A Cast of Characters

From Linda Colwell — Blog by Linda Colwell

May 30, 2009

The dame, Marguerite, in the fishnet neck is the oldest. She is caramelized brandied cherry liquor. To her right are two young whippersnappers Jude and Dane. They are brothers from black currants. The dark square bodied Guy on the left is an eight year-old French styled walnut liquor. He’s eccentric and sweet though a little cloudy with age. And the rotund matron in the middle with the lumpy figures is Matilda.

These characters live in a cupboard and come out when it is cold and dreary, viruses abound and cheer is in order. Sometimes when infected with a spring fever giddiness they’ll court some dish and consider themselves a perfect match. Often they are a quick shot or an eye-to-eye toast to a committed friendship. They are the bee’s knees.

Marguerite’s outfit has been in the family for generations. It is an old acid etched decanter with little stemmed glasses to match. Down to three from four after a tumble into a firestone sink, these glasses are fraternal triplets. Clearly intended to be identical they differ ever so slightly in shape and stance. Their hand blown uniqueness is a reminder of pre-manufacturing days. Mysteriously, Marguerite is improved by the vintage packaging that hides her flaws so well. Her cherries are all gone. They were sucked on when colds came knocking, laid beside fat rich charcuterie and scattered about in little bowls when guests arrived. Her pips remained inside, slowing down the mouth and entertaining the tongue. Indeed, there is something sad about the torn flesh of a perfect cherry.

Marguerite’s cherries were dark and juicy Bings from the Columbia River Gorge where the volcanic soils, cold winters and hot dry summers make some of the best cherries in the world. Cherries from here have a young history and names like Lambert and Black Republican. They’re relative elders, pushed aside, ripped out and replaced by young durable offspring with less character but the structure to travel long distances for export markets far away. Marguerite is burnt sugar syrup and brandy from 1996.

The whippersnappers, Jude and Dane, like many farm grown youth, are fresh and direct. Their fruit is thick skinned and seedy. Quite simple, they are a vodka and black beauty base with eight months of basement storage. A bit of sugar. And time. They fly through the mouth in a sweet and tart volley. The boys’ roots are on a Gaston OR farm where they were raised in a clean and wild environment. They are naïve and pleased with themselves. They are versatile, lean and bright. They can stand on their own or dress up with a splash of soda water. Recently, these dashing young men chased a toasted nut gateau down the gullet. I anticipate their maturation and mellowing.

I’d like to say Guy and Matilda are married but they are not. Guy is a mature old French recipe sometimes called 50-50-50- equal numbers of June green walnuts, sugar and alcohol. He leaves his dark stained mark on hands and wood. He comes from a walnut tree felled two doors down that dropped a mess too large to tolerate and cracked the sidewalk. He is her stubborn remains, hanging around to keep the memory of her alive. He is a devoted old son.

This Guy is strange. People either like him or not. There is an odd familiarity to him. He tastes a bit like Coca Cola. Yet, his sweetness quickly dissipates and is replaced by the bright memory of embryonic walnuts- he’s a flirt really, an old man. A ladies’ man.

He started in a jar on the kitchen counter. A chartreuse colored mass of ground green walnuts that bathed in the early summer sunshine and slowly turned brown-black from top to bottom. He is the subtleties that come with a stick of vanilla bean and fruit peels. A few handfuls of mint and lavender and some quality vodka. Then, like Jude and Dane, he spent a long dark winter in the basement with Matilda.

Ah, sweet Matilda. Matilda is Brooks Prunes and Armagnac. Look at her! So beautiful! Somewhat of a wallflower, I first met the likes of her about 27 years ago, a gift from a friend.

Nuggets of fleshy dried fruit soaked in booze, Matilda is more complicated than the others. She is soaked in a strong black-flower infused tea to bring tenderness back to her flesh. She bathes for years in an Armagnac and light brown syrup. The infusions of flavor are deepest in her nooks and crannies.

