Six Seasons
a new way with vegetables
Joshua McFadden
with Martha Holmberg
Foreword by Barbara Damrosch and Eliot Coleman
Artisan | New York
Contents
Foreword by Barbara Damrosch and Eliot Coleman
How Getting Dirty Helped Me Become a Cook
How This Book Can Help You Become a Better Cook
What I Learned While Writing This Book with Joshua by Martha Holmberg
My Larder
Go-To Recipes
Pickles: Six Seasons in a Jar
Season One
Spring
Artichokes
Asparagus
English Peas
Fava Beans
Lettuces and Early Greens
Onion Family (Early Season)
Radishes
Sugar Snap Peas
Season Two
Early Summer
Beets (Early Season)
Carrots (Early Season)
Celery
Fennel
Potatoes (Early Season)
Turnips (Early Season)
Season Three
Midsummer
Broccoli
Cauliflower
Cucumbers
String Beans
Summer Squash
Season Four
Late Summer
Corn
Eggplant
Sweet Peppers and Chiles
Shell Beans
Tomatoes
Season Five
Fall
Beets (Late Season)
Brussels Sprouts
Carrots (Late Season)
Swiss Chard
Collards
Kale
Mushrooms
Season Six
Winter
Cabbage
Celery Root
Kohlrabi
Onions (Storage)
Parsnips
Potatoes(Late Season)
Rutabaga
Turnips (Late Season)
Winter Squash
Acknowledgments
Index
P.S.
About the Authors
Conversion Charts
Foreword
In fall 2008, our farm stole Joshua McFadden away from a really good job at Dan Barber’s New York City restaurant, Blue Hill. Dan’s loss, for which he has forgiven us, was certainly our gain—the following February we turned the running of the farm over to Joshua and a fellow enthusiast for most of the growing season so that we could take time to build a barn. They brought in two young cooks as farmworkers, and it was like turning over your garage to a budding John, Paul, Ringo, and George. This was before we had a real commercial kitchen, and soon the concrete floor at one end of our main greenhouse had more small cooking appliances than Broadway Panhandler. On weekends, our farm stand in the adjacent orchard was transformed into a restaurant. Strands of little white lights, strung through the apple trees, made it look like a festive gypsy camp.
Farmers and chefs are natural collaborators. Both work insane hours, although at different times of day. During that stretch of time when both are awake, they salute what the earth has to offer. Chefs are thankful when we give them great produce, and we love them when they enhance it with their art—even the picky ones. Especially the picky ones.
Put a chef in the garden and amazing things can happen. Joshua and the crew grew everything from celtuce to saltwort that summer, and he was even bolder as a cook, grilling outside in the dark and throwing fistfuls of whole herbs into exquisitely dressed salads. People flocked to eat his food, and still do, though now the ingredients that inspire him are from West Coast fields and waters. We’ve had the good fortune to taste some of his current fare and are overjoyed that we now have his wonderful book to show us how it’s done. We’re happy that a chance to play in the dirt at Four Season Farm gave him the deep understanding of seasonality that imbues so many of the recipes in Six Seasons. We like to say that there are 365 seasons of the year, when each day finds certain ingredients in their absolute prime state, but even going from four to six is a sign of enlightenment.
Lots of cookbooks these days celebrate vegetables, we’re glad to say, but Joshua has an extraordinary gift for preparing them, and for making it easy for any cook to do the same. His directions are absolutely clear, and he is, above all, realistic. Even as he pours all his inventive ideas from the cornucopia of his brain into yours, he seems to know that we are all busy and need ways to make meals wonderful without going crazy. It’s desirable to have a larder full of quality items—such as simple homemade breadcrumbs—that you can grab in a hurry. It’s even okay to start your mayonnaise with a glob of Hellman’s, whisk in an egg yolk, and keep going from there. It’s pleasure we’re after, not purity. Life, like Joshua’s excellent croutons, should never be rock hard, but should have “a little chew in the center.”
