(Originally posted November 17, 2010)
All of Healdsburg turned out for the opening night of Susan Preston's one woman show ~ One Button Off~ last Friday evening. Thanks to an insane Barndiva cocktail called The Contortionist and a surfeit of always wonderful Preston wines, no one seemed to mind the wall to wall crowds. (We apologize to any of our guests who did not get to taste the spicy chopped Mediterranean salad we served on Lou's baguettes or our crispy tempura string beans.)
It was, in short, a great night.
Best part of the evening: the party atmosphere did not stop folks from taking the time to slowly view this extraordinary show.
One Button Off will be on exhibit through the month of December in Studio Barndiva.
(originally posted October 6, 2010)
I don’t know how many times I re-read Raymond Carver’s short story collection “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” over the years, but the spine of the book eventually fell apart if that tells you anything. Carver had that particular kind of talent that could surgically slice through the emotional muscle we build up over our hearts, all the better to prod at what lies below. But while I still crave stories that seek to answer what for me has been one of life’s most mystifying question ~ what DO we talk about when we talk about love ~ with respects to Carver, I’m tired of quiet denouements that artfully foretell a future in which lasting true love is pretty much a hopeless proposition. I’ve spent a lifetime mucking about in the name of love, licking my wounds, acknowledging my mistakes. If all that doesn’t confer wisdom, at least let me celebrate the fact that it speaks to a enduring optimism of the heart.
When I was younger I was epically naïve on this (and sadly many other) subjects. I had the requisite young person’s immediate apathy towards any marriage that smacked to me of convention, rejecting the kind of relationship where after you stripped away the holidays, martini hour and whose responsibility it was to pick Jimmy up from Judo there was no deeper intellectual connection to carry the day once the children had grown. I was sticking too closely to the Ibsen script by only defining ‘convention’ as some narrow set of rules for conduct dictated solely by the mores of the day. Convention ~ old fashioned values ~ also means following a code of honor that often puts character above passion, especially bad news for my horny generation. This didn’t occur to me then, not even when friends of my parents started to get divorced in blockbuster numbers. It was easier to blame the institution.
My generation held out the hope that through equality of the sexes we might remedy what had been wrong with marriages that came before us, but we swung the pendulum too far in the other direction. Trying to create an agenda of shared interests, even going so far as to swap roles like wage earning and child rearing, we too often fell into over analyzing every interaction, awarding stars for good behavior, taking away privileges when we fell short. Feelings, instead of providing a way into the loved one's psyche, all too often became the shield we used to protect ourselves. As often follows when one gets ready for battle, after the shield came the sword.
So here is a marital parable for our times. When Earl Fincher met Myrna Hall 52 years ago, he wasn't looking for a meaningful relationship. He was a 20- year old boy intent on sowing his wild oats. She was a beautiful 15-year old with a wide open heart. They met a dance. He had no money and few prospects. There was no conscious meeting of the minds, no existential conversations or résumé sharing, just an honest physical attraction they could not ignore. Marriage was the last thing on either of their minds. Earl worked long hours, just as he had done since he was 8 years old, the year his parents left Missouri for a protracted hardscrabble journey west that eventually landed them in California, in the small farming town of Healdsburg, doing migrant work picking in the fields.
Possessed of a relentlessly curious mind, Earl has an uncanny ability to think endlessly on all manner of things that fall into the ‘how to build a better birdhouse’ category. But then, as now, when it comes to what the rest of us consider the ‘big’ issues, like wrong from right, he does not have to think much at all. The way he sees it, there are the things in life you have to wrestle to the ground to figure out, and then there is the stuff you should just know. He knew what to do when he took measure of Myrna. He married her.
If Myrna was scared starting out so young in life with a man that had but $11 in his pocket ($10 after they paid the preacher) she is not saying so now. They met in Spring, by Christmas she had given birth to their first child. Life was good but hard. Only once did they have to break Earl’s cardinal rule ~ never rely upon anyone else ~ and then only to stay with Myrna’s family for a few weeks during a particularly rough time. They saved every dollar, working and living up at Michel-Schlumberger, followed by a stint at Gallo. A lucky conversation Earl overheard one day looking for work brought him to the gates of the mill in Healdsburg just as construction in the area was taking off. With Earl’s work ethic, it’s not surprising a one-day job turned into a 26 year career.
