Growing a Farmer

by Kurt Timmermeister

  I wish I could say that I do every task here personally. I want to pick every strawberry, feed every chicken and mow the lawn with the regularity of my tidy neighbors. A few times per week Jorge comes to the farm to work. Born in Mexico on a small subsistence farm, Jorge has great experience with cows and welcomes working on my farm as a pleasurable alternative to being a cook in a hot commercial kitchen. For years he worked on the line at my former restaurant in the city, cooking hamburgers and pastas and flipping many fried eggs on busy weekends. Little by little he started to come out to the island to work on the farm. Now I could not run it without him.

  Jorge treks out to the farm early in the morning, most of the year while it is still dark. He lets himself into the kitchen, turns on the lights, fires up the dishwasher and makes a pot of coffee. Soon thereafter, at a more respectable time to get out of bed, I stumble down the stairs of the log house and head over to the kitchen. The sight of the kitchen filled with light warms my heart. It is close enough to the image of the Leave It to Beaver home with June Cleaver baking cookies all afternoon that I longed for as a child. With a bit of a smile, I open the kitchen doors, Jorge pours me my coffee and offers me a concha, a Mexican pastry shaped like a snail, and the farm day begins. Each morning, after a discussion about his three young sons and how they are doing at school, we move into a chat about American politics, Mexican politics and the intersection of the two. Jorge repeatedly chides me for my naïveté about corruption and bribes; I counter with pushing him to abandon his small-town ways now that he is in el Norte. Once the preliminary conversation is complete, we discuss the plans for the day: which animals need attention, how we will fix this or that problem that has arisen since he was last here, the field that I would like tilled or planted, weeded or harvested. We also talk about our mutual excitement and optimism for the near future. “Next month the grass on the upper-back-side pasture will be especially great, no question,” he proclaims, confident that the work he has done there will pay off in a few weeks’ time. His favorite calves he declares to be the best ever, forgetting that he said the same thing last year about that spring’s calves.

  The dance complete, the coffee finished and only a few crumbs of the concha remaining, we head out to get the morning chores completed. Once those chores are done, we will return to this vital kitchen space to wash the vegetables from the field and store the eggs gathered from the chicken coops. Running the length of the main room of the kitchen is the dinner table. Constructed of long planks of Douglas fir, it was made from wood cut down on the island a few blocks from this farm. I know where the trees were. I watched them as they were felled years ago. When the trees were milled for the replacement logs to repair the log house, the planks that were cut off of those rounds became the top of this table.

  This table is at once grand and humble. It bears no resemblance to a Queen Anne table, or Sheraton, or even Duncan Phyfe. The table has long planks, adhered together to form the top, and a simple trestle base of additional Doug fir. The edge is not straight, the thickness varies and there is not a hint of square or level or true. To me, however, it is true. It reflects this land and this life.

  When I originally made the table, the surface was rough from the blade of the portable mill. The planks were never put through a planer or sanded down to make them smooth. I would have preferred it, but never found the time or the equipment. From the passing of platters of food and the sliding of wine-glasses, the rough edges of the wood have been worn smooth. Pork fat, butter, spilled red wine, salad dressing have all been added in layers to this surface. It has a finish. It speaks of the meals that have been eaten here, of the people who have dined here, of the conversation that has passed here.

  I often reach under the table to the underside of the table planks. It is still rough, still reflects the crudeness of the mill blade with the heavy kerf. I have no interest in sanding it down. It is my way of marking time, of knowing that change has happened.