Matilda is happy stuffed inside a pork loin or nesting in the crook of a leg of duck confit. She’ll drape a bowl of homemade ice cream or drop in on a cup of coffee. She does well in nut cakes and fruit pies. She cures scratchy throats, angst filled teens and their parents. She soothes nursing mothers and their babies. Old ladies love her. Matilda courts and cultivates my love interests. Matilda has a poor reputation with the un-indoctrinated but is quite enchanting.

I adore these characters and their diverse personalities. I relish the anticipatory waiting from start to finish and the slow doling out of precious reserves. They are more than their origins, process and shared values. They are the loss of a valuable tree or a diverse palate. They are preserving for the future and hanging onto the past. They are appropriately self-centered at the peak of their fruit. Their seasonal immediacy is pertinent to their long-term success. They, and I, are parts towards a good end. I have to listen to their qualities and coax them along. Every year is a different year. They too are mastered by their own set of influences that may or may not bear a good year. And yet, there, in the pursuit of perfect, comes the nuances of their personalities. Cheers.

The Urban-Rural Divide

From Linda Colwell — Blog by Linda Colwell

May 19, 2009

I have a young understudy whose name is Julia. She is my childhood friend’s daughter. She is finishing her senior year in high school and has to do an internship of four forty hour weeks. I few months ago Julia asked me if I had ideas for a sustainable agriculture and/or bakery internship for her. I gave it some thought and delivered her a handful of options. #5 was to shadow my daily life for the month- Oh the pluck! Oh the nerve! Oh selfish and frisky me! I wanted time with this lovely young woman eager for knowledge about as much as I crave a perfect cocktail and I found the golden ticket, I won the lottery, I hit the jackpot, I got Julia.

Julia and I spend about three eight hour days together and the other two days she is at a farmers market or on an educational farm. I am not sure who is learning and enjoying the project more. I love to hear myself talk second only to hearing Julia talk about what she is seeing, smelling, tasting and learning. Yesterday she said she thinks fennel tastes like jumping in cool water on a hot summer day. She touches everything then smells her hands; lemon verbena, cardamom, tomato plants, corn, soil and food. I am painfully aware that I can’t smell like her anymore- too used and too old. Now I slowly adjust, I am the seamstress of her experience.

We spend two days a week on a 144 acre farm in Gaston Oregon and I can’t decide if we work hard or not. Hoeing two 300 foot rows of newbie raspberry canes in 85 degrees isn’t a piece of cake but eating sorrel soup, bread and butter and loganberry water for lunch is. Kneeling before a rain drenched alter of plastic sheeting ready to receive 150 melon transplants into the dense Oregon soil isn’t a picnic but eating sauerkraut soup with pork and leek bratwurst and mustard is. Building a supplemental food and agriculture curriculum can be wrought with challenges and deliberations but walking through the neighborhood noshing on edible flowers and weeds and talking botanical families is not. And then just simply making lunch from the findings in my fridge and talking about it is slowing my thoughts and my life to a reasonable rural-pace. “All because of Julia I say” as I wring my heart to understand why her appreciation for this attention to detail is in full bloom while others eat pizza up the boulevard.

And this isn’t, really it isn’t about me. The muscles in my body are competing with the muscle between my ears for first place. It is a continuous and heavy volley of rural Vs. urban ammo. Don’t make me dissect it, trust me. Large oceanic skies and waving fields of grasses Vs. noisy crowded masses distracted by competing messages. A deep ancient and yet familiar movement of past harvest, present work and future dreams Vs. chaos. It is a tremendous shock to re-enter the urban growth boundary let alone the urban world awareness. Never did I think that Julia’s journey would so fire mine. And when the fire gets really hot I start to cook.

