Finding the Flavors We Lost: From Bread to Bourbon, How Artisans Reclaimed American Food

196 Pages·2016·1.25 MB·English

by  Patric Kuh

DEDICATION
FOR MY SISTER,
MICAELA
CONTENTS
DEDICATION
PART ONE
TO LAND
TO CRAFT
TO PLACE
TO MARKET
TO TABLE
PART TWO
TO DISTILL
TO BAKE
TO BREW
PART THREE
TO ESSENCE
TO WORK
TO SCALE
TO HARVEST
TO TELL
CODA
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY PATRIC KUH
CREDITS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
PART ONE
TO LAND
128TH AVENUE, FENNVILLE, MICHIGAN
OCTOBER 28, 1978
I
t was the day of Alyce Birchenough and Doug Wolbert’s wedding. The home-
brewed root beer was chilling, some friends were setting up their bluegrass
instruments on the porch, and others were hauling kegs of beer when a local
farmer pulled into the rutted driveway. Hitched to his truck was a trailer holding
a single cow. She was to be Doug’s present to Alyce, the animal that would help
them to revitalize the thirty-three acres of depleted soil they’d settled on in
western Michigan. Doug hadn’t nailed down the delivery date and, attuned to the
casual ways of Fennville, he reasoned this just happened to be a lull when the
farmer had time. Still, he was more than a little surprised to learn the cow hadn’t
been milked. Was that customary? There she was, in the trailer, her udder tight,
obviously in pain. Alyce and Doug exchanged a glance. Alyce immediately
understood that this was Doug’s gift. But today? Had he forgotten to tell the
farmer that this was precisely the date not to bring the cow? Then again, maybe
he had and this was a rural statement: you wanted country living, well, here you
go.
Their relationship with the locals had been much on Alyce’s mind in the few
months since she had moved to Fennville. They lived in the town, a small
farming community near the eastern shore of Lake Michigan with an active 4-H
youth agriculture club, sport leagues, and churches, but they were not of it.
Instead of buying their staples from the local grocery stores, they got them in
bulk from a Chicago co-op whose truck intermittently undertook the four-hour
drive to service a ragtag group of communes. Alyce winced at how this could be
interpreted as rejecting the community, but she had come to the land to be, in a
word, de-Twinkiefied, and she was actively pursuing that when she stood by the
vehicle’s rusty tailgate using her own scales to measure out whole wheat flour,
brown rice, and chickpeas.
Less than a mile from their homestead, Fenn Valley Vineyards had opened a
few years previously and was selling natural fruit wines, but the townspeople
mainly thought of it as a curiosity. Alyce and her friends were an even greater
one. Dungarees, beards, homespun vests, loose handmade dresses cut from
patterns, dinged-up hats; they looked like farmers all right—from another
century. Still, there was no animosity; perhaps there was even a hint of
admiration at their sense of thrift. The newcomers’ vehicles—a fleet of
sputtering, backfiring decal-covered vans—weren’t going to show up anyone’s
pickup. The home-canned tomatoes that might bring sunshine to a winter table
were not that far from what was going on in surrounding kitchens. When a
farmer whose peaceable Guernsey was being picked on by the Holsteins in the
herd decided to sell her, he put a notice in the local paper and Doug responded.
Whatever differences existed had not prevented a sale.
Alyce had gotten into the habit of extrapolating great significance from little
evidence. Those times when, driving over the rutted dirt byway that linked their
farm to asphalted roads, she received a country greeting—finger lifted off
steering wheel from an oncoming car—she could be happy for days. They were
being accepted. Now, standing before her, was a farmer pointing out that the
cow he had with him hadn’t been milked and she understood that instead of a
taunt, this was rural showmanship, a way of displaying for them just how much
milk the cow could produce.
