In this excerpt from her first non-fiction narrative,Animal, Vegetable,Miracle:A Year of Food Life ,Barbara Kingsolver
wrestles with an all-locally grown menu for a large family gathering.
For people who grow food,late spring is the time when we pay for the rela-
tive quiet of January,praying for enough hours of daylight to get everything done. Many who farm for a living also
have nine-to-five jobs off the farm and still get it done. In May we push deadlines,
crunch our other work,borrow time,and still end up parking the tractor with its
headlamp beams pointed down the row to finish getting the last plants heeled into
place.All through May we worked in rain or under threat of it,playing chicken
with lightning storms.We worked in mud so thick it made our boots as heavy as
elephant feet.
On work and school days we started predawn to get an early hour in,then in the late
afternoon picked up again where we 'd left off. On weekends we started at
daybreak and finished after dusk,aching and hungry from the work of making food.La-
bours like this help a person appreciate why good food costs what it does.It ought to
cost more.
In the midst of our busy spring,one of us had a birthday.Not just a run-of-the-mill
birthday I could happily ignore,but an imposing one,involving an even fraction of
one hundred.We cooked up a party plan,setting the date for Memorial Day so out-of-town
guests could stay for the long weekend.We sent invitations and set about preparing for a
throng of guests,whom we would certainly want to feed.Our normal impulse would have been to stock up on standard-issue, jet-propelled edibles. But we were deep enough into our local-food sabbatical by now, that didn't seem entirely normal.
Something had changed for us, a rearrangement of mindset and the contents of our refrigerator. Our family had certainly had our moments of longing for the illicit: shrimp, fresh peaches and gummy worms, respectively. Our convictions about this project had been mostly theoretical to begin with. But gradually they were becoming fixed tastes that we now found we couldn't comfortably violate for our guests, any more than a Hindu might order up fast-food burgers just because she had a crowd to feed.
It put us in a bit of a pickle, though, to contemplate feeding a huge crowd on the products of our county this month. If my mother had borne me in some harvest-festival month like October, it would have been easy. But she (like most sensible mammals, come to think of it) had all her children in the springtime, a fact I'd never minded until now. Feeding just my own household on the slim pickings of our local farms had been a challenge in April. The scene was perking up in May, but only slightly. Our spring had been unusually wet and cool, so the late-spring crops were slow coming in. We called a friend who cooks for a living, who came over to discuss the game plan.
Apparently, the customary starting point for caterers in a place that lacks its own food culture is for the client to choose a food theme that is somebody else's land-based food culture. Then all you have to do is import the ingredients from somebody else's land. Mediterranean? A banquet of tomato-basil-mozzarella salads, eggplant caponata and butternut ravioli - that's a crowd pleaser. And out of the question. No tomatoes or eggplants yet existed in our landscape. Our earliest of early tomatoes was just now at the blossom stage. Mexican? Enchiladas and chipotle rice? Great, except no peppers or tomatillos were going to shine around here. Siberian Tundra was maybe the cuisine we were after. We began to grow glum, thinking of borscht.
Not to worry, said Kay. A good food artist knows her sources. She would call the farmers she knew and see what they had. Starting with ingredients, we'd build our menu from there. As unusual as this might seem, it is surely the world's most normal way of organizing parties - the grape revels of Italy and France in September, the Appalachian ramp hoedowns in April, harvest festivals wherever and whenever a growing season ends. That's why Canadian Thanksgiving comes six weeks before ours: so does Canadian winter. We were determined to have a feast, but if we meant to ignore the land's timetable of generosity and organize it instead around the likes of birthdays, a good travel weekend and the schedules of our musician friends, that was our problem.
Kay called back with a report on our county's late May pantry. There would be asparagus, of course, plus lots of baby lettuces and spinach by then. Free-range eggs are available here year-round. Our friend Kirsty had free-range chicken, and the Klings, just a few miles from us, had grass-fed lamb. The Petersons had strawberries, Charlie had rhubarb, another family was making goat cheese. White's Mill, five miles from our house, had flour. If we couldn't pull together a feast out of that, I wasn't worth the Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow Award I won in 1972. (Kind of by accident, but that is another story.) The menu wrote itself: Lamb kabobs on the grill, chicken pizza with goat cheese, asparagus frittata, an enormous salad of spring greens and a strawberry-rhubarb crisp. To fill out the menu for vegan friends we added summer rolls with bean sprouts, carrots, green onions and a spicy dipping sauce. We had carrots in the garden I had nursed over the winter for an extra-early crop, and Camille ordinarily grew bean sprouts by the quart in our kitchen windowsill; she would ramp up her production to a couple of gallons. We might feed our multitudes after all.
As the RSVPs rolled in, we called farmers to plead for more strawberries, more chickens. They kindly obliged. The week of the party, I cut from our garden the first three giant heads of Early Comet broccoli - plants we'd started indoors in February and set out into nearly frozen soil in March. Without knowing it, I'd begun preparing for this party months ago. I liked seeing now how that whole process, beginning with seeds, ending with dinner, fixed me to some deeper than usual sense of hospitality. Anyone who knows the pleasure of cooking elaborately for loved ones understands this. Genesis and connection with annual cycles: by means of these, a birthday could be more than a slap on the back and jokes about memory loss.
