Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

by Barbara Kingsolver

  It's easy for any of us to claim no time for cooking; harder to look at what we're doing instead, and why every bit of it is presumed more worthy. Some people really do work double shifts with overtime and pursue no recreational activities, ever, or they are homeless or otherwise without access to a stove and refrigerator. But most are lucky enough to do some things for fun, or for self-improvement or family entertainment. Cooking can be one of those things.

  Working people's cooking, of course, will develop an efficiency ethic. I'm shameless about throwing out the extraneous plot twists of a hoity-toity recipe and getting to its main theme. Or ignoring cookbooks altogether during the week, relying mostly on simple meals I've made a thousand times before, in endless variation: frittata, stir-fry, pasta with one protein and two vegetables thrown in. Or soups that can simmer unattended all day in our Crock-Pot, which is named Mrs. Cleaver. More labor-intensive recipes we save for weekends: lasagna, quiches, roasted chicken, desserts of any kind. I have another rule about complicated dishes: always double the recipe, so we can recoup the investment and eat this lovely thing again later in the week.

  Routines save time, and tempers. Like a mother managing a toddler's mood swings, our family has built some reliable backstops for the times in our week when work-weary, low-blood-sugar blowouts are most likely. Friday nights are always pizza-movie nights. Friends or dates are welcome; we rent one PG feature and one for after small children go to bed. We always keep the basic ingredients for pizza on hand--flour and yeast for the dough, mozzarella, and tomatoes (fresh, dried, or canned sauce, depending on the season). All other toppings vary with the garden and personal tastes. Picky children get to control the toppings on their own austere quadrant, while the adventurous may stake out another, piling on anything from smoked eggplant to caramelized onions, fresh herbs, and spinach. Because it's a routine, our pizzas come together without any fuss as we gather in the kitchen to decompress, have a glass of wine if we are of age, and talk about everybody's week. I never have to think about what's for dinner on Fridays.

  I like cooking as a social event. Friends always seem happy to share the work of putting together a do-it-yourself pizza, tacos, or vegetarian wraps. Potluck dinner parties are salvation. Takeout is not the only easy way out. With a basic repertoire of unfussy recipes in your head, the better part of valor is just turning on the burner and giving it a shot. With all due respect to Julia, I'm just thinking Child when I hazard a new throwin-everything stew. I also have a crafty trick of inviting friends over for dinner whose cooking I admire, offering whatever ingredients they need, and myself as sous-chef. This is how I finally learned to make paella, pad Thai, and sushi, but the same scheme would work for acquiring basic skills and recipes. For a dedicated non-cook, the first step is likely the hardest: convincing oneself it's worth the trouble in terms of health and household economy, let alone saving the junked-up world.

  It really is. Cooking is the great divide between good eating and bad. The gains are quantifiable: cooking and eating at home, even with quality ingredients, costs pennies on the dollar compared with meals prepared by a restaurant or factory. Shoppers who are most daunted by the high price of organics may be looking at bar codes on boutique-organic prepared foods, not actual vegetables. A quality diet is not an elitist option for the do-it-yourselfer. Globally speaking, people consume more soft drinks and packaged foods as they grow more affluent; home-cooked meals of fresh ingredients are the mainstay of rural, less affluent people. This link between economic success and nutritional failure has become so widespread, it has a name: the nutrition transition.

  In this country, some of our tired and poorest live in neighborhoods where groceries are sold only in gas station mini-marts. Food stamp allowances are in some cases as low as one dollar a person per meal, which will buy beans and rice with nothing thrown in. But many more of us have substantially broader food options than we're currently using to best advantage. Home-cooked, whole-ingredient cuisine will save money. It will also help trim off and keep off extra pounds, when that's an issue--which it is, for some two-thirds of adults in the U.S. Obesity is our most serious health problem, and our sneakiest, because so many calories slip in uncounted. Corn syrup and added fats have been outed as major ingredients in fast food, but they hide out in packaged foods too, even presumed-innocent ones like crackers. Cooking lets you guard the door, controlling not only what goes into your food, but what stays out.

  Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It's the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood. Cooking and eating with children teaches them civility and practical skills they can use later on to save money and stay healthy, whatever may happen in their lifetimes to the gas-fueled food industry. Family time is at a premium for most of us, and legitimate competing interests can easily crowd out cooking. But if grabbing fast food is the only way to get the kids to their healthy fresh-air soccer practice on time, that's an interesting call. Arterial-plaque specials that save minutes now can cost years, later on.

  Households that have lost the soul of cooking from their routines may not know what they're missing: the song of a stir-fry sizzle, the small talk of clinking measuring spoons, the yeasty scent of rising dough, the painting of flavors onto a pizza before it slides into the oven. The choreography of many people working in one kitchen is, by itself, a certain definition of family, after people have made their separate ways home to be together. The nurturing arts are more than just icing on the cake, insofar as they influence survival. We have dealt to today's kids the statistical hand of a shorter life expectancy than their parents, which would be us, the ones taking care of them. Our thrown-away food culture is the sole reason. By taking the faster drive, what did we save?

  Once you start cooking, one thing leads to another. A new recipe is as exciting as a blind date. A new ingredient, heaven help me, is an intoxicating affair. I've grown new vegetables just to see what they taste like: Jerusalem artichokes, edamame, potimarrons. A quick recipe can turn slow in our kitchen because of the experiments we hazard. We make things from scratch just to see if we can. We've rolled out and cut our pasta, raised turkeys to roast or stuff into link sausage, made chutney from our garden. On high occasions we'll make cherry pies with crisscrossed lattice tops and ravioli with crimped edges, for the satisfaction of seeing these storybook comforts become real.

  A lot of human hobbies, from knitting sweaters to building model airplanes, are probably rooted in the same human desire to control an entire process of manufacture. Karl Marx called it the antidote to alienation. Modern business psychologists generally agree, noting that workers will build a better a car when they participate in the whole assembly rather than just slapping on one bolt, over and over, all the tedious livelong day. In the case of modern food, our single-bolt job has become the boring act of poking the thing in our mouths, with no feeling for any other stage in the process. It's a pretty obvious consequence that one should care little about the product. When I ponder the question of why Americans eat so much bad food on purpose, this is my best guess: alimentary alienation. We can't feel how or why it hurts. We're dying for an antidote.

  If you ask me, that's reason enough to keep a kitchen at the center of a family's life, as a place to understand favorite foods as processes, not just products. It's the prime motivation behind our vegetable garden, our regular baking of bread, and other experiments that ultimately become household routines. Our cheesemaking, for example.

  Okay, I know. You were with me right up to that last one. I'm not sure why, since it takes less time to make a pound of mozzarella than to bake a cobbler, but most people find the idea of making cheese at home to be preposterous. If the delivery guy happens to come to the door when I'm cutting and draining curd, I feel like a Wiccan.

  What kind of weirdo makes cheese? It's too hard to imagine, too homespun, too something. We're so alienated from the creation of even ordinary things we eat or
use, each one seems to need its own public relations team to calm the American subservience to hurry and bring us back around to doing a thing ourselves, at home. Knitting clothes found new popularity among college girls, thanks largely to a little book called Stitch and Bitch. Homemaking in general has its Martha. French cuisine had its immortal Julia. Grilling, Cajun cooking, and cast-iron stewing all have their celebrity gurus. What would it take to convince us that an hour spent rendering up cheese in our kitchens could be worth the trouble? A motivational speaker, a pal, an artisan--a Cheese Queen, maybe?

  Yes, all of the above, and she exists. Her name is Ricki Carroll. Since 1978, when she founded New England Cheesemaking Supply and began holding workshops in her kitchen, she has directly taught more than 7,000 people how to make cheese. That's face to face, not counting those of us who ordered supplies online and worked our way through her book, Cheesemaking Made Easy, which has sold over 100,000 copies. An Internet search for Cheese Queen will pop her right up.