She could contemplate those subtleties later. There wasn’t time for
rumination. She saw the cow pawing in its trailer in obvious discomfort. Alyce
and Doug had readied a shed across from the house and she led the cow toward
it while Doug finished up with the farmer. Rushing back across the driveway and
into the kitchen, she found an enamel pail and, remembering quickly the steps of
milking she’d studied in anticipation of this moment in Carla Emery’s The
Encyclopedia of Country Living, she raced back out to the animal. Grab high on
teat near udder, the first of Emery’s three drawings instructed. Applying the
gentle pressure that Emery described, while all the time squeezing to force the
milk downward, Alyce started the repetitive up-and-down movements. Who was
this person she was becoming? She wasn’t some kind of pioneer woman who
would have been practiced in these farmstead skills. She was someone who less
than a decade earlier had been a science major celebrating the first Earth Day
with much strumming of guitars on the campus of Southeastern Louisiana
University. Now she was taking possession of a cow on her wedding day.
Sounds often accompany life’s turning points—the creak of a door closing in a
place we won’t return to, a newborn’s cry—and Alyce felt there was something
of that to the hissing the milk made as it hit the bottom of the enamel pail.
BY THE FOLLOWING WEEK DOUG and Alyce had gotten used to the rhythms of
milking and named their Guernsey Cindy Lou. The occasional mooing they’d
hear from the shed or the sight of her swishing her tail nose down in a tuft of
grass contributed a sense of permanence to their new life. It was your typical
1970s homestead: a modest structure, a scrawny garden, some sheds, a three-
seater outhouse, and only five workable acres. The poor quality of the land—
heavy with sand that blew from the deforested edges of Lake Michigan—was
part of the reason Doug had been able to buy the property. His first task had
been to clear it of the car shells and debris that the previous owners had left.
Soon after, he’d set up a sawmill that ran from power he took off a rotating
tractor belt, and he often accepted lumber in payment for transforming a log into
a stack of boards. It was a simple life, punctuated with occasional parties that
gathered the local back-to-the-land community in one setting.
Alyce had attended one of those gatherings when, unsure where her life was
going, she’d first visited Michigan. A New Orleans native, Alyce had moved to
Connecticut soon after graduating from college and worked for a time as a
nutritionist at Yale–New Haven Hospital. It had been a disappointing
experience; the doctors barely took her suggestions seriously. The nods her
nutrition and wellness recommendations received were only a maddening form
of dismissal—they were never included in the instructions the doctors jotted
down. While others might have made their peace with the situation, Alyce saw
no need to cede as important a point. She’d left, traveled, and eventually visited
a college roommate friend living in the town of Holland, an artistically inclined
town on Lake Michigan, fifteen miles north of Fennville.
The two friends had driven down to one of Doug’s parties and, over the
course of a few weeks, Alyce fell in love with the rangy Wolbert. His farm and
its land needed a lot of work—the brush pushed right against the back of the
house—but she admired how he was going at it, slowly and alone, armed with
little more than a deep appreciation for self-sufficiency, something she, too,
shared. Many of the improvements he’d made to the hodgepodge house had an
endearingly off-kilter quality—pulling a chain in the kitchen let a jet of fresh air
in through a roof trap—and over repeated visits she started to picture herself
joining him in his quiet life. It didn’t take much convincing to get her to stay—
still, she had standards. The three-seater outhouse had to become indoor
plumbing. In a climate with only 120 frost-free days a year it didn’t seem to
Doug such an outlandish demand.
Perhaps a little comfort was perfectly fitting, even deserved. Though there
was a long tradition of sects rejecting the trappings of cities, disengagement did
not necessarily induce hardship. Rappites, Mennonites, Shakers, Perfectionists—
all managed to pursue transcendent goals while enjoying their share of temporal
pleasures in the form of breads, dried fruits, vinegars, whiskeys, and hams.
Charles Nordhoff’s 1875 study of these communities put it succinctly. “I have
found it generally true,” he wrote after years of research, “that the members of
communistic societies take life easy.”