By 1970 they had finally saved enough to put a down payment on some land. It was 3 ½ acres on Chalk Hill Road for $7,000, a price that was not as cheap as it sounds today ~ certainly not for them. But they managed to pay it off and finance a loan to build a house. It is the house they still live in, raising their family of five, year by year expanding the verdant patchwork of raised beds and fields from which they now feed their many loyal customers and restaurants like Barndiva. It is a source of great pride to them that they paid off that 30 year mortgage ~ though it took them every one of those 30 years ~ just like they said they would.
Early Bird's Place is laid out in a jumble of outbuildings, all with a different purpose, all filled with inventions Earl has designed over the years. Myrna calls the stuff that fills the ranch house, garage, potting and gourd drying sheds and chicken coops ‘creative clutter’. She closes her eyes, sighs and smiles when she says the word creative, adding that Earl is a man incapable of throwing anything away. It is something she both hates and loves about him, in unequal measure. Unequal is the operative word because, according to Myrna, love is never equal at any given moment in time. After more than fifty years together they have seen all the fault lines in each other; it no longer matters who is right or who is wrong. So long as I always put Earl first in my thoughts, she will tell you, and he does the same for me.
A few weeks back I visited them at the farm with Drew Kelly, a talented young photographer who is working to help me document Barndiva’s ties to a cadre of local farmers. It was a joy to see them together as I usually only ever see Myrna alone when she drops off produce and eggs at Barndiva's kitchen door. It struck me ~ as it must folks that see them together every week at Healdsburg’s Farmer's Market ~ how completely they compliment each other without either losing a beat on what makes them so interesting as individuals.
There is true adoration in their banter, which is played out in the physical dance they do as they move through their many rooms and linked gardens. Earl is short and wiry, these days he walks with most of his weight held high up in his shoulders, steering in a specific direction until something interesting catches his eye and he changes course. Myrna is rounder, more kinetic as she moves, with an almost tendril quality in the way she constantly reaches out with the part of her that is most vulnerable, fragile wrists encased in protective bands where repetitive strain injury has taken its toll. When the distance between them grows too great she weaves back to him in looping circles. In this way they trade off who leads and who follows.
This then is the secret of their marriage: it doesn’t matter who leads or who follows. By not constantly reassessing how the other might be falling short, or what might be missing from their marriage, they never made the fatal mistake of taking what they did find in each other for granted. If it always wasn’t this way, it hardly matters now. I learned to button my lip early on, Myrna will tell you, the important thing is to be patient, to know that marriage has a way of balancing out. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for her, Earl will tell you. She’s is my life’s helpmate. For a man who understands the nature of life as hard work, there is no greater compliment he could give.
(originally posted September 29, 2010)
Healdsburg made a joyful noise on Saturday night ~ especially on our part of Center Street where 200 elegantly dressed people of all ages came together and kissed, wept, drank, ate, laughed, told stories, then lost their shoes and danced their hearts out. Our weddings are always very special, but something else was in the air as well. As if the brief return of a warm night coupled with the sense that only a few weeks are left of summer heightened the mood so it swelled beyond the happiness felt by this particular couple and their families and friends. It reminded me how important it is going to be in the coming year to express delight whenever we can. We will continue to face seemingly insurmountable problems ~ a faltering economy, an ailing ecology, a paucity of leadership ~ that history has placed at our door. Most solutions will come in tiny packages. All but a few will seem to take too much time. Many of us reading this will not be around to see how it all plays out for our children and grandchildren. But we are in the game right now, and each of us with a powerful role to play. With the stakes so high, we need to keep from feeling overwhelmed. It’s essential we stop when we can to acknowledge that good things are still happening, though sometimes they need a jump start.
The first thought we came up with to keep the parties going ~ stay tuned for lots more ~ was to open the Gallery for musical evenings, films, talks and fun cocktail parties of any size. We will waive all facility rental fees to make use of the space more affordable. Our menus will be keenly priced, but will continue to be sourced locally and sustainably. Our farmers need to feed their bottom line, as do we, but we want Studio Barndiva to feed something else as well ~ a sense that as a community we have a great deal to be thankful for.
We like the French word soirée, even though it sounds a bit poncy, because it really does capture what we’d like to see happen in the Studio. To wit: “An evening party or social gathering esp. one held for a particular purpose” yes, that hits the nail on the head! Besides, it rhymes with archway, which is nice. Sometimes friendship alone pulls us through to the next courtyard in life, sometimes it’s music, or the spoken word. The point is to keep moving in an interesting direction. Yet real social contact is precisely what our all-consuming electronic media is robbing us of. What’s most important when we come together in groups, after the work of the day is done, is often simply that we are together. And while it’s great when you know people at a party, often it’s more exciting when you don’t. In a community our size ~ with so many interests and passions and so much talent to express them ~ it almost doesn’t matter what draws you away from the campfire of your hi-def screens and out to the town square. Your presence alone has the power to redefine the space, and claim it. Not knowing the outcome is part of the magic.
