Made by Hand

by Mark Frauenfelder

  One early December afternoon in 2008, while I was working in my office in the guesthouse, I heard a car honking loudly outside. I knew it wasn’t the UPS guy, because he always announced his arrival with two polite taps on his truck horn. This honking sounded urgent. I hurried out of the cottage and saw a dust-covered brown 1980s Crown Victoria in the driveway. When I got closer, I recognized the driver. It was Alfie.

  Alfie’s a short, sturdy man who looks like Picasso. He’s about eighty years old. We first met one morning about four years ago, when I went outside to pick figs from our tree. Alfie was already there, picking figs and putting them into a paper bag. He saw me, said hello, and kept picking. His audaciousness irked me. I curtly told him to save some of the figs for me; I was the tree’s owner, after all.

  “But they’re rotting!” he exclaimed. I saw that one of his eyes was bright blue, the other milky white.

  “I don’t care,” I said. “I don’t want you to take any more.”

  He grumbled and got into his car and drove off, taking several pounds of my figs with him. I picked the remaining ripe figs off the tree and brought them into the house. I had just started to tell Carla what had happened when we heard an insistent series of honks outside. I looked out the window.

  “That’s him!” I told Carla. “He came back!”

  “Go out and see what he wants.”

  I met Alfie as he was getting out of his car. In his hands were a plastic bag and a small knife with an orange handle.

  “I want to give you this,” he said, handing the bag to me. It was filled with garden-grown peppers, parsley, and basil. “And look at this,” he said. He leaned into the open window of his car and grabbed a page from an Arabic newspaper. “Now, watch.” He held a corner of the sheet of newspaper in one hand and, with the orange-handled knife in his other hand, began slicing strips from the newspaper, letting them fall to the ground.

  “These are my knives,” he said. “They can slice anything—except raw meat. Cooked meat, OK, raw meat—don’t do it. My knives are in all the Subways. They all know me! Tell them you know Alfie. This knife is for you.” He held the knife out to me, handle side first.

  Sheepishly I took the knife and introduced myself. I apologized for getting crabby with him about the figs. He explained that the previous owners of our house had given him permission to harvest figs and persimmons from the property, and he hadn’t realized they’d moved. I told him he was welcome to take our figs anytime, and he thanked me.

  “Follow me,” he said. He got in his car and started driving away very slowly. I walked quickly behind the car to keep up. I wondered how long I was going to have to follow him down the street, and where we were going.

  Alfie turned the corner and drove very slowly for another half a block, stopping in front of a vacant lot barricaded by a metal fence. He got out and unlocked the gate. The lot was about a half acre and was filled with black five-gallon plastic containers holding pepper bushes, citrus trees, and more. There were numerous other vegetables growing in the ground, along with dozens of trees sagging with fruit.

  “This was my house,” he said. “It was destroyed in the earthquake.” (He was referring to the Northridge earthquake of 1994, which killed fifty-seven people, injured at least nine thousand people, and caused between $20 billion to $40 billion in damage.) Alfie’s house had been beyond repair, so he’d torn it down and turned it into a very large garden. He lived with his wife in a condominium a couple of miles away.

  I wasn’t as interested in gardening then as I am now, so I didn’t give too much thought to his garden, nor did I ask many questions about his methods for producing such bumper crops.

  As the months passed, Alfie’s honks (and gifts of knives) became a welcome and almost regular occurrence. I started paying more attention to the tips he offered. He told me I should collect fallen leaves and lawn clippings into a pile near my garden to make compost. He explained how to prune away the branches from the fig tree once growing season was over to ensure a good harvest the following year. Usually he offered this advice while helping himself to our persimmons, loquats, and feijoas, always without asking. By this time, I liked Alfie too much to care about this quirk of his. He never went into much detail about himself, but I learned that he was from Iran and that, besides being a knife salesman, he had also been in the book-distribution business.

  I hadn’t seen Alfie for a few months, and I was happy to see him that day in December. He’d brought his wife along, a pretty, well-dressed woman who looked to be ten or fifteen years his junior.

