These Italian agri-tourists were lovely dinner companions who met the arrival of each course with intense interest, questions, and sometimes applause. My customary instincts about rural-urban antipathy ran aground here where our farmer hosts, wearing aprons tied over their work clothes, were the stars of the evening, basking in the glow of their city guests’ reverent appreciation.
The farm hotel often has the word fattoria in its name. It sounds like a place designed to make you fat, and I can’t argue with that, but it means “farm,” deriving from the same root as factory—a place where things get made. Our favorite fattoria was in Tuscany, not far from Siena, where many things were getting made on the day we arrived, including wine. We watched the grapes go through the crusher and into giant stainless steel fermenting tanks in a barn near our guest room. Some guests had brought work gloves to help pick grapes the next morning. We were on vacation from farm work, thanks, but walked around the property to investigate the gardens and cattle paddocks. A specialty of the house here was the beef of Chianina, the world’s largest and oldest breed of cattle, dating back to Etruscan times. Snow white, standing six feet at the shoulder, they are gentle by reputation but I found them as intimidating as bison.
In a vegetable garden near the main house an elderly farm worker walked slowly along on his knees, planting lettuces. When he finished his row he came over to talk with us, making agreeable use of his one word of English, “Yes!” Nevertheless we managed to spend an hour asking him questions; he was patient with the linguistically challenged, and his knowledge was encyclopedic. It takes 100 kilograms of olives to make 14 kilos of oil. The pH is extremely important. The quality of olives grown on this farm were (naturally) the best, with some of the lowest acid levels in all the world’s olive oil. This farm also produced a nationally famous label of wine, along with beef and other products. I was curious about wintertime temperatures here, which he said rarely dropped lower than freezing, although in ’87 a Siberian wind brought temperatures of –9°F, killing olive trees all over central Italy. On this farm they’d had no harvest for six years afterward, but because they had a very old, established orchard, it recovered.
All the olives here were harvested by hand. Elsewhere, in much of Italy, older trees have been replaced in the last two decades by younger orchards trimmed into small, neat box shapes for machine harvest. Mechanization obviously increases productivity, but the Italian government is now making an effort to preserve old olive orchards like the ones on this farm, considering their twisted trunks and spreading crowns to be a classic part of the nation’s cultural heritage.
Our new tour guide was named Amico. We seemed to be working our way through the alphabet of colorful Italian patriarchs. And if Amadeo was poetically devout, Amico really was Friendship personified. He showed us the field of saffron crocuses, an ancient and nearly extinct Tuscan crop that is recently being revived. Next came the vineyards. I asked how they protected the grapes from birds. He answered, by protecting their predators: civet cats, falcons, and owls patrol the farm by turns, day and night. Amico was also a big fan of bats, which keep down the insects, and of beneficial ladybugs. And he really loved the swallows that build their mud nests in the barns. They are marvelous birds, he insisted, rolling his eyes heavenward and cupping a hand over his heart. His other deepest passion appeared to be Cavolo Nero de Toscana—Tuscan black kale. He gave us an envelope of its tiny seeds, along with careful instructions for growing and cooking it. We were going to have Tuscan kale soup for supper that very night, a secret he disclosed with one of those long Italian-guy sighs.
At dinnertime, we were surprised when Amico took his place at the head of the table. He introduced himself to the rest of the guests, opening his arms wide to declare, “Amico de tutti!” This kind old man in dirty jeans we had taken that afternoon for a field hand was in fact the owner of this substantial estate. I took stock of my assumptions about farmers and landowners, modesty and self-importance. I’m accustomed to a culture in which farmers are either invisible, or a joke. From the moment I’d spied draft horses turning the soil of a glamorous city’s outskirts, Italy just kept surprising me.