Of course it helps when there is great food and drink ~ which we will happily provide. When Ryan first came to us we weren’t sure how he would feel about all our weddings and special events. Lots of chefs look down on events, understandably. It’s not just the amount of work that goes into coordinating them. From a chef’s point of view, because of the timing and the sheer number of plates, most often they don’t showcase a chef’s talent in the way fine dining does.
Taking his cues from Lukka, whose joie de vivre is legendary, Ryan has fun with the menus, be they family style or comprised of many wine paired courses. He approaches a glitzy Oscar Night or a serious dinner where each course is paired with the dirt it was grown in with the same intensity, and as his talent blossoms it reflects on each and every farmer partner. Even for those working the events the sheer exuberance and style of our parties is contagious. By summer’s end we will have sent thousands of people back to their own cities and towns across the country talking about what’s going on in Healdsburg. Not just Barndiva ~ but the connection they made here with the surrounding community. Hopefully it sent them looking to recreate parts of that experience closer to home.
By making the story of local sourcing the point of our food, we haven’t relegated Ryan’s talent anymore than Bonnie Z’s, whose gift for arranging flowers is sometimes subsumed by the sheer extravagance of her locally grown blooms. Talent and product become indispensable to each other, and for the end user, indistinguishable. We all live in cultivated landscapes, in self-curated spaces. What we choose to seed and grow and prune is up to us. If only a fraction of our wedding guests go back to their hometowns and seek out a Farmer’s Market, that’s a fraction more than had the desire to do so when they sat down and unfurled their napkins on a warm summer night beneath the fairy lit arches in our gardens.
But make no mistake: Joy is the carrier of that message. And Joy, while clearly not in abundance these days, does not need a wedding to thrive.
So listen up: If you own a business and want to say thanks for a year of hard work (with another yet to come) or are a group of friends wanting to meet up to raise high the roof beams, we want to make Studio Barndiva ~ and the food and drink we serve ~ available to you. While we hope you will join us for some of our upcoming scheduled events (first up: the opening party for the much anticipated Susan Preston Exhibit: One Button Off) consider this an invitation to think up your own reason for a soirée in the coming months ~ rhyme it as you will.
(originally posted September 22, 2010)
(originally posted September 8, 2010)
A few weeks back a journalist called looking for a quote for an article she was writing on the salmonella debacle, whose horrifying revelations were then just beginning to unfold. The first quotable words that came out of my mouth when she asked what I thought (lots of expletives having preceded them) were “It’s just the tip of the iceberg.” Which, sadly, it is. It’s a travesty that the simple egg, which even comes out of the animal that produces it in its own sanitary container, can be made into a lethal weapon. But that is by no means the only potentially dangerous food heading your way courtesy of a hydra-headed corporate food industry that has been built to put its own profitability before the health and safety of its customers. Up next: more meat recalls. Still, even for someone as skeptical as I am about the business practices of CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations), it was shocking to read that one single company alone (family owned no less) was capable of producing 2.3 million eggs a week in its Clarion, Ohio facility. We’re talking 60 million chickens folks, housed in hanger-sized industrial roosts where they lived, laid their eggs, and died inhabiting spaces the size of a shoebox. It’s not like you can take a broom and clean out a henhouse that size with the help of the neighbors.
Not these neighbors at any rate. From all available reports most of them either worked for the DeCoster family or had businesses dependent to some extent upon them. After I hung up I began to wonder at the mindset of someone living in Clarion, traveling to work every day, passing “millions of gallons of manure and putrid animal carcasses” heaped, in plain sight, beside facilities where rat excrement in the chicken feed was eventually found to be the cause of the outbreak. What were they thinking? At what point does self-interest begin to take a back seat to a greater concern for the health and safety of the community at large?
It’s easy to judge the community of Clarion in hindsight, but the truth is they are not alone in turning a blind eye to the perils of modern food production. Most Americans have come to accept, even expect, cheap animal proteins in their daily diet. Instead of questioning how a plate of food that includes meat can be sourced, prepared, and served in a fast food restaurant for only $1.99, we complain when we come up against the real cost of food which has been properly farmed. A farmer I know that has a stand at the Farmers Market in Marin, an upscale town if ever there was one, told me a well dressed woman looking at her heirloom tomato prices last week ($1.50 above what we pay for them wholesale at Barndiva) told her “That’s a bit high, don’t you think? I can get six of those at Safeway for the same price.” No, actually, she can’t, not six of ‘those,’ but where is the change in having that conversation, at a Farmers Market no less?