  Sunday evenings are reserved for Cookhouse dinners. The meats, the cheeses, the fruits, the vegetables, the eggs, the herbs—they all come from this farm. Only a short list of ingredients—flour, sugar, salt, pepper—are brought in from the supermarket. Here are a couple typical seasonal menus from Cookhouse dinners:

  FALL/WINTER

  Thin, crispy pizza from the wood-fired oven with guanciale, chilies, fresh herbs

  Winter squash soup from Musque de Provence squash, pureed, finished with cream, garnished with brown butter, fried sage

  Hard rolls, sweet cream Jersey butter

  Antipasti course: hard, aged eight-month cows’-milk cheese, membrillo/quince paste, pickled pumpkin, pork rillettes, black pepper crackers, pork copa

  Fresh slaw of shaved Brussels sprouts, with apple cider vinegar, pickled red currants

  Poached farm eggs, sauce Bernaise, sautéed lacinato kale

  Tagliatelle noodles, butter, fava beans, cippolini onions

  Pork shoulder roast, braised in milk, sliced, with boiled bay leaf potatoes

  Caramel ice cream, butter shortbread cookies

  SPRING/SUMMER

  Thin, crispy pizza from the wood-fired oven with fresh tomato sauce, whey ricotta, fresh herbs

  Light pork brodo, English peas, chervil, thyme, parsley, chives

  Hard rolls, sweet cream Jersey butter

  Antipasti course: fresh cows’-milk, bloomy rind cheese, tomato jam, pickled lemon cucumbers, pork liver pâté, black pepper crackers

  Nantaise carrots sautéed in butter, fennel pollen, honey

  Fresh heirloom tomatoes, sliced and served with clarified butter, salt

  Pappardelle noodles, braised beef shank ragout, grated hard cheese

  Boneless pork loin, roasted in the wood oven, thinly sliced, pan juices

  Rose-geranium-infused custards, raspberry puree, butter shortbread cookies

  It is a different way to cook; a different way to eat. Seasonal and always fresh, a farm dinner could be said to be the ultimate in local eating. I think of this dinner and the entire lifestyle of raising food and cooking it to be a denial of the present times. The four ingredients that are brought in are slightly processed: the flour has been milled, the white sugar processed from sugar beets, but they are minimally processed. The salt and sugar, the flour and pepper look essentially like they did one hundred years ago. I want to believe that the industrial food revolution that took place in this country after the Second World War never existed.

  It is most likely that I am imitating a time period and a lifestyle that never truly existed. I will take that criticism. This is, however, how I like to eat. I need to see the animal that will eventually be my dinner. I want to pull the carrots from the soil the morning that they will be cooked for the evening meal. The cream, the milk, the cheese, the butter that grace the dinner table come from a cow with a name familiar to me: Dinah, Boo, Lily.

  This is my personal choice. I don’t expect, or desire, to have the entire nation return to a pre–World War II era in terms of agriculture and food culture. I don’t have the facts, but I doubt that there is ample farmland near the cities for a serious part of the population to have their own twelve acres and live off of the land exclusively. I cannot advocate for most of Manhattan to be depopulated as the stockbrokers and clothing designers return to the country to raise their own cows.

  My way of life, I sadly conclude, is rather elitist. I enjoy a life and diet that few can enjoy. I don’t have a recommendation for a way of growing food that would be accessible to everyone. I can only say living off of the land, and grandly, is possible.

  I enjoy serving my dinners every Sunday; it is the family that I wanted to create, if only for a meal per week. When I was a kid my mother always worked. I was envious of the other kids in the neighborhood whose mothers were home during the day making soup, baking cookies. At this point in my adult life, my guess is that the domestic bliss was illusory; those mothers most likely didn’t all love being home all day making soup and bread. It is a grea
t vision, however, and one that is comforting to many. The folks who trek out to this farm every Sunday either miss those Sunday dinners at their grandparents’, or want a Sunday dinner that they too never had.

  We serve dinner family-style at the long Doug fir table, a bench on one side, old wooden chairs on the other. The guests are seated cheek by jowl, the large platters of food passed from person to person around the table.