  “Do you remember me?” he asked.

  “Of course I do, Alfie!” I said, opening the gate to let them in.

  “Good!” he replied. “I’ve been trying to come here for persimmons, but you aren’t home.”

  “I guess we just missed each other.” I told him that all the persimmons were already off the tree but that I’d dried a bunch. I went in the house to get some for him. When I stepped back outside, Alfie was shaking the branches of the feijoa tree to make the fruits drop to the ground. He had about six of them in his hands, so I went back inside to get a bag for him, for which he thanked me. He filled the bag with fruit, went to his car, and gave me another knife, demonstrating its sharpness on a sheet of newspaper.

  “Do you want to come with me now?” he asked. “I have things to give you.” I was interested to find out how his garden was coming along in the late fall. I hopped on my bicycle and pedaled behind his car.

  Once we had arrived at the yard, Alfie and his wife got out of the car, and Alfie’s wife settled in one of the plastic lawn chairs under a large tree.

  “One day, I come over, I give your wife recipes,” said Alfie. “If you eat, you go crazy. You say, ‘I live so long, I never tasted this food?’ Something out of this world. You’re going to thank me all your life.”

  Alfie’s wife told me to bring my bike into the lot so no one would take it.

  “Good idea,” I said, then brought it into the yard and leaned it against a tree.

  “Where did you learn to cook?” I asked Alfie.

  “Oh, I know a lot of good recipes,” he said, leading me through the rain-soaked garden. “I know Israeli food, I know Iraqi food, I know Persian food. I know things you could not even imagine.”

  Birds squawked at us from the trees.

  “Everything is mutual,” he said. “If you’re nice to me, I’m nice to you. I like you. The first time I met you I thought you were a good person.” (I wondered how he could think that after I’d acted so peevish about his fig pilfering.)

  He led me to the back of the lot. There were so many trees and tall plants around that I felt like I was in another country, not a mere block away from my house. A rooster crowed off in the distance.

  “I will show you something,” he said.

  Alfie stopped in front of a plant loaded with chubby little green peppers. He picked one and handed it to me. “Eat this. It’s clean. Eat this pepper. It’s sweet.” I popped it into my mouth. He was right. It was sweet and crunchy. “It’s like cucumber,” he said.

  “What kind of pepper is it? What’s it called?”

  Ignoring my question, he said, “I show you here.” He picked up a one-gallon plastic container with a pepper plant, pulled a few of the brown leaves, and handed the pot to me. “Here. I give you this one.”

  I thanked him and asked him again what kind of pepper it was.

  “No, no. This is different. You don’t find this in America.”

  “Where did you get them?”

  He turned away from me. “From Middle East, I get.” He started picking peppers from the larger bushes and handing them to me. I had no bag, so I stuffed them in my pockets. “They usually sweet at this stage, but be careful, because the weather is changing.”

  I tried one. “They’re sweet,” I said.

  “If you pick them small, they are sweet,” he said. “And I give you some recipes how you can use.” He started off in a new direction.
I followed.

  I noticed a run-down chicken coop along a fence near the back. “Did you keep chickens here?”

  “I did keep, but a dog came and killed them.” He stopped in front of a large pile of black compost, surrounded by ten or twelve five-gallon plastic pots full of the stuff in various stages of decomposition.

  “This is the best compost in the world, because this has worms.”

  “Did you put worms in it?” I asked, looking at the pink and red earthworms wriggling in the soil he was upturning in one of the containers.

  “They create worms!” he said. I asked him what he meant by “create worms.” He explained that crushed old fruit will spontaneously generate worms.

  I had no desire to argue with him. I was more interested in finding out how he made this loamy compost.

  “The scientists,” he continued, “they even don’t know how this worms eat the leaf and the shit that comes out of them—it’s the best fertilizer in the world. Oh, my God, everything grow like you can’t even imagine.”

  It was hard getting a straight answer out of Alfie, because he was always on to the next thing, walking away before I had a chance to fully understand something. But I told him I really wanted to know how he made the compost.