By failing to understanding the real cost of producing food which respects the land and the animals that live on it in a manner which puts health first (their and ours, which in fact is one and the same thing) we have come to validate a false economy. One that, with the shrinking availability of the oil it's wholly dependent upon, is about to crash. The irony here is that when it does it will affect the cost of those "cheap" tomatoes a lot more profoundly than the local, seemingly more expensive ones.
And don’t be fooled by the recent headlines that until the spigot closes, oil based agriculture will be able to help the economy in general in any meaningful way either. The lead article in the New York Times business section on September 1 may have read “strong exports lift agriculture, a bright spot in the U.S. economy,” but the key word in that seemingly optimistic headline wasn't ‘Bright’ ‘Strong’ or ‘Lift.’ It was ‘Exports.’ While the natural catastrophes in Russia, Kazakhstan and the Ukraine which decimated their wheat crops this summer, along with the increasing desperation in China to feed its exploding population have indeed lead to higher prices for wheat and grain produced by American food conglomerates, who really benefits? Read a bit further in the same article and you find out: 75% of the farm production the headline touts as being ‘on the rise’ in this otherwise dreadful economic year occurs in just 12% of the total farms in the country. If the ethically challenged DeCoster’s aren’t representative of that 12%, I’ll eat my hemp hat.
If we can just agree it’s time to understand the real costs involved in producing good safe food and adjust to the fact that it’s going to be a bit higher than we have gotten used to, where do we go from there? We can start by eating less and eating more intelligently, but obviously that alone won’t do it. We need systemic changes in the system ~ food production needs to reflect a sustainable set of values. If food producers are not held to legal standards to accomplish those, we’re doomed. Yet at precisely the moment in our history when we should be pulling together as a nation and demanding oversight and change in a unified voice that will truly serve 'the will of the people' ~ that hallowed historical tenet ~ built into the constitution to save us from ourselves when faced with precisely this kind of scenario ~ has been co-opted.
What do you really know about the Tea Party Movement? Not what you've been led to think ~ a genuine grass roots (neo-conservative) movement ~ but what do you really know about how it’s being funded and what its real agenda is?
Frank Rich wrote an eye-opening editorial two weeks ago in the New York Times in which he noted “There’s a difference between mainstream conservatism and a fringe agenda that tilts completely toward big business, whether on Wall Street or in the Gulf of Mexico, while dismantling fundamental oversight safety nets designed to protect the unemployed, public health, workplace safety, and the subsistence of the elderly.” A lot of what Rich refers to in “The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party,” which we provide a link for below and urge you to read, was based on a remarkable article published last month in The New Yorker by Jane Mayer. Both articles point to overwhelming evidence that the self-serving interests driving the Tea Party Movement will subvert the very notion of grass roots that has always been relied upon to seek change from the bottom up. Instead, and possibly without the knowledge of most of its members, the TP Movement advances a singular big business agenda that cares about as much for the little guy as the DeCosters cared for their 4.6 million disease riddled chickens. Don’t get me wrong: Americans need to demand change within virtually every Federal Regulatory Agency we’ve entrusted to have our backs when it comes to labor, the environment and food safety. More and more, with every Katrina and BP disaster showing fault lines in federally funded protection agencies we should be able to depend upon, Washington begins to resemble a lawless frontier town where justice is random and graft reigns. But having a lawless town doesn’t mean you don’t need a sheriff, it means you need one whose gun fires more than blanks.
With respect to food, which this newsletter is primarily about each week, if you’re reading this within eating distance of the Sonoma County Foodshed and are tempted to think outbreaks like the Salmonella egg fiasco can’t touch you because you know where your eggs come from, think again. No matter what your individual diet is comprised of right now no matter where you source it, the dismantling of controls over food production will eventually affect all of us.
It’s one thing to be fed up with the quality of "elected representation" masquerading as leadership in Washington ~ I know I am ~ but quite another to think the center will hold in America by dismantling all our flawed but essential public programs simply because they don't serve the vested interests of powerful lobby's and the corporate entities they represent. The very way we define the words “an America of and by the people” is up for grabs, that is the real war being fought right now. As in all wars, the first thing to arm yourselves with is knowledge.
CAFO: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories
With respect to The Tea Party we urge you to read Frank Rich’s editorial: The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party, and the Jane Mayer article: Covert Operations, in the New Yorker.
