Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

by Barbara Kingsolver

  I knew he wouldn't be annoyed, because this was no tedious burglary suspect--it was wildlife. He sat up, attentive. His research interest is bioacoustics: birdsong and other animal communication. He can identify any bird native to the eastern United States by ear, and can nail most insects, mammals, and amphibians at least to category. (Like most mortals, I cannot. I can mistake mammal calls for birds, and certain insects for power tools.) He offered a professional opinion on this pre-dawn croak: "Idunno."

  As we listened, it became clear that two of them were having some kind of contest: "Cro-oa-oak!"

  (A pause, for formulation of the response.)

  "Cri-iggle-ick!"

  Steven figured it out way ahead of me. These were our boys of summer. Yikes.

  More rooster voices joined the choir as dawn crept over the ridge. Eventually one emerged as something of a leader, to which the others responded together in the call-and-response style of an old-time religious revival.

  "Rrrr-arrr-orrrk!"

  "Crii-iggle-ick!" "Cro-aok!" "Crr-rdle-rrr!"

  We had on our hands what sounded like a newly opened Berlitz School for Rooster, with a teacher hired on a tight budget.

  The girls heard us from downstairs, and came up to the sleeping porch to see what was so funny. Soon we were all flopped across the bed laughing after every chorus. Welcome to our funny farm. Did I say we were hoping for a Pavarotti? We had a gang of tone-deaf idol wannabes. For how many weeks would this harrowing audition go on before we could narrow the field of applicants? One outstanding contestant punctuated the end of his croak, every time, with a sort of burp: "Crr-rr-arrrr...bluup!"

  This guy had a future in the culinary arts. Mine.

  Our turkeys were looking gorgeous after their awkward adolescent molt into adult plumage. Bourbon Reds are as handsome as it gets on the turkey runway, with chestnut-red bodies, white wings, and white-tipped tailfeathers. The boys weren't crowing, of course, but this would be their only failing in the department of testosterone. We'd seen that show before. Prior to our move to Virginia I'd raised a few Bourbon Reds as a trial run, to see how we liked the breed before attempting to found a breeding flock. I'd gotten five poults and worried from day one about how I would ever reconcile their darling fuzzy heads with the season of Thanksgiving. But that summer, with the dawning of adolescent hormones, the cuteness problem had resolved itself, and how: four of my five birds turned out to be male. They forgot all about me, their former mom, and embarked on a months-long poultry frat party. Picture the classic turkey display, in which the male turkey spreads his colorful tail feathers in an impressive fan. Now picture that times four, continuing nonstop, month after month. The lone female spent the summer probably wishing she'd been born with the type of eyes that can roll. These guys meant to impress her or die trying. They shimmied their wing feathers with a sound like rustling taffeta, stretched their necks high in the air, and belted out a croaky gobble. Over and over and over. Our nearest neighbor down the road had called to ask, tentatively, "Um, I don't mean to be nosy, but is your rooster sick?"

  Many of us were relieved that year at harvest time, when our first turkey experiment reached its conclusion. By autumn the boys had begun to terrify Lily, who was six that year, by rushing at her gobbling when she entered the poultry yard to feed her chickens. In the beginning she'd lobbied to name the turkeys, which I nixed, but I relented later when I saw what she had in mind. She christened them Mr. Thanksgiving, Mr. Dinner, Mr. Sausage, and--in a wild first-grade culinary stretch--Sushi.

  So we knew what we were in for now, as our new flock came of age. By midsummer all our April-born poultry were well settled in. Our poultry house is a century-old, tin-roofed grain barn with wire-screened sides covered by a lattice of weathered wood slats. We had remodeled the building by dividing it into two large rooms, separate nighttime roosting coops for chickens and turkeys (they don't cohabit well), secure from predatory raccoons, possums, coyotes, owls, and large snakes. An entry room at the front of the building, with doors into both the coops, we used for storing grain and supplies. The chicken coop had a whole wall of laying boxes (Lily had high hopes), and a back door that opened directly to the outdoors--the chickens now ranged freely all over our yard during the day, and only had to be shut in at night. The turkey side had a hatch opening into a large, wire-enclosed outdoor run.