—Barbara Damrosch and Eliot Coleman
How Getting Dirty Helped Me Become a Cook
I grew up in Wisconsin in farm country, among rural beauty, large farms, but not a lot of terrific food—at my house anyway. Oh, my family cooked: big Sunday dinners and holiday parties, with spreads of vegetable salads, mountains of corn with butter and cheese, the grill going all day with burgers, steaks, and sausages. Some of my relatives even put up the end-of-the-year produce as pickles and preserves. But in our kitchen, you could still find the box of mac and cheese, processed foods, and out-of-season vegetables and fruits.
Prowling around my neighbors’ gardens gave me a hint that there was more to food than what was in the cupboards. Some early moments are etched on my palate, maybe even on my soul: Biting into a sun-warmed, plucked-from-the-vine tomato with a saltshaker in my hand. Pulling a stalk of rhubarb from the ground, blowing off the dirt, and dipping it into a sugar jar. The elemental pleasures of those close-to-the-earth foods have stuck with me.
In the same way everyone finds a path through school and work, I wandered a bit, starting out studying film in Chicago, but deciding that rather than stories on film, I connected to the stories told every night at restaurants. I knew that’s where I should be, so I ended up at Le Cordon Bleu in Portland, Oregon, in 2001. After months of reading, eating, and absorbing as much as I could from instructors (which wasn’t as much as I needed, I knew), I headed into the pro world.
My skills weren’t great, but my energy and passion were obvious, and I worked my way into some of the big kitchens in the big cities: Lark Creek Inn and Roxanne’s in the Bay Area; North Pond in Chicago; Franny’s, Momofuku, Lupa, and Blue Hill in New York.
After those stints, I was adept at working in kitchens, but I also knew that the magic didn’t start in restaurants, it started on the farm. In the orchards. Off the coast. In the mossy soils of the forest. It started with nature.
And so, in the way that life unfolds for you when you’re truly passionate about your pursuits, I found a job working for Eliot Coleman on Four Season Farm in coastal Maine. Eliot and his wife, Barbara Damrosch, are legendary. She’s an amazing gardener and writer, he’s a pioneer in both organic farming and farming throughout the whole year—which in the harsh climate of Maine is quite something.
Eliot writes too, and they both love to nurture people who choose a life in food, hosting interns on the farm, teaching, sharing. I was farm manager for a stretch, during which time Eliot let me integrate good cooking into the farm operations. I conducted weekly farm dinners
inside the candlelit produce stand. We’d welcome guests at sunset with seasonal cocktails in a greenhouse, conversing among the cucumbers, tomatoes, and herbs, mingling with each other and the makings of their dinner.
It was an experience that marked me indelibly. The sign on the dirt road that leads to the farm reads, “Real farming, real food.” When I took that dirt road on my first day, it was a big step toward understanding food in a whole new way, truly understanding the process of transforming a tiny seed into food that not only nourishes but delights, a process about the cycle of life that was life changing for me.
From Maine I went to Rome to work at the American Academy, an Alice Waters project. Cooking in Italy with Italian produce—well, that pretty much sealed my fate. I needed to work with real food, simple food, in season. Which is how I ended up as the chef and now owner of Ava Genes, in Portland. A nice full circle, right?
How This Book Can Help You Become a Better Cook
Writing a book is hard and time-consuming, so I didn’t do it for fun (though plenty of fun was had along the way). My goal in writing this book was to encourage and energize cooks of all skill levels—that means you—in your efforts at seasonal and local eating. I want to show you how to eat tomatoes in August, peas in April, butternut squash only when there’s frost on your car windshield. Cherish the vegetables when they’re at their best, and then wait until their season rolls around again. The impact will be profound, in your own kitchen and in the community at large.
The best way to eat with the seasons is to frequent and support local farms, markets, and grocery stores that are doing good things. It’s a virtuous cycle that nourishes the simple things that make life taste great.