(originally posted August 25, 2010)
Every year when the kids were little we marked the official end of summer with a blowout weekend at the Mendocino County Apple Fair, held in Boonville. Saturday night we went on all the rides and ate junk ‘til our sides ached; Sunday morning, usually with a strange assortment of hung-over house guests in tow, we somehow managed to slide into the old wooden stands at the fairgrounds with a minute to spare before Guido Pronsolino welcomed the crowd to the start of Sheep Dog Trials. Remember the movie Babe? No animated pig in sight, but the same loyalty, patience, and hushed nail-biting tension ~ even better when it happens in real time.
The County Fair ended up being a hyper version of the pen marks we made on the door frame to show how fast the kids had grown: no sooner did we let go of their hands for a second to reach for the caramel corn than they were shouting over their shoulders, we’ll call you on the cell when we’re ready to leave, disappearing into the fairground crowds just as a few years later they would disappear into their own lives. But hell, that was bound to happen. At least the memories we were making were good ones.
To this day Boonville puts on a proper fair with a parade, a rodeo, sheep dog trials, pie eating contests, a fairground full of rickety (thus exceptionally thrilling) rides, and large exhibition halls filled with every variety of crop grown and animal raised in the county, all spit polished and groomed to what contestants hope is an award winning shine. It was in those 4-H buildings one summer that I first began to understand what a mutually dependent relationship between a farm animal and a human could look like, and where it starts in a young person. You haven’t lived until you’ve spent time with a bright eyed nine year old wearing a green sash who speaks with the authority of someone who can put food on the table.
Growing up in a big city all I’d ever known was the social relationship people have with their pets, starting with the BFF status we invariably confer on them. The relationship between those young future farmers and their animals was different. These were kids who cared for their animals from birth with a matter-of-fact understanding of just how they fit into a farming family’s dynamic. As far as I was concerned the blue ribbons weren’t awards for how perfectly they groomed their animals but for all those early mornings and late nights they’d swept and cleaned and cared for them like their lives depended upon it, which, once upon a time, it did.
The Sebastopol Gravenstein Apple Fair isn’t associated with 4-H ~ it’s just a wonderful community event now in its 100th year with the big green heart of a Gravenstein apple, which Sebastopol, with the help of Slow Food, is trying to bring back from the verge of extinction. So I wasn’t expecting a real county fair experience when I set out to go two weeks ago with a group of friends. We wanted to hear great bluegrass by John Youngblood & Company and eat Gravensteins to excess. We scored on both counts: Just as the sun came out John played an incredible set on a stage beneath a giant canopy of spreading oak trees. We ate apple pie, apple fritters, and (in my case, at least) drank copious amounts of hard cider. We saw a display of very old tractors and tried out ingenuous farm tools that had never been patented (some, like the recumbent bike that cut useless roundels out of redwood trees, for obvious reasons). It wasn’t until a much needed trip to the port-a-potties sent me to the furthest corner of the fairgrounds that I found that animals had, in fact, been invited to the party.
Sebastopol is not deep country, not anymore, so it was understandable that the animals on display weren’t many, but it was hard to miss the fact that not one of them would ever end up on the dinner table anywhere. There were cashmere sheep with Jean Tierney eyes, llamas groomed like large exquisite poodles, and miniature donkeys that had been saved from a coal mine ~ I’m assuming somewhere far from Sebastopol. Had I inadvertently stumbled upon the Jonathan Safran-Foer collection of farm animals?
Safran-Foer, in case you somehow missed it last year, is the author of Eating Animals, a passionate and highly personal rant on why he believes the human diet should not contain animal proteins. Safran-Foer is a wonderful writer ~ Everything Is Illuminated, his first book, was a tour de force ~ but in Eating Animals he bullies the reader in much the same way a Jehovah Witness arrives at your door with the ‘either/or’ option of accepting their version of religion or going to hell in a handbag. I have no doubt that expanding one’s vegetable diet would be good for the planet, if not for our health, but there is a big difference between making the decision not to eat animal proteins and an insistence that everyone else make the same commitment ~ which would mean, by extension, that we stop raising animals for food.