That does it, I told Steven later that night, retrieving our well-traveled Zucche de Chioggia from the car. They’re not going to kick us out of this place for possession of pumpkin with agricultural intent. At worst they might tell us it’s doo-doo because it was grown in a different province. But no, the housekeeper admired it the next morning, and the kitchen staff without hesitation handed over an enormous knife and spoon. They suggested we butcher it down by the chicken and pig pens, where any fallout would be appreciated.
Indeed, the enormous pink pigs sniffed the air, snorted, and squealed as we whacked open our prize. Its thick flesh was custardy yellow, with a small cavity in the center packed with huge white seeds. We took pity on the wailing hogs and chopped up the pumpkin flesh for their dinner rather than ours, distributing the pieces carefully among the pens to avoid a porcine riot. Back in our room, I washed the sticky pulp from the seeds as best I could in our bathroom sink, but really needed a colander, which the kitchen staff also happily supplied. For the rest of our stay we spread out the seeds on towels in the sun, but they weren’t completely dried by the time we had to depart from the fattoria. They would mildew and become inviable if we left them packed in a suitcase, so the rest of our Italian vacation (in the rain, on the train) was in some way organized around opportunities to spread out the seeds for further drying. Most challenging was a fancy hotel room in Venice, where I put them in a heavy, hand-blown glass ashtray on the dresser. We were going out for the whole day so I left a note to housekeeping, whom I feared would throw them away. I gave it my best, something like: “Please not to disturb the seminary importants, Thanking You!”
But most of our days were spent in bucolic places where we and our seeds could all bask in the Tuscan sunshine, surrounded by views too charming to be believed. The landscape of rural central Italy is nothing like the celebrated tourist sights of North America: neither the uninhabited wildness of the Grand Tetons, nor the constructed grandeur of the Manhattan skyline. Tuscany is just farms, like my home county. Its beauty is a harmonious blend of the natural and the domestic: rolling hills quilted with yellowy-green vineyard rows running along one contour, silvery-green circles of olive trees dotting another. The fields of alfalfa, sunflowers, and vegetables form a patchwork of shapes in shades of yellow and green, all set at different angles, with dark triangles of fencerows and woodlots between them.
The effect is both domestic and wild, equal parts geometric and chaotic. It’s the visual signature of small, diversified farms that creates the picture-postcard landscape here, along with its celebrated gastronomic one. Couldn’t Americans learn to love landscapes like these around our cities, treasuring them not just gastronomically but aesthetically, instead of giving everything over to suburban development? Can we only love agriculture on postcards?
Tuscans and Umbrians have had a lot more time than we have, of course, to recognize the end of the frontier when they see it, and make peace with their place. They were living on and eating from this carefully honed human landscape more than a thousand years before the Pilgrims learned to bury a fish head under each corn plant in the New World. They have chosen to retain in their food one central compelling value: that it’s fresh from the ground beneath the diners’ feet. The simple pastas still taste of sunshine and grain; the tomatoes dressed with fruity olive oil capture the sugars and heat of late summer; the leaf lettuce and red chicory have the specific mineral tang of their soil; the black kale soup tastes of a humus-rich garden.
On the road to the fattoria we’d passed a modest billboard that seemed to epitomize the untranslatable difference between Italy’s food culture and our own. It’s a statement you just don’t hear from the tourist boards of America. It promised, simply:
Nostro terra…
E suo sapore.
I’m no expert, but I see what it means: You ca
n taste our dirt.
16 • SMASHING PUMPKINS
October
Driving through our little town in late fall, still a bit love-struck for Tuscany’s charm, I began to see my home through new eyes. We don’t have medieval hilltop towns here, but we do have bucolic seasonal decor and we are not afraid to use it. “Look,” I cried to my family, “we live in Pleasantville.” They were forced to agree. Every store window had its own cheerful autumnal arrangement to celebrate the season. The lampposts on Main Street had corn shocks tied around them with bright orange ribbons. The police station had a scarecrow out front.