Throughout the book, I praise small farms as the best places—other than your own garden—to get ingredients worth celebrating. But I’m not on a mission to point out the ills of industrial farming (though I believe there are many). My intent is to celebrate all the positive changes that have unfolded over the past couple of decades. Many more small farms, an explosion of farmers’ markets, big grocery chains responding to peoples’ desires for real, fresh food—an earnest, gentle, delicious revolution toward a new way of growing and consuming food.
So while you’re free to cook any recipes in the book whenever you want, I’m begging you to jump on the joyful ride of eating with the seasons. When you begin with fresh, ripe ingredients, your cooking will improve right off the bat.
But what’s a season, anyway? Winter, spring, summer, and fall don’t adequately reflect what’s truly happening in the fields, so I divided the book into six seasons instead of the traditional four. In this book, summer is three sections, because summer is where the action is, with waves of new families of vegetable arriving every few weeks, almost like microseasons. June brings fresh and delicate colors from light greens to ivories to yellows; an August market basket will vibrate with supersaturated reds, oranges, and purples. And of course seasons are different in different parts of the country, so you need to adapt to the rhythms of your latitude, soil, and climate.
In spring, you’ll find plenty of dishes with raw vegetables, fresh from the newly warmed earth and needing not much more than a slick of olive oil and a sprinkle of salt to showcase their green goodness. English peas piled high (and tumbling off) grilled bread slathered with fresh cheese. Raw asparagus sliced to emphasize its crunch, tossed with walnuts, Parmigiano, and olive oil. That’s what I want to eat in the first weeks of the regenerating earth.
When the sun grows stronger, more vegetables join the party—raw cauliflower crumbled to look like couscous, dressed with such a perfect balance of sweet, spicy, salty that you can’t stop eating it. Charred broccoli, dipped in creamy, dreamy tuna sauce. Sophisticated fennel, iced to make it crisp, dressed in crème fraîche and garnished with pristine seafood.
The golden days of late summer are like Eden—vegetables that came on line earlier in the summer are still looking good, all the Mediterranean vegetables are luscious and ripe, so many awesome vegetables joined by herbs, stone fruits, melons. It’s hard to go wrong when you can just toss chunks of melon with ripe tomatoes of every color, basil leaves torn to release their perfume, creamy burrata cheese, and a kick of chile and you’ve got dinner on the patio.
Every stage
As each microseason unfolds, my impulse is to start out using the new vegetables raw, when textures are juicy-crisp and I can taste the full essence of the thing itself. I recommend you do the same, even if you’ve never considered eating a particular vegetable this way. Raw winter squash? When sliced thin, drizzled with brown butter, and tossed with pecans and currants, um, yes, please.
As weeks progress, I’ll turn up the heat, maybe bring in some fire from the grill to get some char. (And please note—when grilling or charring, skip the oil. Cook your vegetables naked, which will allow the sugars to nicely caramelize and avoid the awful taste of burnt oil.)
Every part
And as chefs are recognizing the old farmhouse virtues of eating nose-to-tail with meat so as not to waste any part of the animal, I aim for eating leaf-to-root with many vegetables. When you think “carrot,” you may think orange, but I also think green. Early in the year, carrots come with lacy tops that are delicious, such as in my Pan-Roasted Carrots with Carrot-Top Salsa Verde, Avocado, and Seared Squid. All roots have edible greens, so catch them early when they’re tender.
My flavor signature
All the recipes in this book, no matter how simple, present the vegetables in a context of complexity. I make sure that every dish has more than just balance—it must have tension, a dance between sweet, sour, spicy, salty, creamy, crunchy. I use textural ingredients such as toasted breadcrumbs, nuts, croutons; flavor bursts from dried fruit, capers, pickles; and the all-important bright acidity from good vinegar and fresh citrus juices. These are some of the hallmarks of my cooking, and the means to make ordinary vegetables extraordinary.