Michael Pollan tackles many of the same issues In Defense of Food as Safran-Foer does in Eating Animals, but manages to reach an inclusive endgame ~ he believes that through shared community values that directly effect the marketplace we can still make profound changes in the way food is produced in this country. The first step is to become more thoughtful eaters. The little I managed to read of Safran-Foer’s book struck me as guilt driven, written by a man so petrified by the idea of raising healthy children in a messed up world (and who isn’t) he’s gone into the wall building business: this side of the wall (vegetarians only) is good, that side (the rest of us) is bad. It’s the kind of thinking that can only serve a divisive agenda, creating antagonistic groups of people who, while they certainly differ on eating habits should be waging the same war when it comes to fighting for respectful, responsible stewardship of the earth. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Even if we put aside the case that the human race is predisposed to being carnivorous ~ we ignore at our peril that we have only made it this far in history by a profound reliance upon domesticated animals. A lot has gone wrong with that seminal relationship in the last century, starting with the way we treat animals in the corporate food system that by and large replaced them with machines. But if we can find our way back to it, a culture of mindful animal husbandry holds many answers to the real complexity of farming well. And, as Wendell Berry writes in so many of his wonderful books, there is real complexity to farming well.
Look, there’s little doubt that dependence on machine based agriculture and overdependence on the chemicals their use has engendered has lead us to where we are today ~ mired in the wrong kind of shit, the kind that fertilizes nothing. But the historic relationship between farmer and animal, which should be built upon respect born out of mutual dependence, goes hand in hand with a natural cycle that could provide a roadmap to re-claiming ecological (and quite possibly psychological) health. The widespread soil erosion, toxicity and decay we’ve seen with the rise of mono-culture mega-farms that have proliferated in the last fifty years have gone hand and hand with the destruction of our rural communities, the direct result of not having what Berry’s friend Wes Jackson calls the “right ratio of eyes to acres.” These are issues that cannot be addressed in any meaningful way if we eliminate the central dynamic of personal farming that has animals at its center.
I had a good time at the Sebastopol Gravenstein Apple Fair with my friends, but I left feeling like it was a bit of a lost opportunity. County Fairs have the potential to embody two essential American traits we are fast losing: inventiveness and the ability to admire accomplishment based on hard work, not luck or the hubris that often comes with fame. Walking around a crowd-filled fairground isn’t the same as walking around a crowded mall ~ the mall is a sales construct that teaches us nothing, it exists with the sole purpose of selling a false sense of security. Programmed to replicate the same controlled experience over and over again, all it can inspire is a faster technological response to a shrinking list of stimuli. When are we going to wake up and see that all technology has thus far afforded us is the ability to know more and more about less and less?
A County Fair is an opportunity to have a unique experience with people you can choose to recognize as your community. It’s about hand-grown food, and hand-made craft. Not all of it’s good, of course, but if you don’t like the apple pie at one stand, there is another one a few steps away touting a different family’s recipe. Pies at small County Fairs aren’t flavor profiled by a chemist in some food lab a thousand miles away, their taste testing was done in kitchens like yours just up the road where dogs and kids wander in and out and the oven door has a loose hinge. No doubt every generation had added something to the mix, but they still call it Grandma’s Recipe because, at heart, it still is.
With or without the kids, I’m going to the Boonville Fair this year. I long for that smell of hay with a hint of cow manure you get the minute you step out of the car, full moon rising, into the big field that serves as a parking lot and head off towards the fairy lights of the fairground. At some point the smell of cotton candy takes over, but it’s nice to get a whiff of the real smell of a place, before that overlay of sugar kicks in.
LINK The Mendocino County Apple Fair in Boonville is September 17-19th. Rodeo is Saturday Night. Sheep Dog Trials start at 10 am Sunday.
(originally posted August 18, 2010)
(originally posted August 18, 2010)
(originally posted August 4, 2010)
I was happily surprised we only received one complaint after last week’s admittedly bloody newsletter in which Chef Fancher dismembered a 90 lb Fritschen Vineyard’s lamb. ‘ugh, gross” the unsigned email read. Everyone around here figured a vegetarian or a vegan wrote it.
But I’m not so sure. I know from personal experience it could just have easily been written by a passionate carnivore who loves to eat lamb. It is one of my favorites too, but if memory serves me, ‘ugh, gross’ was exactly the thought running through my head many years ago when I found myself face to face with a plate of Stuffed Lamb Heart. I was living in London at the time and it was my first outing to Fergus Henderson’s Mecca of Nose to Tail dining, St John. I fancied myself quite the food adventurer, but while I had devoured a plate of roasted bone marrow and parsley salad, bravely tasted deep fried lamb’s brains on toast and a spoonful of Gratin of Tripe, something about the sight of that heart made me realize what I was playing at wasn't a game. The non-stop plates coming out of this kitchen represented a whole new way of thinking about food, and that scared me. I can’t eat this I told my friends. In reply they didn’t argue or tease. One of them just leaned over the table and quietly asked, What do you have to lose?