As I have mentioned, yard art is an earnest form of self-expression here. Autumn, with its blended undertones of “joyful harvest” and “Trickor-Treat kitsch,” brings out the best and worst on the front lawns: colorful displays of chrysanthemums and gourds. A large round hay bale with someone’s legs hanging out of its middle. (A pair of jeans and boots stuffed with newspaper, I can only hope; we’ll call it a farm safety reminder.) One common theme runs through all these dioramas, and that is the venerable pumpkin. They were lined up in rows, burnished and proud and conspicuous, the big brass buttons on the uniform of our village. On the drive home from our morning’s errands we even passed a pumpkin field where an old man and a younger one worked together to harvest their crop, passing up the orange globes and stacking them on the truck bed to haul to market. We’d driven right into a Norman Rockwell painting.
Every dog has its day, and even the lowly squash finally gets its month. We may revile zucchini in July, but in October we crown its portly orange cousin the King Cucurbit and Doorstop Supreme. In Italy I had nursed a growing dread that my own country’s food lore had gone over entirely to the cellophane side. Now my heart was buoyed. Here was an actual, healthy, native North American vegetable, non-shrink-wrapped, locally grown, and in season, sitting in state on everybody’s porch.
The little devil on my shoulder whispered, “Oh yeah? You think people actually know it’s edible?”
The angel on the other shoulder declared “Yeah” (too smugly for an angel, probably), the very next morning. For I opened our local paper to the food section and found a colorful two-page spread under the headline “Pumpkin Possibilities.” Pumpkin Curry Soup, Pumpkin Satay! The food writer urged us to think past pie and really dig into this vitamin-rich vegetable. I was excited. We’d grown three kinds of pumpkins that were now lodged in our root cellar and piled on the back steps. I was planning a special meal for a family gathering on the weekend. I turned a page to find the recipes.
As I looked them over, Devil sneered at Angel and kicked butt. Every single recipe started with the same ingredient: “1 can (15 oz) pumpkin.”
I could see the shopping lists now:
1 can pumpkin (for curry soup)
1 of those big orangey things (for doorstep).
Come on, people. Doesn’t anybody remember how to take a big old knife, whack open a pumpkin, scrape out the seeds, and bake it? We can carve a face onto it, but can’t draw and quarter it? Are we not a nation known worldwide for our cultural zest for blowing up flesh, on movie and video screens and/or armed conflict? Are we in actual fact too squeamish to stab a large knife into a pumpkin? Wait till our enemies find out.
Two days later my mother walked in the kitchen door, catching me in the act of just such a murder, and declared “Barbara! That looks dangerous.”
I studied my situation objectively: the pumpkin was bluish (not from asphyxiation) but clinging tenaciously to life. I was using a truly enormous butcher knife, but keeping my fingers out of harm’s way. “Mom, this is safe,” I insisted. “I have good knife skills.”
Where her direct descendants are concerned, my mother’s opinion is that a person is never too old to lose digits or eyesight in the normal course of events.
Dad is another story. To be frank, he’s the reason Mom’s worry-skills remain acutely honed. Naturally he wanted to get in on the act here. “Step right up!” I said. My father’s career, before he retired, covered most kinds of emergency surgery imagined in the twentieth century, carried out in operating rooms that occasionally did not come equipped with electricity. I wasn’t going to argue with his knife skills.
The pumpkin kept the two of us sawing and sweating for a good thirty minutes while we made no appreciable progress. Our victim was a really large pumpkin of the variety called Queensland Blue. The seed catalog had lured me in with testimonials about its handsome, broad-shouldered Aussie physique and tasty yellow flesh. Next year, Amadeo’s warty Zucche de Chioggia would get to vie for the World Cup title of our pumpkin patch, but for now the Queensland Blue ruled. And this one was not yielding. My surgical assistant and I sawed some more, taking frequent breaks to review and strategize. I lusted in my heart after one of those “1 can (15 oz) pumpkin” recipes.