If anything, modern times had taken some of that simplicity away. No
previous landward-looking generations had been more curiously studied or
mercilessly skewered than those of the 1960s and 1970s. News coverage dripped
with condescension. One expected it from Fortune and Time, but it bore a
particular sting when written by contemporaries who cast the urge to move to the
land as a tiresome set piece. Instead of finding solidarity in the pages of Working
Papers for a New Society—a short-lived quarterly aimed against the status quo
—one found mistrust. There’s almost a prosecutorial thoroughness to Rosabeth
Moss Kanter’s 1974 description of a typical urban commune interior. Typically,
such “wayside inns on the route to the country” consisted of “windows full of
plants, batches of drying herbs, tattered oriental carpets, clutter of furniture, pets,
smells of incense and marijuana, old barn boards and rough wood shelves in the
kitchen holding mason jars of organic grains.” In the same publication, in a 1973
issue, Andrew Kopkind chose to narrow the focus to a single Vermont
commune, the aptly named Mayday Farms, which “occupied a comparative
middle ground between the austere and the amenable in style, between the
revolutionary and the psychedelic in politics, between the farmers and the
hangers-out, between the lower and the upper in class background of the
members.” With such a jumble of elements, it was no wonder few communes
lasted.
As homesteaders, Alyce and Doug were spared the travails that accompanied
communal living. They were landowners involved in at least a nominal form of
farming with a few chickens and, now with their cow, even animal husbandry.
Already, two weeks after Cindy Lou’s arrival, Alyce could not keep up with the
volume of milk she could produce. Containers filled the fridge. She tried
churning butter, added Hansen’s rennet tablets she bought at the store to make
custardlike junket pudding. Going one step further, she even tried her hand at
making cheese. Her food sciences training made the process of cheesemaking
appear simple. The initial acidification lowered the pH to counter any lurking
pathogens, culturing established the desired microbes, a measure of rennet
allowed for the separation of cultures and liquid, and . . . nothing came out.
Nothing that they would want to eat at least. It was time to turn to Carla Emery
again.
Started in 1970 with an ad in Organic Gardening magazine, Emery’s
standard guide to surviving on the land was for its first seven printings a series
of three-hole-punched mimeographed sheets that spoke of hard-won
experiences. In the late ’60s, she’d moved to an almost deserted stretch in
northern Idaho and soon found herself in what she later described as “a
tremendous out-migration from cities to country.” With time she became the
voice of authority on every conceivable aspect of self-sufficiency. Despite
passages on serene activities such as candle making, to read Emery’s
Encyclopedia is to be reminded of the realness of the homesteading enterprise.
“You could use a .22 but a 30-30 or bigger is surer,” she says in her typically
thorough manner on the subject of gun gauges used for cow slaughtering. “Try
very hard to get it right with the first shot.” Cheesemaking could hardly be
considered a challenge after that.
And yet, despite Emery’s clear instructions, the cheeses Alyce tried to make
were not cooperating. To help her, Doug bought her a Wagner’s Gourmet Home
Cheesery, an ill-conceived beginner’s kit popular at the time. The press where
the cheese was molded was a coffee-can-size plastic cylinder with a threaded rod
running down the center. Pressure was applied with plates and wing nuts on
either end. The problem was that when the cheese was set and the rod drawn out,
it left a long, hollow passage behind. A moist, dark, air-filled hole, precisely the
kind of spot where pathogens could establish a home base. The cheese didn’t
mature because it rotted first. It was enough to make Alyce question the whole
undertaking. Country greetings were nice, but Alyce and Doug weren’t country
people. What was this undertaking of theirs?
If she had been a pioneer woman, the knowledge of cheesemaking would
have been there, passed on from a mother or a family tradition. Dairy work had
always been the work of women, a way to sustain the household in the long
periods between payment for crops. We can appreciate just how demanding that
work was in the 1898 diary a Mormon woman left where, with a brevity that
itself speaks of fatigue, she delineates the daily tasks.