a plastic carton, even if it was labeled organic or local, or unpasteurized and labeled not at all. A little cream in my coffee, a bit of yogurt here and there, some crème fraiche over a dessert – that was the extent of my dairy needs. That and crooning “aaaay bosssss” to any cow I encountered. Oh, and tossing down a few capsules of calcium everyday.

And when friends marveled over the unpasteurized whole milk they got from a neighbor farmer I was wont to say that in a real farmer’s life whole milk was an oxymoron: that pail of milk was poured off into jars and pitchers and put into the fridge and not until it was icy and the cream had risen and could be scraped back would I accept a glass of it. As I remembered. No icky clots of cream in MY glass of milk, thank you very much. Cream itself was much better used over berries or made into butter.

They looked at me pityingly, but didn’t say much after that.

...making butter while the sun shines...

But then I decided I wanted to make some butter. This is the time of year that animals are eating fast growing green grass and when you eat of their flesh or the products of their flesh – butter, cream, milk, eggs – you are getting a nice helping of all the omega-3s they are converting that grass into, as well as helpful amounts of vitamins, such as D and A. You can even buy an 8 ounce jar of especially potent clarified butter online for an especially potent amount of money. Why not, I first wondered, just stock up on butter made at this time of year and freeze it?

Omega-3s. They are the offspring of Alpha Linolenic Acid and gotten from the leaves and green parts of plants. They are the opposite arm from Omega-6s (linoleic acid), and a balance between the two is essential to the health of our bodies, from our brains to our bones to our organs to our very souls. But omega-3s oxidize quickly and so, to reduce spoilage and create a longer shelf life, food processors have worked hard to eliminate them from processed food. In addition, industrial food producers have unwittingly cut out the omega-3s in their products by keeping their animals indoors and feeding them grains and silage. Simplify, simplify. That’s the short of it.

The long of it is taken by Susan Allport, a science writer, in her rigorous little book, The Queen of Fats: Why omega-3s were removed from the western diet and what we can do to replace them. Allport’s thorough study asks the question, “...though cholesterol and saturated fat have been reduced in the American diet, heart disease continues to afflict just as many Americans – and we’re now facing epidemics of obesity and diabetes. Saturated fat and cholesterol were supposed to be the problem, so where did we go wrong?” She follows the studies done on fatty acids from before anyone knew the various and competitive components of fat up until the present, when there have been “...many thousands of studies linking deficiency in omega-3s to a long and growing list of illnesses,” but which have been swept under the rug by various political and industry entities who like things just the way they are; and, of course, a public that has as hard a time reading scientific reports as I do.

Which all means, of course, that we need to go out of our way to get our good omega-3s – by eating dark green leafy vegetables, as well as other bright vegetables and fruits; finding really free range meats and animal products; and finding a good source of non-scoured pharmaceutical grade cod liver oil. Little fishes are full of good omega-3s, fishes such as sardines and anchovies packed in olive oil, NOT cottonseed or soy oils. As a matter of fact, most seed oils are preponderantly omega-6s and therefore to be avoided. To do all of this we need to support our local farms, markets, and co ops so they can continue to support us.

Easier reads are two books I’ve mentioned before – Mary Enig’s and Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions and Eat Fat Lose Fat, both of which sing the praises of unpasteurized milk, cheeses, butters, creams, yogurts and kefirs. Like the egg, whole unpasteurized milk is designed to nourish the young. From a clean and healthy dairy, it is the perfect food.

...KISSing Dr. Strangelove...

Of course, various state and federal agencies wish the whole idea of unpasteurized milk would just disappear. It’s much easier to keep an eye on things if everything is uniform, and pasteurization just makes sure that, clean or dirty, a dairy’s milk is heated until any undesirable – as well as desirable, indeed, necessary – microbe or bacteria is dead. It’s a variation on the rather rude admonishment, KISS, which I’ve always read as “Keep it stupid, Simple.” Nevertheless, the Vermont Agency of Agriculture allows the sale of unpasteurized milk if all sales take place on the premises where the milk is produced and are limited to less than 25 quarts of milk per day. The sales must be to the final end user of the raw milk, and no advertising is permitted.

But I didn’t think it was necessary, or even possible, to find enough unpasteurized milk to make, say, ten pounds of fast-growing-green-grass butter to put away for the year; I thought I’d start with locally produced butter from a commercial source. Surely our cows were eating grass in this green season!

Not especially true, John Thomas of Thomas Dairy told me. What green grass they do get is in this season, until around the 4^th of July, but many farmers don’t have enough pasture to graze their animals, and they need what land they do have to grow corn and hay. “When we still had cows,” he said, “we let them out at night to keep them out of the heat of the day. We had a lot of land that couldn’t be used for anything but grazing.”

In an email, Annamarie Clark, of Cabot Cheese, whose butter Thomas distributes, told me that their cows were pastured from April to December.

Well that’s okay, I thought. Cabot spring and early summer butter should be a pretty good source of vitamins and omega-3s if you knew when it was made. I called Cabot and talked to another person, who told me that unsalted Cabot butter had a four month or 120 day sell-by date. In other words, if you wanted May or June grass-fed butter you would stock up on that which had a mid-August to Mid-October sell-by date. And you could probably begin looking for that butter now.