On Thursday I went to the garden for carrots, hoping for enough. With carrots you never know what you've got until you grab it by the green hair and tug it up. These turned out to be gorgeous, golden orange, thicker than thumbs, longer than my hand. Shaved into slivers with green onions and our indolent sprouts, two dozen carrots would be plenty. I could only hope the lambs and chickens were co-operating as well. I stood for a minute clutching my carrots, looking out over our pasture to Walker Mountain on the horizon. The view from our garden is spectacular. I thought about people I knew who right at that moment might be plucking chickens, picking strawberries and lettuce, just for us. I felt grateful to the people involved, and the animals also. I don't say this facetiously. I sent my thanks across the county, like any sensible person saying grace before a meal.
Guests began to trickle in on Friday: extended family from Kentucky, old college friends from South Carolina, our musician friends John, Carrie and Robert. I was bowled over by the simultaneous presence of so many people I care about, from as far away as Tucson and as near as next door. We made all the beds and couches, and pitched tents. We walked in the garden and visited. All those under age 12 welded into a pack and ran around like wild things. I overheard a small platoon leader in the garden command: "You, whatever your name is, go down that way and I'll hide and we'll scare the girls." I only made two rules: Don't injure each other, and don't flatten the crops. With the exception of one scraped finger and the tiniest mishap with a Dolly Parton, they obliged.
We set up a sound system on the back patio, dragged bales of straw into benches, and eyed the sky, which threatened rain all day Saturday but by late afternoon had not delivered. We carried a horse trough out of the barn and filled it with ice to chill our Virginia Chambourcin and Misty River wines, and beer from a nearby microbrewery. The lamb kabobs on the grill made all our mouths water for an hour while Kay and her helpers worked their mojo in our kitchen. The food, when it came out, was applauded: the summer rolls were saucy, the lamb succulent, the frittata puffy and light. The strawberry-rhubarb crisp vanished into thin air. Here's what we didn't have: the shrimp arranged in a ring like pink poker chips; those rock-hard broccoli wedges and lathed carrots surrounding the ubiquitous white dip; the pile of pineapple and melon chunks on a platter. Nobody seemed too disappointed.
Some of us were in fact sticking our fingers into the rhubarb-crisp pans to lick up crumbs when the music started. The three-year-olds were the first ones out on the flagstone dance floor, of course, followed closely by my 75-year-old parents, the teenagers and the elders and the middle-aged, recklessly dancing across age categories. And it still didn't rain. Nobody fell in the creek, nobody went hungry, and nobody's husband refused to dance. When the night chilled us we built a huge bonfire, and nobody fell into that either. Midnight found me belting out backup harmonies with my cousin Linda to You Can't Always Get What You Want by the Rolling Stones. The over-50 crowd stayed on its feet until 2 in the morning. You get what you need.
From: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Copyright © 2007 by Barbara Kingsolver, Steven Hopp and Camille Kingsolver. All rights reserved.
Strawberry rhubarb crisp
Two of our friend Kay's best recipes from Mom's party are good ways to feature early spring vegetables, and the only fruits you're likely to find in May: strawberries and rhubarb.
WHAT YOU NEED
3 cups strawberries, halved
3 cups rhubarb, chopped
1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup rolled oats
1/2 cup brown sugar (or a bit more, to taste)
3/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon allspice
1/3 cup butter
WHAT YOU DO
Mix together strawberries, rhubarb and honey thoroughly and place in an 8- by 8-inch ungreased pan. Mix rest of ingredients until crumbly, sprinkle over fruit mixture and bake at 350 F for 40 to 50 minutes, until golden.
Camille Kingsolver
Asian vegetable rolls
WHAT YOU NEED
2 ounces thin rice noodles
1 cup bean sprouts
10 soft lettuce leaves
1 cup carrots, finely shredded
2 to 3 green onions, finely chopped
1/2 cup mint leaves
1/2 cup cilantro leaves
8 rice paper wrappers (about 20 centimetres square)
WHAT YOU DO
Drop noodles into boiling water, remove from heat and let stand for 8 to 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Drain, rinse with cold water, and drain again. Lay out noodles and vegetables in an assembly line. Heat a pan of water until it's almost too hot to handle. Soak one rice-paper wrapper in the hot water for 15 to 20 seconds, then take it out and lay it flat. Flatten out one lettuce leaf on top (this helps prevent other fillings from poking through the wrapper). Next, place a finger-sized bunch of noodles close to one side of the paper and roll that side over the noodles. Continue this same pattern for the vegetable fillings, laying each ingredient parallel to the noodles and rolling the paper over. After the mint and cilantro leaves have gone in, fold the ends of the wrapper in, then fold the remaining side over them to secure. Set roll on a platter, seam side down. Keep rolls moist until served, and separated so they don't stick together (the wrappers will rip).
Serve whole or cut in half, with your choice of spicy dipping sauce. Camille Kingsolver
One simple option is to add a few tablespoons of rice vinegar and sesame oil to 1/2 cup of soy sauce.