  When I went to see Ricki, it was equal parts admiration and curiosity. If my family is into reconnecting with the processes that bring us our foods, if we've taken it upon ourselves to be a teeny bit evangelical about this, we have a lot to learn from Ricki Carroll. We're just small-time country preachers. This woman has inspired artisans from the Loire to Las Vegas. She's the Billy Graham of Cheese.

  Okay, not really. She's just Ricki. She starts to win you over when you step onto the porch of her Massachusetts farmhouse, a colorful Queen Anne with lupines and lilies blooming around the stoop. Then you walk through the door and fall through the looking glass into a space where cheesemaking antiques blend with the whimsy of handmade dolls winking at African masks, unusual musical instruments and crazy quilts conversing quietly in several languages. The setting prepares you to meet the Queen, greeting her workshop guests with a smile, waving everyone into the big kitchen as she pins up her wildly curly hair with a parrot-shaped barrette.

  Ricki had invited our family to come for a visit, after hearing of our interest in local and artisanal foods. Generously, she let us and half a dozen of our friends sit in as her guests at an all-day workshop for beginning cheesemakers. Now we sat down at long tables and introduced ourselves to the twenty other workshoppers. I was already taking notes, not on cheesemaking, but on who in the heck comes here and does this thing?

  Anybody. For several men it was an extremely original Father's Day gift. A chef hoped to broaden her culinary range; mothers were after healthy, more local diets for their families. Martha, from Texas, owns water buffalo and dreams of a great mozzarella. (Their names are Betsy and Beau; she passed around photos.) Maybe we were all a little nuts, but being there made us feel like pilgrims of a secret order. We had turned our backs on our nation's golden calf of cellophane-wrapped Cheese Product Singles. Our common wish was to understand a food we cared about, and take back one more measure of control over our own care and feeding.

  We examined the stainless steel bowls, thermometers, and culture packets assembled before us while Ricki began to talk us into her world. Cheese is a simple idea: a way to store milk, which goes bad quickly without refrigeration but keeps indefinitely--improves, even--in the form of cheese. From humble beginnings it has become a global fascination. "Artisanal cheesemakers combine science and art. All over the world, without scientific instruments, people make cheeses the way their grandparents did." In the Republic of Georgia, she told us, she watched cheesemakers stir their curd with a twig and then swaddle the warm pot (in lieu of monitoring it with a thermometer) in a kitty-print sweater, a baby blanket, and a cape.

  Forging ahead, Ricki announced we were making queso blanco, whole milk ricotta, mascarpone, mozzarella, and farmhouse cheddar. Yes, us, right here, today. We looked on in utter doubt as she led us into our first cheese, explaining that we'd make all this with ordinary milk from the grocery. Raw milk from a farm is wonderful to work with, unhomogenized is great, but any milk will do, so long as it's not labeled "ultra-pasteurized." Ultra-high-temperature pasteurization, Ricki explained, denatures proteins and destroys the curd. The sole purpose of UHP is to ship milk over long distances; after this process it can sit for many weeks without any change in its chemistry.

  Because its chemistry is already so altered, though, UHP milk will not make cheese, period. This discussion confirmed what I'd learned the hard way at home in my earliest efforts. Before I knew to look for the term "UHP" and avoid it, I'd used some to create a messy mozzarella failure. The curd won't firm up, it just turns into glop.

  "Ask your grocer where your milk comes from," Ricki instructed us; the closer to home your source, the better. Reading labels in your dairy case may lead you to discover a dairy that isn't too far away, and hasn't ultra-pasteurized the product for long-distance travel. Better yet, she suggested, ask around to find a farmer who has fresh milk. It may not be for sale, since restrictions in most states make it impossible for small dairies to sell directly to the consumer. But some allow it, or have loopholes the farmer can advise you about. You may be able to buy raw milk for your pets, for example. (Those kitties will love your mozzarella.) You can pasteurize raw milk yourself if you like, but most outbreaks of listeria and other milk-borne diseases occur in factory-scale dairies, Ricki said, not among small dairies and artisans where the center of attention is product quality.

