Trauma Farm (21 page)

SEVERAL YEARS AGO SHARON
and I served a meal in honour of a visiting Italian poetry professor. Another guest complimented our cooking and asked the professor what he thought of the food. The professor snorted extravagantly: “It’s easy to cook a meal like this.” Our friend was aghast at his cavalier remark, but I laughed because I knew exactly what he meant. He was a true epicure. “How can they go wrong?” he blustered on, realizing his words had been misinterpreted. “Our hosts have real food, vegetables and fruits straight from the garden, meat from their land. These are the ingredients of the best meals. Only a bad cook could ruin them.” He was right, and so very Italian.

I try not to gather our produce until we eat. We are fortunate to live in a climate where we can grow crops year-round, though we have to cloche the more delicate winter greens. This good fortune allows me to go out on a cold, dark evening and gather the precious leaves of
mizuna,
gai lin, mei king choi,
and carrots under their mulch of seedless canary grass. We also grow and store good winter root vegetables.

My favourite vegetable is cob corn in September. I eat it raw in the garden, a leftover childhood habit. The traditional varieties are now known as “cow corn” because they’re used to fatten up the unfortunate cattle in feedlots. We still grow old-fashioned cobs, though they’re becoming extinct because the seed industries are eliminating most varieties from the market. The new, small-kernelled super-sweets are too much like mushy candy for my taste. They don’t have enough texture and density; Sharon is addicted to them, however, and we have to plant multiple varieties to satisfy us both. Corn is also determinate, which means each variety ripens in a certain number of days, so we grow early, mid-season, and late corn, ensuring a continuous supply and a few torchy discussions as we trade off favourites during seed ordering.

The sugar in corn begins turning to starch as soon as it’s picked. That’s why the hybrid super-sweets are grown for the public, because these can store for several days and still taste sweet, but a good cow corn, which has texture and density, is their equal when fresh off the stalk. Though I’m not fanatic enough to set up a corn pot on a propane burner in the garden next to the plant, shuck the cob on the stalk, and dip it into the boiling water, I’ve considered it.

IN TODAY’S ESCALATING FOOD
debate, the slow-food and environmental movements have begun to spread a false mythology about traditional food in the same way that pan-nativism has occasionally created false impressions about ecological Natives and “recalled” traditional practices. There was a time when people lived as the land gave. Before farming, hunter-gatherer societies around the world spent the greater part of their days gathering food, since preservation was difficult. It took hundreds of thousands of years to learn how salt could preserve flesh and produce, in tandem with drying or smoking. Salt turned the abattoir into a strange kind of commercial temple, and in some cultures the abattoirs actually became temples.
Salaam,
the Arabic term for peace, derived from a word for negotiations over salt.

Wheat and barley in the Mideast, beans and corn and squash in America, rice in Asia—each began whittling away the permaculture that was the original history of our species. All of these are annual farm crops. They demanded the breaking of soil, the retaining of seed, and storage of the crop, which eventually required an infrastructure.

Thus began the transition from hunter-gatherer societies toward stable villages and small farms. Agriculture allowed human populations to grow beyond what wild land could sustain. It also created a need for crop storage as a survival tool against natural disasters like droughts and harsh winters. Once you begin storing produce and supplies, you need record keeping, and thus writing came into its own. The ability to keep records and communicate over long distances as well as record history allowed the unecological, exponential growth of our species, creating additional farms, villages; then cities arrived—filling up the planet while we contrived the impossible dream of endless growth, our tools and technology evolving faster than our social structures and brains. This is a mightily generalized history of 3 million years, and like most generalized histories it is dangerous. But sometimes we get so wrapped up in the details we forget the whole. If we consider the time our species has spent on earth as a single day, twenty-three hours were expended in hunting and gathering, about fifty-nine minutes on small farming, and one minute on industrial agribusiness.

THE SOUP FOR OUR
lunch? Well, that’s a history which needs telling. I look at it steaming on the wood stove. Is a soup just a watery stew? Did it originate, like tea, when the first leaf fell into a earthenware pot of steaming water? Did someone throw too much water into the first gruels, and was he too hungry to wait for them to boil down? Or maybe gruel came out of a broth of grains boiled down. Or did the soup arrive even earlier, a cave mother scooping up the last of the cold greasy boar and brilliantly deciding to melt the fat off in a gourd full of hot water in the warm ashes? Human history is the history of soup, among many other histories, and the variations are beyond cataloguing.

When I first met Sharon she was an uneven cook with a tendency to torture a beef bone and some noodles into a gelatinous soup. What can I say? She was from Thunder Bay. After I introduced her to the idea of terroir, food grown naturally in its region, and to the ethnic cuisines that enthralled me, her natural intelligence caught on quickly, and she soon became the master of our dinners, though she still has dangerous tendencies to invent recipes before she looks at a cookbook—a practice that leads to delicious new combinations, although it can also give me crossed eyes and much hamming of a death by poisoning. One of the pleasures of our relationship, for me, has been the opportunity to introduce her to fine cooking, and then watch her surpass me.