Nothing, as it turned out, and an enormous amount to gain. I no longer even remember what that dish tasted like, but the question has stayed with me. It proved especially providential six years ago when I began to start thinking about the kind of food we wanted to serve at Barndiva.
So I’m sympathetic to the awkward part of any food journey, especially nose to tail, which certainly takes some getting used to. Anthony Bourdain was an inspired choice to write the introduction to Henderson’s cookbook, The Whole Beast, when it was finally published in America ~ we all know Bourdain is a guy who will eat anything. But while he was right to call the tome “a proclamation of the true glories of all the neglected bits of animals we love to eat,” for the rest of us he really should have written “neglected bits we should eat, but don’t.” Why we don’t is worth taking a look at.
The reason I was able to persevere after that first dinner at St John was down to the fact that I was living in a country that still valued that kind of cooking, and I had a very patient guide. My husband Geoffrey grew up in a post WW2 England when even getting meat, no matter the cut, was a treat. The recipes his mum relied upon flowed directly from a farmhouse kitchen history that 20 years later Henderson would resurrect and refine at St John. As Bourdain correctly points out, this kind of cooking is the foundation of haute cuisine, but even more to the point, “nearly every part of nearly everything we eat, in the hands of a patient and talented cook, can be delicious ~ something most good cooks and most French and Italian mothers have known for centuries.”
I grew up in the same era as my husband, but our exposure to food was vastly different. For a treat on Sunday he was more likely to be taken to the seaside for mussels, winkles and welks than a Baskin-Robbins for 31 Flavors of ice cream, which was invariably my family’s choice. Before I left home I never saw a cut of meat that didn’t come from the supermarket case. If it didn’t arrive in the house frozen, it quickly found it’s way there. I’m not dissing my mother, she loved the supermarket like every woman she knew at the time because its one-stop shopping experience meant a liberation of her time. Everywhere you looked in America during those years, if you bothered to look, you could have seen the effects of a ‘bigger is better, and cheaper is best’ mindset that was sweeping the country, ultimately having a profound effect on the survival of anything smaller and hand-made. I do remember thinking, when my favorite bookstore closed shortly after a discount book barn opened across the street, that the end result would be larger and larger venues with less and less choice when it came to books, but I never thought about how the same dumbing down process was profoundly affecting food. Never would have occurred to me.
In the case of animal proteins the move towards corporate food production resulted in a cheaper unskilled work force hired to “butcher” animals for the money cuts, those parts of the animal that took the least amount of skill to extract. Anything that took time to cut or process was thrown away. While we value cuts like filet mignon and rack of lamb for a variety of tasty reasons, we only started to think of them as ‘the best’ parts of an animal because that’s what the industry producing them wanted us to think. Offal was ‘awful’ and ‘cheap’ to boot, the implication being that if you ate tripe or had the wherewithal to make head cheese you were either a foreigner, lower class, or both. What nonsense. And it’s actually a misnomer to call the neck or the belly ‘cheaper’ cuts at all, when you factor the labor involved in properly butchering and prepping those parts of the animal. Real nose to tail cooking takes consummate skills that only start with the knife. Yet for a burgeoning middle class hanging over the freezer case in the supermarket during the second half of the 20th century, if the industry didn’t deem it salable it wasn’t to be easily found. As the butchers disappeared from the street, sub-primal cuts disappeared from the table, resulting in recipes which had been passed down for centuries becoming lost forever.
Last week I made the point that there are profound environmental gains in shortening the distance between animal and plate, especially when it involves smaller, feedlot-free abattoirs that could service local farms and ranches. A return to this kind of food production would contribute to a more diverse marketplace, so much so it’s not a stretch to say that with accessibility to animals of this quality we could re-establish a system of food production that is infinitely healthier for us, and more humane to the animals we depend upon.
All true, but we should fess up that here at Barndiva our main reasons for wanting to do more of this kind of cooking isn’t just politically or even morally driven. At the end of the day, the beauty of sustainability in this context derives from the fact that it’s also insanely delicious. On Saturday night lucky diners in the barn were offered a $35 tasting menu with five different cuts of lamb from a single animal ~ belly, neck, leg, rack, and tongue. Each preparation drew from flavor profiles you just don’t get a chance to enjoy very often. Following this process over the past two weeks, from the day I met John Fritschen and photographed the lamb frolicking in his vineyards to the moment I lifted my fork to taste an incandescent morsel of Ryan’s rillette of lamb neck, I’ve thought a lot about how far we still have to go before we have anything approaching a true locavore economy. It’s quite a distance.