  The turkey poults had recently figured out how to fly out through this hatch and were enjoying the sunny days, returning to the indoor coop only to roost at night. Although most people think of chickens and turkeys as grain-eaters (and for CAFO birds, grain is the best of what they eat), they consume a lot of grass and leaves when they're allowed to forage. Both chickens and turkeys are also eager carnivores. I've seen many a small life meet its doom at the end of a beak in our yard, not just beetles and worms but salamanders and wild-eyed frogs. (The "free-range vegetarian hens" testimony on an egg-carton label is perjury, unless someone's trained them with little shock collars.) Our Bourbon Reds were skilled foragers, much larger than the chickens now, but a bit slower to mature sexually. It wasn't yet clear how our dozen birds would sort themselves out in that regard. Frankly, I was hoping for girls.

  My kids find this hard to believe, but when I was a child I'd never heard of zucchini. We knew of only one kind of summer squash: the yellow crooknecks we grew copiously in our garden. They probably also carried those down at the IGA in summertime, if any unfortunate and friendless soul actually had to buy them. We had three varieties of hard-shelled winter squash: butternuts, pumpkins, and a green-striped giant peculiar to our region called the cushaw, which can weigh as much as a third-grader. We always kept one of these on the cool attic stairs all winter (cushaw, not third-grader) and sawed off a piece every so often for our winter orange vegetable intake. They make delicious pies. And that is the full squash story of my tender youth. Most people might think that was enough.

  Not my dad. Always on the lookout for adventure, he went poking into the new Kroger that opened in a town not far from ours when I was in my early teens. Oh, what a brave new world of culinary exotics: they carried actual whole cream pies down there, frozen alive in aluminum plates, and also vegetables of which we were previously unaware. Artichokes, for example. We kids voted for the pies but got overruled; Dad brought home artichokes. Mom dutifully boiled and served them with forks, assuming one would eat the whole thing. We tried hard. I didn't touch another artichoke for twenty years.

  But our lives changed forever the day he brought home zucchinis. "It's Italian food," he explained. We weren't sure how to pronounce it. And while the artichokes had brought us to tears and throat lozenges, we liked these dark green dirigibles a lot. The next year Dad discovered he could order the seeds and grow this foreign food right at home. I was in charge of the squash region of the garden in those days--my brother did the onions--and we were diligent children. I'm pretty sure the point source of the zucchini's introduction into North America was Nicholas County, Kentucky. If not, we did our part, giving them to friends and strangers alike. We ate them steamed, baked, batter-fried, in soup, in summer and also in winter, because my mother developed a knockout zucchini-onion relish recipe that she canned in jars by the score. I come from a proud line of folks who know how to deal with a squash.

  So July doesn't scare me. We picked our first baby yellow crooknecks at the beginning of the month, little beauties that looked like fancy restaurant fare when we sauteed them with the blossoms still attached. On July 6 I picked two little pattypans (the white squash that look like flying saucers), four yellow crooknecks, six golden zucchini, and five large Costata Romanescas--a zucchini relative with a beautifully firm texture and a penchant for attaining the size of a baseball bat overnight. I am my father's daughter, always game for the new seed-catalog adventure, and I am still in charge of the squash region of the garden. I can overdo things, but wasn't ready to admit that yet. "I love all this squash," I declared, bringing the rainbow of their shapes and colors into the kitchen along
with the season's first beans (Purple Romano and Gold of Bacau), Mini White cucumbers, five-color chard, and some Chioggia beets, an Italian heirloom that displays red and white rings like a target when sliced in cross-section. I was still cheerful two days later when I brought in the day's nineteen squash. And then thirty-three more over the next week, including a hefty haul of cubit-long Costatas. Unlike other squash, Costatas are still delicious at this size, though daunting. We split and stuffed them with sauteed onions, bread crumbs, and cheese, and baked them in our outdoor bread oven. All dinner guests were required to eat squash, and then take some home in plastic sacks. We started considering dinner-guest lists, in fact, with an eye toward those who did not have gardens. Our gardening friends knew enough to slam the door if they saw a heavy sack approaching.