Born of this new generation spoiled by global trade and travel, we make Thai
tom yum
soup, Mexican chicken broths with chickpeas, and creamed European soups, vegetarian or with meat. We often cook together, and this can lead to differences of opinion, sometimes amiable, sometimes not. I tell her cooking is a contact sport, a statement that usually gets me the evil eye.

But I continue in my ways. I keep the corpses of scrawny old hens in the freezer, beside the bones of game or pork or beef. Chicken feet make the ultimate broth. When we feast on crabs I’ve captured on the beach at low tide, we boil the shells and detritus after dinner with garlic and herbs and then freeze the broth for a good bisque. Generally, we make our soup bases in winter and freeze them. The wood cookstove in the kitchen not only simmers our broths but heats both the house and our hot water via a complex series of pipes recycling the water through a preheater that leads to our hot-water tank. A good soup simmering on the stove is an ancient cultural pleasure.

The chicken broth can be difficult because our old, tough hens—pot chickens—are too delicious and tender upon finally hauling them out to cool and debone. A little salt, and we start picking at the carcass—an addictive behaviour—and before we know it there’s no meat to add back to the soup.

The trick about a traditional broth is never to boil it, which clouds the broth. Then we add every old vegetable within reach, clearing out the fridge or the reedy remnants from the garden, along with chopped garlic and tomatoes that we sun-dry or dehydrate in the summer and use all year long, and leaves from our bay tree and fresh herbs. (If it’s for our vegetarian grandchildren, we omit the meat base.) After we cool this concoction in the greenhouse overnight, we skim the fat and strain out the cooked-down vegetables. If we want a minestrone, then we’ll add fresh, finely chopped vegetables and boil semolina noodles in another pot (I can’t abide overcooked noodles in a minestrone; they add a wheaty taste to the broth).

There’s nothing like a traditional broth and fresh vegetables and noodles. I rip off a hunk of bread and slather it with butter or dry-dip it and eat two-handed—bread crust in one and soup spoon in the other. Soup and bread are only a variation on each other, the soup a watery gruel and the bread a baked gruel. Thousands of years of cookery have merely refined the recipes.

An eccentric way to imagine the invention of bread is via a grain soup that was left out too long and then fermented. Afterwards it was dried and baked. More likely it was a slurp of old soupy gruel splashed on a hot rock on a fire. Flatbread! Bread, soup or gruel, and beer all apparently arrived around 10,000 bc . The fungi that fell out of the air into the batter and made sourdough have taken bread making through some exotic changes around the world. Bread has even driven people to madness and convulsions in what’s known as St. Vitus’s dance—if they ate rye bread infected with the ergot mould, which is related to lsd. At least our modern breads have revived since the sliced Wonder Bread hysteria that began in the 1930s and sped as fast as a yeast strain across North America and England.

Bread is alive like clay. Just as potters will tell you that a pot never stops firing, a great bread never ceases its transformations. The yeast fungi are one of our earliest domesticated organisms. Let them loose in wet or sprouted grain, and they develop a kaleidoscope of tastes.

In the seventies I possessed a sourdough from the California gold rush of 1848, or so I was told when it was passed on to me almost like a hallowed relic—a finger bone of the bread Buddha. You can imagine my guilt after I murdered it with neglect in my refrigerator. My latest sourdough is merely a baby. I began it with potato water and a few ironic prayers less than a decade ago, but it has some life and is slowly building up a range of tastes. I make a complex cia-batta bread with it. My focaccia I inherited from my mother. It resembles a modern two-thirds whole-wheat flatbread, pounded flat and basted in olive oil, sprinkled with garlic, salt, oregano, and basil. The good news about this bread is that if it’s left out to dry it still tastes good, chewy and filling, and perfect for soup dipping—the chewier the better.

When we are in a frenzy of cooking, especially if the grandchildren are about, we all get together for focaccia nights, where everyone sprinkles the flatbread with a topping of his or her choice. During my childhood this was how my mother made pizza, layering the focaccia with ground hamburger and tomato sauce, cheese, and spices. I favour mine with sliced tomatoes and the original ingredients, though truthfully, I like the simple herb base best, without the tomatoes. But I’ve been tempted by black olives and pickled artichoke hearts and feta sprinklings, smoked salmon and onion slices. The choice is endless, depending on what’s in the refrigerator, and I thrill to watch the grandchildren invent a new topping when they arrive at the farm. We bake flatbreads on a round pizza stone given to us by a good friend, and if we need more bread I gather kiln shelves from my pottery studio and use them. A stone is always better than a pan.

Bread is the stuff of civilization and family. It’s a communal dish that’s gone through a million mythologies and rituals. Turn around and someone will stick a biscuit in your mouth and call it the body of a god. It’s also the base rate by which most civilizations judge themselves. When the bread ran out the cities died. The Egyptians made their bread in such vast quantities that illustrations show bakers kneading vats of dough with hoes. Our granddaughter Jenna, mucking sauces onto the dough, or the astonished expression on the face of our grandson, Aubrey, as he bites into an olive and anchovy pizza topping—they are just a continuation of the great tradition.