Indispensables
Let’s pause for a moment to talk about oil and vinegar. Real extra-virgin olive oil is almost more than an ingredient—it’s a force of nature, and I wouldn’t be a chef without it. Incredibly healthful (full of phytonutrients and monounsaturated fats), olive oil and humans go together. And oil carries and marries flavors, adds great moisture, and just finishes a dish in a way nothing else can. You can read how I dial in the final flavors with olive oil in my cowriter Martha Holmberg’s section.
It’s critical that you use a good-quality true extra-virgin olive oil. The world of olive oil is confusing, not well regulated in the United States, and frankly full of fraud. I use a California extra-virgin made by Albert Katz for everything I do in the kitchen—sautéing, frying, making sauces, drizzling over dishes . . . even making cakes (see the yummy Parsnip, Date, and Hazelnut Loaf Cake with Meyer Lemon Glaze). Albert is a wizard who has learned through passionate trial and error to do what many people think is impossible: make great olive oil in California. He’s a stubborn guy and would rather make less money but better oil, so he nurtures every small batch of oil from grove to bottle, and it shows. His oils aren’t inexpensive, but they’re worth the cost (www.katzfarm.com).
So olive oil is my yin, and my yang is vinegar. Again, quality matters, and I use vinegars also made by Albert Katz. Almost all of his vinegars have a sweet-sour character to them, what the Italians call agrodolce. As I said above, that tension between sweet and acidic is key to my cooking, especially with vegetables. I find it brings out their own natural sweetness, plays off their earthiness, just makes them sing. In My Larder, I recommend a few brands of vinegar to use if you can’t find KATZ.
Everything you need for great vegetable dishes
Though my recipes are mostly simple, real cooking takes time . . . but less time if you plan ahead, break up the work, and have everything on hand. In My Larder, I recommend my indispensables, such as anchovies, cheeses, and canned tuna, with my favorite forms and b
rands. In Go-To Recipes, I share the basics like croutons and roasted almonds, but also yummy condiments like Green Garlic Butter, Whipped Ricotta, Caper-Raisin Vinaigrette, Charred Scallion Salsa Verde, and Pistachio Butter. Each one is super versatile and keeps for weeks; I suggest ideas for using them beyond the recipes in this book. And we can’t forget pickles—I make quick refrigerator pickles out of everything that enters my kitchen; I’ve mapped out a few favorites for you on Pickles: Six Seasons in a Jar.
Any which way you want them
One brilliant aspect of vegetables is that you can feature them in every place in the meal, from appetizers like my Rainbow Chard with Garlic and Jalapeño, to salads like Little Gem Lettuce with Lemon Cream, Spring Onion, Radish, Mint, and Breadcrumbs to slaws—please try the Beet Slaw with Pistachios and Raisins. It will change your life. Soups in every season, main dishes that are vegetarian . . . or not (I do use meat and seafood in some recipes, and I use anchovies and fish sauce), even desserts, like the parsnip cake mentioned earlier and a perfect-for-Thanksgiving Carrot Pie in a Pecan Crust.
I hope you’ll like my food and find it delicious, even revelatory—who knew you could make pesto from fava beans and pistachios, cook celery root as you would a steak, grill unripe tomatoes to pair with watermelon? But I hope you never find it to be fussy. I hate chef books that presume home cooks have the time, money, and skills—and desire—to replicate restaurant-style recipes. Not to mention the dishwashing staff! We serve a lot of the dishes in this book at my restaurant, Ava Gene’s in Portland, Oregon, but the techniques and ingredients are mostly quite ordinary. You’ll need to do some prepping and cooking and seasoning, but the soil and rain and sun will have done the rest for you. Embrace the seasons and good cooking will follow.
Words to Cook By
• Visit farmers’ markets often and always ask questions.
• Things that grow together in a season go very well together in a dish.
• Start with raw vegetables. Take a bite so that you understand their flavors before you begin making your dish. Do this as each season progresses to learn how vegetables change.
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