  Camille gamely did her part. Before her sister's birthday she adapted several different recipes into a genius invention: chocolate chip zucchini cookies. She made a batch of about a hundred, obliterating in the process several green hulks that had been looming in the kitchen. She passed the tray around to Lily's friends at the birthday party, with a sly grin, as they crowded around the kitchen table to watch Lily open her presents. Fourth-graders hate squash. We watched them chew. They asked for seconds. Ha!

  Camille dared them to guess the secret ingredient, slanting her eyes suggestively at the dark green blimps that remained (one of them cut in half) on the kitchen counter.

  "Cinnamon? Oatmeal! Candy canes??"

  We'll never tell. But after the wrapping paper had flown, with all dust settled and the hundred cookies eaten, we still had more of those dirigibles on the counter.

  Had we planted too many vines? Should we let the weeds take them early? Oh, constant squash, they never let you down. Early one Saturday morning as I lay sleepless, I whispered to Steven, "We need to get a hog."

  "A hog?"

  "For the squash."

  He knew I couldn't be serious. For one thing, hogs are intelligent enough to become unharvestable. Their eyes communicate an endearing sensibility that poultry eyes don't, even when you've raised them from the darling stage. We didn't need a pet pig.

  But we did need something to dispatch all this zucchini--some useful purpose for the pyramid of excess vegetable biomass that was taking over our lives. My family knows I'm congenitally incapable of wasting food. I was raised by frugal parents who themselves grew up in the Depression, when starvation seemed a genuine possibility. I have now, as a grown-up, learned to buy new jeans when mine have patches on the patches, but I have not learned to throw perfectly good food in the garbage. Not even into the compost, unless it has truly gone bad. To me it feels like throwing away a Rolex watch or something. (I'm just guessing on that.) Food was grown by the sweat of someone's brow. It started life as a seed or newborn and beat all the odds. It's intrinsically the most precious product in our lives, from an animal point of view.

  But there sat this pile on the kitchen counter, with its relatives jammed into a basket in the mudroom--afloat between garden and kitchen--just waiting for word so they could come in here too: the Boat Zucchinis.

  Sometimes I just had to put down my knives and admire their extravagant success. Their hulking, elongated cleverness. Their heft. I tried balancing them on their heads, on their sides: right here in the kitchen we had the beginnings of our own vegetable Stonehenge. Okay, yes, I was losing it. I could not stay ahead of this race. If they got a little moldy, then I could compost them. And the really overgrown ones we were cracking open for the chickens to eat--that isn't waste, that's eggs and meat. A hog could really do that for us in spades....

  Could they design an automobile engine that runs on zucchini?

  It didn't help that other people were trying to give them to us. One day we came home from some errands to find a grocery sack of them hanging on our mailbox. The perpetrator, of course, was nowhere in sight.

  "Wow," we all said--"what a good idea!"

  Garrison Keillor says July is the only time of year when country people lock our cars in the church parking lot, so people won't put squash on the front seat. I used to think that was a joke.

  I don't want to advertise the presence or absence of security measures in our neighborhood, except to say that in rural areas, generally speaking, people don't lock their doors all that much. The notion of a "gated community" is comprehensible to us only in terms of keeping the livestock out of the crops. It's a relaxed atmosphere in our little town, plus our neighbors keep an eye out and will, if asked, tell us the make and model of every vehicle that ever enters the lane to our farm. So the family was a bit surprised when I started double-checking the security of doors and gates any time we all were about to leave the premises.

  "Do I have to explain the obvious?" I asked impatiently. "Somebody might break in and put zucchini in our house."

  It was only July. I'd admit no more squash, but I was not ready to admit defeat.

  * * *

  The Spirit of Summer

  BY CAMILLE

  It's a Saturday afternoon in mid-July, and our farm is overflowing with life. After each trip to the garden we come down the hill bearing armloads of cucumbers, squash, and tomatoes. We're now also harvesting peppers, eggplants, onions, green beans, and chard. In a few hours some friends will be coming over for supper, so my mom and I study our pile of fresh vegetables and begin to prepare. We'll start by making the cucumber soup, which will be served first and needs time to chill. Fourteen small cucumbers go into the blender, one after the other, transformed into bright green, pureed freshness as they meet the whirling blades. Then we stir in the skim-milk yogurt we made yesterday. Finally, we add fresh herbs to the cool, light mixture and wedge the bowl into the refrigerator between gigantic bags of zucchini.