  The subject of regulations touched a nerve for several small milk producers in our workshop. Anne and Micki, two mothers raising families on neighboring New England farms, got interested in home dairying after their pediatrician suggested switching to organic milk. If a family can put one organic choice on their shopping list, he'd said, it should be dairy. The industry says growth hormones in milk are safe; the pediatrician (and for the record, he's not alone) said he had seen too many girls going through early puberty.

  So Micki and Anne acquired their own Jersey cows, happily guaranteeing their families a lifetime supply of hormone-free milk. Anne also makes kefir, which she would like to sell at her farmers' market, but can't. Micki's daughter makes ice-cream-and-cookie sandwiches using their own milk and eggs--a wildly popular item she could sell to build her college fund, except it's illegal. "We're not licensed," Micki said, "and we never will be. The standards are impossible for a small dairy."

  She wasn't exaggerating. Most states' dairy codes read like an obsessive compulsive's to-do list: the milking house must have incandescent fixtures of 100 watts or more capacity located near but not directly above any bulk milk tank; it must have employee dressing rooms and a separate, permanently installed hand-washing facility (even if a house with a bathroom is ten steps away) with hot and cold water supplied through a mix valve; all milk must be pasteurized in a separate facility (not a household kitchen) with its own entrance and separate, paved driveway; processing must take place daily; every batch must be tested for hormones (even if it's your cow, and you gave it no hormones) by an approved laboratory.

  Pasteurization requires three pieces of equipment: a steel pot, a heat source, and a thermometer that goes up to 145degF. Add to this list, I suppose, the brainpower to read a thermometer. I've done it many times without benefit of extra driveways and employee lockers, little knowing I was a danger to the public. In fact, later on when I went poking into these codes, I learned I might stand in violation of Virginia State Law 2VAC5-531-70 just by making cheese for my own consumption. It takes imagination to see how some of these rules affect consumer safety. Many other raw food products--notably poultry from CAFOs--typically carry a much higher threat to human health in terms of pathogen load, and yet the government trusts us to render it safe in our own humble kitchens. But it's easy to see how impossibly strict milk rules might gratify industry lobbyists, by eliminating competition from family producers.

  Ricki was sympathetic to that position, having traveled the world and seen a lot of people working without major milking-room specs. In Greece, for example, she watched shepherds make cheese in a cinderblock shed right after they milked, m
aking feta over a fire, pouring out the whey over the stone floor to wash it. The specific bacteria that thrived there created a good environment for making the cheese, while crowding out other, potentially harmful microorganisms. French winemakers apply the same principle when using their grapes' leftover yeasty pulp as compost in their vineyards. Over the centuries, whole valleys become infused with the right microbes to make the wine ferment properly and create its flavorful terroir.

  Many of our most useful foods--yogurt, wine, bread, and cheese--are products of controlled microbe growth. We may not like thinking about it, but germs crawl eternally over every speck of our planet. Our own bodies are bacterial condos, with established relationships between the upstairs and downstairs neighbors. Without these regular residents, our guts are easily taken over by less congenial newcomers looking for low-rent space. What keeps us healthy is an informed coexistence with microbes, rather than the micro-genocide that seems to be the rage lately. Germophobic parents can now buy kids' dinnerware, placemats, even clothing imbedded with antimicrobial chemicals. Anything that will stand still, if we mean to eat it, we shoot full of antibiotics. And yet, more than 5,000 people in the United States die each year from pathogens in our food. Sterility is obviously the wrong goal, especially as a substitute for careful work.

  That was our agenda here: careful work. Ricki moved in a flash from terroir to bacterial cheese cultures to warming our own pots of milk to the right temperature. While waxing poetic in praise of slowness, she moved fast. By the time we'd added the culture to set our cheddar, she was on to the next cheese. With a mirror propped over the stove so we could see down into the pot, she stirred in vinegar to curdle the queso blanco, laughing as she guessed on the quantity. There's no perfect formula, she insisted, just some basic principles and the confidence to give it a try.