I asked him, too, why Cabot pasteurizes the milk they turn into cheese even though the law says that cheeses aged more than 60 days can be unpasteurized. He said that by law they needn’t be pasteurized, but to receive US Department of Agriculture certification they must.

I’m thinking Dr. Strangelove, here, but things were about to get stranger.

I had noticed that the Organic Valley milk carried by the Co-Op was ultra-pasteurized. Organic, granted, but heated to within an inch of its life. When I talked to the dairy person at the Co-Op, she told me that Organic Valley gets their milk from eighty Vermont farms (among others), but is sent to Wisconsin for processing. The milk of another producer, Organic Cow, is shipped all the way to Colorado for processing, so of course both companies have to ultra-pasteurize their milk or it would be sour by the time it got back to Vermont! The Co-Op is trying to bring in a smaller organic milk producer, from Vermont, whose milk will be pasteurized but not ultra-pasteurized, and won’t have been flown all over the country. They also carry Thomas’s (pasteurized but not ultra-so) milk which, even though not labeled organic, would seem, by far, the best bet to me.

“Big” seems to be the adjunct of going organic, which is another contradiction in terms. Thomas’ would like to be known as organic, but they are perfectly satisfied being a small company, and so will probably not seek certification. A farmer down the road from me said they’d considered going organic, but would have to be quite a bit bigger, and they’re already running short of pasture.

...in which I visit the farm...

But sitting at my desk and talking about cows had given me an itch to see one and to smooth its soft nose and rub its nubbly horns. I drove up to a farm that had been recommended to me by the “unpasteurized milk underground.” There I was given the tour by three small and well-behaved dogs. I worried over a small Jersey with an immense udder (hours from milking time) who was joyously wound around some long grass, chewing with abandon, her big brown eyes laughing up at me. She was not tethered or secured in any way at all. I hallooooed and yoo-hoooed to no avail and, just before I got back in my car, saw the little Jersey switch her bony rear into the barn.

That night I called and made an appointment with Mr. Farmer to get some milk the next morning. I told him about the unsecured cow. “Oh, that must’ve been Dumber,” he said. “She’s about to be disappeared. She’s driving me nuts, can’t keep her in.”

“Dumber?” I said.

“Ayup,” he said, “Dumbest’s already gone. She’d walk right through a fence, know what I mean?”

I didn’t ask him about Dumb.

Next morning I arrived in the midst of much activity. The vet was there filing down the teeth of a horse. Ms Farmer told me that horses’ teeth grow in slanted and they need to be filed flat so they can get a grip on their food. “Go ahead, look around,” she said. I wandered around a bit with the dogs, had a good look at the horses in their stalls, and petted each and every one of the calves that were in their little plastic houses and tiny pens just outside the milk house, allowing my hands to be suckled in their eager mouths.

Ms Farmer showed me into the milk house with its big stainless steel tank, how to turn on its thrumbulator to mix the cream back into the milk, how to hook the spigot to the tank, how to turn it on. She filled some pails with milk for the calves. I took one of the buckets and, as I was fitting it through the window and into its bracket, she said, “Careful, she’ll head-butt it in her eagerness.” Splash. Once it was settled, the calf plunged her whole sleek golden head into the milk.

Finally, I took my jug of icy-cold milk and started home. On the road I met Mr. Farmer wheeling a large yellow plastic wheelbarrow and leading a cow. In the wheelbarrow was the latest calf, born just as I was filling my milk jug. On the winding, narrow road home I followed, with infinite patience, a farmer on a tractor with a baler on the back.

Granted, it was the best of days on the farm: a beautiful summer day, a new calf, some good milk. I could imagine it in mud-season, or on a frigid February morning, the deaths and accidents and disappointments. I could imagine all the pitfalls of farming, had grown up with them intimately. But when it was beautiful there was nothing that could beat it. Farming is a noble venture and the farmer a noble being – that’s all there is to it.

...a glass of milk...

At home I lugged my slippery jug of unpasteurized, fresh-from-the-cow, creamy milk into the house and slung it up on the counter. I looked at it, at the moisture forming on the glass, and thought, Now what am I going to do with a gallon of milk? Well, first of all, I thought I’d just have to have a glass of it. It might be the first glass of milk I’d drunk in thirty years, but the occasion seemed to demand it. I unscrewed the top, and plunged a dipper to the bottom and brought it back up.

When all is said and done, when all the pros and cons have been considered, telephone calls made, emails exchanged, books read, laws obeyed or disobeyed, memories proven faulty, it takes only one taste to tell you what’s real and what’s fake; what’s healthy and what’s not; how we need to live our lives.

I filled that glass. I took a sip. I paused. Was I really going to cry over a glass of milk? I stood at the counter and drank straight down to the bottom. It was the taste of my childhood. It was indescribably delicious!

This column was originally published in the Rutland (Vermont) Herald on June 19, 2007