  Now it's time for the bread baking. This is the man's job in our household, so Steven gets out his various bags of flour and begins to work his magic. A cup of this and a tablespoon of that fly into the mixer until he's satisfied. Then the machine's bread hook folds it all together and it's left to rise. Later our friends arrive, and Nancy, a true bread artisan, works with Steven to roll out and shape some plump baguettes. Outdoors, a fire has been crackling for hours in the big stone bread oven we built this spring. Nancy has been eager to come over and help try it out. She and Steven set the baguettes on floured pans and slide them into the oven, which has been cleared of coals. The temperature inside is nearly 700 degrees.

  Meanwhile Mom and I are working on dessert: cherry sorbet. We picked the cherries from the tree that shades our front porch, teasing us by bearing the most fruit on its highest branches. Every summer Steven and I climb ladders we've set into the back of the pickup truck strategically parked under the tree, while Mom says "Stop! Be careful!" and then finally climbs up there with us. Even so, bushels of shiny, black cherries still stay out of reach for everybody that doesn't have wings. The blue jays get their share, but we still brought in quite a haul this year. Mom pits the cherries, staining her hands the purplish-black color of pen ink, while I heat water and honey on the stove. We mix the fruit and syrup together and let the concoction chill so it will be ready to pour into our ice cream maker after supper.

  The baguettes don't take long to bake in the hot stone oven. After about fifteen minutes we take them out and cut them open. The smell is enough to make you give up on cooking a gourmet meal and just eat bread instead. We resist, however, slicing the whole loaves lengthwise and laying the baguettes open-faced on a pan. We stack them with grilled vegetables and cheese, starting with slices of mozzarella we made yesterday with the help of my little sister and our Italian grandmother. Next we pile on slices of nicely browned yellow squash, pattypan squash, green peppers, eggplants, and onions that I've just taken off the grill. The final layer is fresh tomatoes with basil. We stick the pans under the broiler for a few minutes, then sit down to enjoy our meal. I feel like I've been cooking all day, but it's so worth it.

  The soup is amazing after its rest in the fridge. It's the perfect
finish to a humid afternoon spent chopping vegetables or hovering over a hot grill. We savor every bite, and then bring out the vegetable-loaded baguettes. The broiler has melted the cheese just right, so everything melds together into one extraordinary flavor.

  After we sit a while talking, it's time for cherry sorbet. The dessert is almost too purple to be real, and an ideal combination of sweet and sour. Everyone finishes smiling. This has been one of the best meals of my life, not only because it was so delicious, but because all this food came from plants we watched growing from tiny seeds to jungles. We witnessed the moment in the mozzarella's life that the milk turned into curds and whey. We saw the bread go from sandy-colored glop to crusty, golden gorgeous. We had a relationship with this meal.

  Here are the recipes that went into our fabulous midsummer menu. I've also included two for secretly serving lots of zucchini. Another very easy way to cook squash is to slice it lengthwise, toss in a bowl with olive oil, salt, thyme, and oregano, and slap it on a hot grill alongside burgers or chicken. Whole green beans are also wonderful grilled this way (a grill basket will keep them from leaping into the flames). The squash cookie recipe has passed the ten-year-old test.

  CUCUMBER YOGURT SOUP

  8 small-medium cucumbers, peeled and chopped

  3 cups water

  3 cups plain yogurt

  2 tablespoons dill

  1 tablespoon bottled lemon juice (optional)

  1 cup nasturtium leaves and petals (optional)

  Combine ingredients in food processor until smooth, chill before serving. Garnish with nasturtium flowers.

  GRILLED VEGETABLE PANINI

  Summer squash (an assortment)

  Eggplant

  Onion

  Peppers

  Olive oil

  Rosemary

  Oregano

  Thyme

  Salt and pepper

  Slice vegetables lengthwise into strips no thicker than 1/2 inch. Combine olive oil and spices (be generous with the herbs) and marinate vegetables, making sure all faces of the vegetable slices are covered. Then cook on grill until vegetables are partially blackened; you may want to use grill basket for onions and peppers.