My Great Aunt Francie

From Linda Colwell — Blog by Linda Colwell

May 4, 2009

This is my great aunt Francie making fritters. She is truly great in many ways. She is my grandmothers youngest sister. She still lives on her own, keeps her own garden, cans her tomatoes, pears and apples and every year says it is her last year with a garden but there is always one more year. She is the mother of Freddy which also makes her great. Freddy can play the accordion and swears like a sailor. Francie cooks a lot, plays cards at least once a week with her best friend Rose who makes really good candy. Out of respect to my dear Aunt Francie, I can’t tell you her age but I’m fifty this year.

Francie lives in the same house she was married in, raised her two boys in and buried her husband and one son in. Her porch overlooks an abandoned coal mine from the midsection of the twentieth century. Her house is close enough to have heard every alarm raised when there was an accident in the mine, including the one that killed her husband Frank.

For years, back in the fifties, Francie and her husband Frank ran the Slovenian Clubhouse in the small town of Yukon PA. Frank tended the bar before and after his shifts in the coal mine and Francie did the cooking and serving in the club kitchen. She still thinks in quantities. Later after Frank died, she worked in a butcher shop.

A few weeks ago I went to visit Aunt Francie with my mom, Bootsie Yaklich. I saw the coal mines, slate piles, monkey dumps and a way of life that is still brimming over with memories and traditions.

The night we arrived, Francie made a pot of chicken soup with home made noodles. She made two apple strudels for dessert, Freddy ate one before we even got there. He came back and ate more and started in on the orders for the weekend. “Pigs in a blanket”, meatballs and sauce and angel food cake to name a few. It was Easter weekend and a lot was expected. Francie cooked it all. Besides, when family visits, a lot of food is shared and most of the days are spent around the kitchen table eating, telling stories, playing cards, and getting caught up on the news and goings on.

In this part of the country “pigs in a blanket” are cabbage rolls stuffed with pork and rice and braised in a tomato sauce. Affectionately known as “pigs” we ate a dozen on Saturday night and delivered another 2 dozen to Molly and Lenny in Cleveland. The pot of meatballs and sauce was as big as I would make for a crowd of 25. These were a side dish for Easter supper and the extra went to Cleveland and one of three freezers.

In southwestern Pennsylvania there are still a lot of small scale family farms with small slaughter and butcher houses. The eastern European foods of the Slavs, Baltics, Polish, Hungarian and Italians are still around. Many traditions have blended and the culinary borders, like the country borders, have blurred and been redrawn. Family gardens are still kept in the same places that they’ve been kept for decades.

Francie is great at home style production cooking. Her cooking is real soul food. She cooks the way she has always cooked, the way she learned from her mother and sisters. Though they have all departed, Francie still cooks. Her cooking is what keeps her alive in more ways than one.

Transylvanian Rose Hip Jam

From Linda Colwell — Blog by Linda Colwell

May 2, 2009

I see rose hips in the wild, in cars passing by, on the backs of Romas and in the heavy bags sitting in the sun up against Emeneni’s house. She has two full bags of hand picked wild rose hips, about forty pounds in all. These wild rose hips are small and seedy and not at all like the big beach plum rose hips of the North American Atlantic coast. The Transylvanian rose hips are more like the wild rose hips of the Nootka or Dog roses in the Pacific Northwest, maybe smaller. Good for bears and birds, a lot of work for people.

It is Friday morning and Emeneni is already working. Large red and brown enamel pots simmer on the wood stove and hips are sorted into three qualities- perfect, rotten and use immediately. Her friend, a widow dressed for years in black, comes, goes and sets the pace for the day. She brings more equipment- grinders and screens- but little labor; “the arthritis is too bad”. The cat, splayed in the warm sun on the concrete threshold, measures the morning in naps, forages, and chases. Emeneni’s husband Imre brings tools and solutions. Clouds gather in the distant sky, calling down the high cool air of late October.

During my stay, I eat rose hip jam with bread. I eat the jam mixed into polenta for dessert after a course of polenta with milk and a course of polenta with cheese. Yes, three courses of polenta for dinner. Rose hip jam is a silky good balance of sweet and tart and bridges the distance between the two. It can play with cured meat, onion, cheese, corn, nuts, butter and cream.