On a personal level, however, I’m anything but disheartened. Every now and then I can see glimmers of it happening. I’ll tell you this, if the future could taste anything like the lamb my English husband and I ate on Saturday night, it’s worth working and fighting for. He and I had traveled vastly different roads to get to that moment together, which made the fact that we had exactly the same reaction to what we put in our mouths all the more remarkable: it was quite simply the best lamb either of us had ever tasted.
Here then are Chef Fancher’s notes on three of the five lamb dishes he prepared this week. I’ve included a fourth, Lamb’s Heart, in part because it brings me full circle to that night in St John when I shared an exciting meal with great friends in noisy room at the edge of the Smithfield meat market. Though very few people got to taste Ryan’s Lamb’s heart, when all is said and done, it epitomizes what cooking nose to tail is all about. Cooking from the heart doesn’t get any better then this.
Lamb Belly:
Chef simmered the belly in a white wine stock with aromatic vegetables, then cooled and carefully cut out the bones and any remaining cartilage from the meat. He then seasoned the belly with salt and pepper and molded and pressed the meat overnight. This allowed the meat flavors to meld and gave him a piece he could cut multiples of any shape out of. He chose diamonds. The product before the final cuts looks like a flatted chicken breast ~ Chef often calls this cut lamb’s breast. To cook he placed the fat side down in a very hot pan and did not flip the piece over at any time. If there is a secret to perfect belly it’s this: score the fat and let it crisp; the heat from searing the bottom will gently cook the meat on the top.
Chef’s words: “I prefer a nicely seared piece of lamb belly over pork belly any day. With pork it’s very easy for a less skilled chef to end up with too much fat to meat ratio. The beauty of this preparation is that you get a crispy top layer of fat followed by a melty meat layer of the same thickness.”
Lamb Neck: Chef cooked the confit of neck in duck fat for 3 hours in a 250 degree oven. Then he peeled the sides down and carefully pulled out any remaining gristle and veins, taking care to leave the meat intact. The trick here is to carefully flip one side of the neck so the thinner end (towards the top) aligns with the thicker end (towards the bottom). If you don’t do this you end up with a cone shape, which will not cook evenly. Next he rolled the whole, re-formed neck meat into cellophane, and chilled it overnight. Before cooking he cut the roll into ¼” rounds ~ though one could cut it to any size thickness. The rillette was rolled in Panko, brushed with a little Dijon, and pan seared to perfection. Chef’s words: “When you see a neck preparation that is comprised of shredded bits you are looking at meat that has been processed clumsily. I treat this cut simply, all you need is that initial crunch, followed by a great, soft, satisfying meaty taste.”
Lamb Steaks (from the whole Leg) This preparation was a revelation for me. Who knew that the single leg I’ve just been roasting, bone in, all these years for Sunday lunch was actually five distinct primal cuts: sirloin, top round, bottom round, shank, and knuckle. Before working with them individually, he first marinated the whole leg in virgin olive oil, garlic, thyme, salt and pepper overnight, then pan roasted the leg until the meat began to relax from the bone. He was then able to separate it into the sub-primal segments, from which he cut the steaks.
Chef’s words: “The beauty of breaking down the leg is that then you can just treat it as you would a great steak: salt, pepper, char the fat and keep basting. We use a seasoned grill butter with lots of garlic and fresh herbs from our garden.”
Lamb’s Heart A traditional preparation for heart is to mix it with giblets and serve it diced in the lamb jus, which is delicious. Ryan went another direction. He thinly sliced then gently grilled the muscle. When it was almost room temperature he tossed it with a tangy panzanella salad comprised of bread, feta, tomatoes and lashings of sherry vinegar.
Chef’s words: “I like this preparation because with heart you are up against a predominate taste of iron…stands to reason…which is nicely cut by the sherry vinegar. There is no need for any oil in the salad, which is also a classic presentation for tongue.
LINKS:
Our Friend Marissa Guggiana, whom we met in the early days of Fork & Shovel, is about to publish Primal Cuts, Cooking with America’s Best Butchers. A brilliant food activist and fourth generation meat purveyor, Primal Cuts, which will go on sale in October, promises to be sublime on all things meaty and wonderful. Check out her wonderful website.
If you are a professional cook interested in where to source whole local animals that have been sustainably raised, contact her dad Ritz who now runs Sonoma Direct with her.
If you are interested in a meat CSA, you might try The Sonoma Meat Buying Club.