Cooking pumpkin from scratch may not be for the fainthearted, but it’s generally not that hard. I wasn’t merely trying to hack it to pieces—if that had been our goal, Dad would have dispatched it in no time flat. But I was being girly, insisting on cutting open the top as neatly as possible to scoop out the seeds and turn the whole thing into a presentable tureen in which to bake pumpkin soup. I have two different cookbooks that feature this as a special-guest recipe. Meanwhile we received plenty of advice from the bystanders (what are families for?), all boiling down to the opinion that it would taste exactly the same if we just smashed it. But this was a special dinner and I was doing it up right. “You’ll see, go away,” I said sweetly, waving my knife. I never went to chef school but I know what they say: presentation, presentation, presentation.
Our occasion was Thanksgiving declared a month early, since all of us wouldn’t be able to convene on the actual day. Turkeys galore were now wedged into our freezer, postharvest, but today’s family gathering included some vegetarians who would not enjoy a big dead bird on the table, however happily it might have lived its life. Meatless cooking is normal to me; I was glad to make a vegetarian feast. But today, as hostess, I felt oddly pressed by tradition to have some kind of large, autumnally harvested being, not just ingredients, as the centerpiece for our meal. A hearty pumpkin soup baked in its own gorgeous body would be just the thing for a turkeyless Thanksgiving.
Or so I’d thought, before I knew this one would not go gentle into that good night (as Dylan Thomas advised). Even our meanest roosters hadn’t raged this hard against the dying of the light. At length, Dad and I ascertained the problem was our Queensland Blue, which was almost solid flesh, lacking the large open cavity in its center that makes the standard jack-o’-lantern relatively easy to open up. We finally performed something like trephination on our client, creating a battle-weary but still reasonably presentable hollowed-out tureen. I rubbed the cavity with sea salt and poured in milk I’d heated with plenty of sage and roasted garlic. (Regular, lactose-free, or soy milk work equally well.) I set it carefully into the oven to bake. According to the recipe, after an hour or so of baking I could use a large spoon to scrape gently at the inside of the tureen, stirring the soft, baked pumpkin flesh into the soup.
Trading Fair and Square
* * *
The local food movement addresses many important, interconnected food issues, including environmental responsibility, agricultural sustainability, and fair wages to those who grow our food. Buying directly from small farmers serves all these purposes, but what about things like our pumpkin pie spices, or our coffee, that don’t grow where we live?
We can apply most of the same positive food standards, minus the local connection, to some imported products. Coffee, tea, and spices are grown in environmentally responsible ways by some small-scale growers, mostly in the developing world. We can encourage these good practices by offering a fair wage for their efforts. This approach, termed fair trade, has grown into an impressive international effort to counter the growing exploitation of farmers in these same countries. Consumer support for conscientious small growers helps counter the corporate ad
vantage, and sustains their livelihoods, environments, and communities.
Coffee is an example of how fair trade can work to the advantage of the grower, consumer, and environment. As an understory plant, coffee was traditionally grown under a shaded mixture of fruit, nut, and timber trees. Large-scale modern production turned it into a monoculture, replacing wild forests with single-crop fields, utterly useless as wildlife habitat, doused heavily with fertilizers and pesticides. This approach is highly productive in the short term, but causes soil erosion and kills tropical biodiversity—including the migratory birds that used to return to our backyards in summer. Not to mention residual chemicals in your coffee. In contrast, farmers using traditional growing methods rely on forest diversity to fertilize the crop (from leaf litter) and help control coffee pests (from the pest predators that are maintained). Although their yields are lower, the shade-grown method sustains itself and supports local forest wildlife. Selecting shade-grown and fair-trade coffee allows these small-farm growers a chance to compete with larger monocrop production, and helps maintain wildlife habitat.
Independent certification agencies (similar to those that oversee organic agriculture) ensure that fair trade standards are maintained. As demand grows, the variety of products available has also grown to include chocolate, nuts, oils, dried fruits, and even hand-manufactured goods. For more information see www.transfairusa.org, www.fairtrade.net or www.ifat.org.
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