Sitting next to Emeneni on the old chipped chair and with our backs into the morning sun, she instructs me with hand signs and smiles and shows me what she wants- the right hips to perfect her standards. Though there is no way to tell what the process will be, the vast amounts of rose hips, the simple equipment, time of day and number of hands involved in the work all say “ long and slow”. I settle into this work meditation and remember gossamered thoughts about staying in a monastery.

Rose hip jam is a welcome gift. Not many people make it at home anymore because it is a tedious process. Mothers, daughters, daughters-in-law, aunts and friends politely disagree about the general process, about how much cooking and sugar is needed and whether or not to use pectin. This is the women’s world and the men ante their assistance without crossing the threshold. There is constant reassessment and adjusting to do.

The longest day is ten hours and we eat, at 3:30, in a tired silence. We eat Emeneni’s old school pork sausage stored in the pantry in pork fat. She cooks them in sour cabbage and serves them with mashed potatoes. We drink local bottled water. We eat in the not-for-working kitchen and then go back to the for-working one. Emeneni’s grandson comes for money to get an ice cream at the corner ABC store. The neighbor checks on our progress and shakes her head. The cat is kicked out from under the stove. There is a constant flow of work, silence, laughter and people passing through the day, the door, and the production. We leave at 8’o clock at night in a downpour and with two large pots to finish at home over the next two days. The potholed drive home sloshes the jam into the seat beds and I smile as I think of child size fingers and sticky seat belts during the next drive to school.

The Recipe
Get the rose hips after the first frost. They are sweeter. Hand-sort the rose hips. Toss the ones with black spots to the chickens and split the remaining between two buckets: softest ones for “immediate use” jam and firmer ones for stored jam. Boil the hips long enough to soften. Cool ever so slightly. Pass through a meat grinder. Loosen with boiling water. Remove the seeds by passing through a sheet metal screen with holes and mounted in a wooden frame. Bury the seeds. Loosen with boiling water. Pass through a fine mesh screen in a wooden frame to remove the hairs. Boil to reduce water content. Add sugar. Reduce more to thicken. Put in jars. Store. Use to stave off winter colds.

Yield: Enough for a winter of family and friends.
Labor: Set aside plenty of time.

“all alone, all alone, Good is everywhere”

From Linda Colwell — Blog by Linda Colwell

April 29, 2009

I grew up when the cartoon Davy and Goliath was Sunday morning entertainment. Deborah and Patrick’s wonderful exploration of eating alone combined with the Davey’s chant “all alone, all alone, God is everywhere” brought a surprising collision of images from my reality and ideality sectors. The reality is I am rarely alone. The cat demands, the dog politely requests a share of avocado. The teens walk in like graveyard shifters in an all night diner to place their orders for food. My ideal is to be alone so I can eat, undisturbed and un-distracted, fully gluttonous in my attentions.

In the episode “All Alone”, Davey and his family are off on a Sunday family outing. Davey exploring, hops on a train and is trapped as the doors close and the train pulls away. Alone in the dark and empty train compartment, Davey’s fear of being all alone is comforted by the rhythm of the train chug-chugging along to the words “All alone all alone, God is everywhere”.

Two mornings ago, as the household slept late, I stole a moment, snuck about and made a new favorite. Puree of Watercress Soup with a duck egg poached in. A drizzle of olive oil and chili flakes. If the egg is just right it bleeds the warm centerpiece yolk into the green piquant goodness and leaves that wonderful tacky film on my lips.

My early childhood religious education has definitely contributed to my williness to find and yes, even look for godliness, in good food. As I tipped my hat to Davey and Ruth Cloakey Goodell (also the creator of Gumby) I sat quietly in my morning light and chanted “I’m alone I’m alone Good is everywhere”.