  Early on Sunday morning a cook comes out to the farm to help prepare the evening meal. When I first started planning these dinners, I envisioned sturdy home cooks coming by the farm to make a home-cooked meal for the table. Friends’ mothers in town for vacation from the Midwest, roasting chickens, steaming green beans and mashing big pots of potatoes with butter and cream: that was the menu I expected. Sadly, or at least realistically, those mothers and grandmothers never materialized. My guess is that the mothers I imagined have been dead for years. My mother, for example, spent her adult life cooking with cans of mushroom soup, Jell-O pudding and frozen vegetables. Presently the guys who cook the Sunday meals come from restaurant kitchens in the city. Their background is different from home cooking; they are trained to cook quickly and to order. Generally restaurant menus are written and printed in advance and remain the same for a number of days, a number of weeks or perhaps even for years. Quality of preparation in a restaurant kitchen comes from repetition: making the exact same dish many times a night, every night of the week. Although restaurants often prepare specials every night, and some change the menu weekly or even nightly, it is the repetition, even if only through the evening, that makes the food great. Cooking for this table is different. Ideally the menu is different every week. There is no chance to repeat a dish completely. Yes, scrambled eggs pop up often, pasta is rolled out each Sunday, hard rolls are baked from the same recipe, but the core of the meal is new, changing from season to season and week to week.

  I also find that cooks—or anyone, for that matter—are very used to shopping for vegetables, meat and dairy rather than picking from the garden or bringing it in from the cellar. The farm cook’s mind-set must be distinctly different.

  There is a finite and varying volume of food produced here. Every year I get a bit better at working the land, a bit more efficient, and the farm’s production tends to increase, but the weather often plays a large role and crops fail. The list of foods grown here is long; you might say that our portfolio is diverse. In any given year a few things do extremely well. They may have been planted at just the right time, and gotten just the right amount of water, thus all the elements came together to produce a large volume of, say, pears. On the other hand, each year a few items fail miserably. They were planted a little too early and froze, or a little too late and dried up from the heat of the sun before they could gain roots, or perhaps I just plain forgot to take care of them. The rest—the majority of the crops—do just fine and produce an ample supply for the kitchen.

  I am keenly aware of what is available at the farm every week. I spend enough time in the gardens and in the cellar to know how many carrots we have to use, how much cream, how much pork. I am aware that when the carrots run out, it is impossible to have any more until the next row has matured. If that is in the middle of June, the pantry will be replenished quickly. If it is December, the wait will be months until fresh carrots will grace this kitchen again.

  When working in a restaurant, or, more simply, when cooking at home in the city, there is always the possibility of more. If you need additional carrots, buy them at the store. When you run low on onions, a simple call to the wholesaler and another case will show up the next morning. We do not have that luxury here. When the last of the onions have been consumed, they are gone.

  This is the distinct difference between this kitchen and a kitchen in the city. We don’t have the luxury of more. The culture of this kitchen is of abundance, but of calculated abundance. This changes the way you cook and the way you look at the seasonality of the food. When new cooks first arrive they invariably grab an apronful of onions, a handful of garlic and begin to chop and sauté to begin a sauce or start a braise. They do it because that is how they are taught. Onions are cheap and they give depth to food. Here at the farm they are always limited. I dole them out judiciously. To me they are precious and valuable.

  The cook who grabs the onions—more than he needs—is thinking in the mode of the city kitchen. He hasn’t looked around him or acknowledged the season. In the city kitchen there are no seasons: onions are delivered every day of the year; carrots as well, same with garlic and so on. Onions on the farm follow a path of the seasons. In the early spring, bits of small green onions can be pulled from the garden, both to aid the cook and to give the neighboring young green onions a bit more growing room. As spring turns to summer, all of the green onions will be used in those few weeks. Soon after, the leeks seeded in the depth of winter in the greenhouse and transplanted to the garden in early spring will begin to mature. They will be the aliums to follow the green onions. The heat of summer will beat down on the onions, seeded at the same time as the leeks, yet given a bit more time to bulb, rising up out of the warm dry soil, their skins beginning to dry. At the end of summer they will all be pulled and allowed a couple or three days lying on the sidewalk to finish their husking before they go to the cellar for storage. The fresh onions will be used in the kitchen first, full of the tastes of summer. When they have started to sprout and soften up, we will move to the storage onions, those that we were able to hold through the winter despite the freezing cold weather just outside the cellar door. As late winter turns to early spring, the cycle will begin again, the last few storage onions grabbed off of the bottom of the box on the bottom shelf of the cellar. The box will be filled mostly with dry dirt, the lost dried skins of onions eaten weeks before and the odd remaining onion rolling around.