  “I put leaves in a pile, and I put ammonium sulfate—you know ammonium sulfate? It looks like sugar. A bag twenty pounds for three dollars at Home Depot. Or horse manure. I mix and put water, and they will rot. They will be best fertilizer in the world. And something else—you know what is elephant garlic?”

  “The giant garlic bulbs?”

  “Yeah. I give you some babies, and if you grow them for thousands of years, without planting them every year you get some and they give babies and every year you will have them.” I assumed he wasn’t telling me to stick the garlic directly into the compost but just hopping from subject to subject a bit faster than technically comprehensible.

  I was trying to memorize Alfie’s compost recipe while he led me away. “I want you to try something else.” We wound our way through the dense foliage. We passed by a fig tree, and I asked him about it.

  “Oh, in March or February I give you cuttings. I have figs you’ve never tasted in your life. You don’t see them in the market. I have four or five kinds. When you eat them—like chocolate. If you close your eyes and eat them, you think it’s chocolate.”

  He stopped at a row of pepper plants and pulled a couple from each plant. Some were round like marbles, some were like small jalapeños, others were like cayennes. But they all tasted sweet. “You never get these peppers in America,” he said again. “If you chop this and you put one or two hot also with them and make an omelet with eggs—ah, delicious!”

  Since we were on the subject of food preparation, I asked him if he made his own yogurt.

  “It’s very easy. You know how?”

  “No, I’ve been reading how to, but I don’t really know.”

  “You boil the milk. It has to be whole milk. One or two boilings. Put it aside for a while until you can put finger in and it doesn’t burn. Then you put one or two or three spoons of yogurt and mix it and cover it and put it in the oven for a little while without the oven on and you wait a little while.”

  Before I got the chance to ask him how long you have to wait, he had plucked a few small greenish-yellow fruits from a nearby tree. They looked like unripe grapefruits. “These fruits you’ve never tasted in all your life.” He pulled a knife that was sticking blade down in a pot of dirt, rinsed it under a hose, and cut one of the lemons into quarters, handing it to me. I bit into it, expecting it to be tart, but it was just the opposite—sweet, like a kid’s drink, without acidity.

  “This is good!” I said. “Will it grow from a seed?” I was thinking of saving the seeds from the piece he’d given me.

  “No. No.”

  “Is it something you got in the Middle East, too?”

  “Yeah, yeah. And I’ll tell about this. If somebody has cold, if you eat eight, ten of this, he’s gonna jump back up after a day.”

  My pockets full of peppers and sweet lemons, I said goodbye to Alfie and his wife and rode my bike home.

  Since moving from Tarzana to Studio City in the spring of 2009, I have had to start over with a new garden. Unfortunately, the difficulty of the move and predator problems with the chickens have kept me too busy to establish the large garden I’d planned. And besides, the new property doesn’t really offer a good gardening spot. I ended up buying several “Earth Boxes,” plastic containers with a reservoir at the bottom that stores water, which wicks up into the soil, preventing it from drying out. The benefit of the system is that you don’t have to water the plant every day, as you do with a normal container.

  Earth Boxes come with a bag of soil and organic fertilizer. In early summer 2009, Jane and I transplanted some pepper, basil, and sunberry seedlings (from seeds I’d ordered the previous August) into them, and I was shocked at how fast the plants shot up. As our new deck is quite large, I could easily put twenty or more Earth Boxes on it and grow a bountiful fruit and vegetable harvest. But I won’t grow sunberries again. They ripened and looked like delicious blueberries, but when Jane and I sampled them, they were loaded with hard, slimy seeds and had an offputting aftertaste. Jane was so disappointed in them that she almost cried. Fortunately, chickens love them.

  I’ve also begun planting fruit trees, designating the steep undeveloped slope below the chicken coop as the orchard. I hope to establish fig, feijoa, grapefruit, citrus, and persimmon trees here, as we had at our place in Tarzana, as well as a variety of more exotic trees, such as dragonfruit, banana, pineapple, mango, cinnamon, and maybe even coffee, all of which have been successfully grown in Los Angeles. I’m sure it will take a long time for the trees to bear fruit, but I’m in no hurry.