  One of my favorite cooks to make a meal in my kitchen was Joseph. He got it. On one of the Sundays when he was planning on coming out to the farm to make dinner I sat waiting in the kitchen for him. As this is an island only accessed by ferryboat, I can always predict when guests will arrive. I know the ferry schedule and can calculate the time for the crossing, the unloading of the boat and the drive down the spine of the island to the farm. I have very few surprises.

  Because I didn’t see his car coming down the driveway to the cookhouse, I began to be worried. He knew the way, having been here many times before. A few minutes later, his car peeked through the brambles at the base of the driveway, slowly heading up the hill. As he got out of the car and explained, I felt all of my apprehensions regarding his tardiness dissolve. At the driveway down by the main road, he had seen the cherry trees that form a canopy over the drive, and realized they were in full bloom, this being a beautiful spring day. He stopped the car, hopped out and with the help of a friend who was with him proceeded to climb up and pick the cherry blossoms. When he had his empty coffee cup filled with the delicate white flowers, he could then proceed.

  That evening he prepared Choiggia beets, fresh from the garden, roasted in the oven, sliced and served with pickled cherry blossoms. It was lovely, innovative and most certainly of this farm.

  When I go into the produce section of the supermarket and see the rows of vegetables, I can tell which items are produced close to home. My garden is the control specimen; I know that the vegetables that are ready at my farm are those that are the most in season. Granted, better farmers could push their vegetables to ripen a few days or a couple of weeks earlier, but essentially our crops all respond to the same weather in the same general location.

  In the supermarket are seasonal and local items, but also the vegetables and the fruits that have a seasonal reference on a cultural basis but not necessarily on an agricultural basis. For example, fava beans are thought of as an early spring vegetable. They appear on the menus of restaurants in April and May and in the supermarkets around the same time. Unless it is a most bizarre spring here and a quite mild winter, there is very litt
le chance of my having a ripe fava bean in April. Yes, the plants will have sprouted and grown and possibly even bloomed by the time I see the beans in the produce aisle, but mine will ripen a month later. Shelling peas are the same. I would love a bounty of peas in late April or early May, but I am often disappointed.

  I think this is the result of a uniform national culture of food despite a tremendous variety of climates over the fifty states. Making pumpkin pie on the third Thursday in November is expected no matter if you live in Hawaii or Alaska. The ripening of winter squash cannot possibly follow all of the many climate zones of this vast land.

  The nature of the food media has a contribution to this as well. I am not in the business of publishing magazines, but I would reckon that parts of the June issue of Food & Wine are written in the dark of winter, anticipating the sunny days of summer before they actually arrive. Even the food section of the New York Times is written days prior to its publication. Hence the food press and the national consciousness of the growing seasons is planned and standardized; ripeness is set by publication dates, not by the weather.

  The weather and the seasons control what comes into this kitchen to be prepared for dinner. Although I occasionally plant fruits and vegetables that are not ideally suited to this climate, I do tend to stick with those plants that thrive here. I think of it as a survival-of-the-fittest. Two years ago I planted four different varieties of raspberries in the beds directly behind the kitchen: one golden, one black and two different red raspberries were given equal real estate in the raised bed. I had thought that with the four varieties I could span the season well; keep raspberries on the table for a longer time period than with just one variety. I also envisioned a bowl of multicolored raspberries when all four berries came ripe at the same time.