  Growing things to eat and making foods like yogurt, sauerkraut, and kombucha have only encouraged me to learn more, to try new gardening techniques, to preserve my harvests using different methods. When I meet a fellow food gardener, we end up talking endlessly about our experiments, failures, and successes. I can’t think of anything more fascinating or engaging than the magic and science of converting tiny seeds into beautiful, tasty fruits and vegetables. I’m sorry I didn’t start doing it earlier in life.

  4

  TICKLING MISS SILVIA

  “I define a Godshot as a better shot than I’ve ever made before. Each time I pull one, the bar goes up a little and it will be harder to pull the next one.”

  —KARL RICE, ALT.COFFEE NEWSGROUP, 2001, REFERRING TO THE PERFECT SHOT OF ESPRESSO

  Milanese manufacturing plant owner Luigi Bezzera was upset. In his opinion, his workers spent too much time making coffee and not enough time on his assembly lines. Bezzera devised a steam-powered solution to speed things up: a machine that shot steam through coffee grounds directly into a cup in just twenty seconds—coffee made to order. Now his employees could get their caffeine and get right back to work.

  Bezzera’s employees back in 1901 may not have appreciated their truncated breaks, but they loved the strong, caffeinated nectar. Figuring he was onto something, Bezzera patented his “fast coffee machine,” now regarded as the first espresso machine. The coffee was somewhat bitter because the steam was too hot (higher temperatures produce bitter coffee, lower temperatures produce sour coffee), but it caught on. A few years later, Desiderio Pavoni bought Bezzera’s patent and immediately went to work on improving it, the main modification being a pressure-relief valve. His “Ideale” machine was introduced at the 1906 Milan International Fair, and while it was more successful than Bezzera’s original, it still used the steam-extraction method that caused bitterness.

  It wasn’t until 1947, when Giovanni Achille Gaggia patented a machine with a lever-operated piston—doing away with the need for high-temperature steam to push water through the coffee—that modern espresso was born. In addition to producing a coffee that was less bitter and more acidic (not to be confused with sourness, acidity
is something to be desired in coffee), Gaggia’s invention yielded a delicious new component: crema, the dark orange foam that forms on the top of a well-pulled shot of espresso.

  Like millions of other people, I’m an espresso enthusiast. (The last time I can recall going without a cup of the black gold was in 1995, when I spent an otherwise fabulous day on an uninhabited island in the South Pacific.) Espresso is an important part of my life, a twice- (often thrice-) daily ritual for my wife and me. I’d been drinking coffee for years but never really appreciated it until, in my early twenties, I tried an espresso at a café in Denver. For the first time, I could really taste the coffee. That weak, sour brown water I’d been drinking during all-nighters in the dorm was nothing like this rich-smelling, strong drink that was served to me in a comically miniature cup with a slice of lemon peel on the side. The instant it passed my lips, I became hooked. I’ve made my own espresso for the past fifteen years or so, but despite having read many how-to articles, I never felt as though I’d gotten the hang of it. That started to bug me. If I was going to be drinking at least two double shots of espresso daily without fail, I decided I ought to get better at making my own.

  The first thing I did was go online and read about making espresso. I discovered that there were a number of variables: ▶ The type of coffee bean (go for arabica, not robusta)

  ▶ The freshness of the roast (ideally, two weeks or less)

  ▶ The freshness of the grind (one day or less)

  ▶ The type of grind (burr, not blade)

  ▶ The amount of force used to tamp the coffee down in the filter (thirty pounds)

  ▶ The water temperature (198 degrees)

  ▶ The extraction time (twenty to thirty seconds)

  Though I tried my best to control these variables, the appearance and taste of the espresso I made varied wildly from shot to shot. Sometimes the coffee gurgled out of the machine, weak and musty. Others, it dribbled out sour and muddy. Sometimes the grind was too fine, so the pump would choke on it, and only a few drops would come out.