Certain parts of our back-to-the-land lifestyle come to me more naturally than others. For example, I enjoyed picking wild berries. It was just the sharp saber nails of the wild raspberry canes, the yellow pine pollen sticking to my sweaty arms, the spring-action brush, the incessant cloud of soul-pricking deer flies—those were the only parts that bothered me. I discovered that nature doesn’t coddle, that branches ricochet back in your face just because they can.
I hadn’t grown up foraging for delicacies. My all-capable mother had always taken care of the hunting and gathering, mostly at the Red Owl. She’d grown up weeding Grandma’s half-acre farm garden in their backyard, picking thorny cucumbers from between the razored vines; she liked to shop at the store.
But these painstakingly picked wild raspberries, they were so sweet and so tart that even a ladybug-size one could make your mouth run with desire for more. I learned that washing them turned them into sweet red mush, so I spent nearly an hour picking through my haul spread out onto a wide platter, sifting through each one with my fingers, pinching out aphids and flicking out leaves. That night we sat on the candlelit porch and spooned up these meticulously clean unwashed berries beneath a drift of whipped sabayon—positively stinging with the whiskey I had naively subbed for the marsala wine I didn’t have—and yet the flavor of the berries still triumphed. They were that strong.
I didn’t work in the traditional sense that summer but instead coasted on our collected savings. My ambitions were funneled into making our life more delicious, and we both considered our chores to count toward the business of living.
Aaron, powered by an incessant drive to finish projects around the homestead, was stomping the steep slant up the hill from the garden all day long, digging new holes, and dry-stacking heavy stones to create landscaping barriers. He was sweating. And me? Lady of leisure, waking up well after the hot sun had burned off all the dew and started to turn the ground to dry, fragrant toast, I made breakfast, shoved the dishes behind the curtained shelf, then walked down to the garden, picked some vegetables, and walked up the hill to start making lunch. It was all I could do to hustle three hot-cooked meals into the waking hours of my day.
I quickly learned that cooking with limitations is what breeds invention. The broccoli rabe grew like a weed, so I threw it indiscriminately into everything until I discovered that wet heat accentuated its bitterness but that dry-cooking in oil or butter calmed its bristles and turned it sweeter.
But I also discovered that I couldn’t cook meat as well as my mom did. My chicken breasts came out tough (overcooked), my chicken thighs wiry (undercooked). Cooking meat clearly involved something more than just following directions. A beef roast doesn’t surrender its tenderness to you just because you can read. Each chunk comes with its own idiosyncrasies. You have to imagine the protein’s inner architecture, the layout of its fibers, its juice pathways; you have to find a darkened side door into which you can slip inside; you have to put your thumb on its needs.
Increasingly, I stuck to the vegetables. The night Aaron’s friends Bruce and Cheryl first came to dinner, I was nervous. Aaron had been friends with Bruce—a silver-bearded, ageless Vietnam vet with dry comic timing and a well-articulated sense of political outrage—since he was a teenager. He joked that Bruce was one of his best high school friends. Bruce had moved out to the Smoky Hills in the early 1980s during the back-to-the-land exodus, and he and Cheryl lived in an underground house of his own design just a few miles away. Their place was off the grid and a paragon of modern counter-culture architecture. It was outfitted to the hilt with natural luxuries—an outdoor solar shower, a living roof covered with squash vines, paths lined with clover for barefoot after-lunch walks. Inside the house, a sauna was tucked right behind their central woodstove so that in the winter they could heat up canners of water in the chimney’s leftover heat and, via a submersible 10-volt pump, shower in the sauna. (I tried it once: rainforest-soft.) They had just recently built a studio out of stacked straw bales for Cheryl’s massage-therapy practice. Their indoor root cellar was stocked with Cheryl’s impressive store of canning. They knew how to build, they knew how to live, and they knew how to eat in August—from the garden. The minute they walked in the door, they handed off a jar of Cheryl’s pickled asparagus, which I took as a hint to whip up a batch of Bloody Marys in which to sink them. Our friendship was instant.
In retrospect, the dinner I made that night was nothing remarkable, but it was full of the latest discoveries from my Alice Waters–Edna Lewis–Deborah Madison phase. I can’t pick up one of their books without being overwhelmed with warm thoughts of meals made from those pages. The scribbled margins contain the blush of first-taste love that my future professional-cooking self would strive to recapture. My first caramelized onions. My first corn pudding. My first roasted heads of garlic.
Aaron lit the oil lamp in the center of the table and I set down the pizza, a whole wheat version topped with wilted blossoms of garden spinach, thin orbs of my family’s sausage, and pads of mozzarella cheese—the last contraband from the store. With it we ate cubes of sautéed zucchini and a simple salad of spiky arugula from the garden, dressed with a thin layer of garlicky, lemony cream. Good-tasting olive oil was hard to come by in town, so I made dressings out of various dilutions of heavy cream and buttermilk flavored with garlic, ginger, lemon, rosemary, or anchovy—not realizing until later that cream dressing was an old Midwestern farmhouse staple.
As Bruce and Cheryl got up to leave, they both hugged me with force, my nose diving deep into Cheryl’s reassuring mane of essential-oil-scented hair. Bruce slapped Aaron on the shoulder and said, “Well, it looks like you’ve found yourself a homestead honey!”
The words slapped my cheeks to a red blush. While this was a comment that likely played fine back at the height of the hippie movement, when Bruce was our age, the part of me that had minored in women’s studies did not take it very well. And she was not too happy with my pioneer-cook counterpart, either, the one who couldn’t suppress the hot tinge of pride in being authenticated as a homesteader.
It came off a little sexist, but I knew what Bruce meant. His point was that Aaron had found himself a girl, and one who cooked. Backwoods homesteads wither away without the cooking. This little cabin, with the soaring, rusty ceiling, the walls cluttered with paintings, the Swede saws hanging over the window, and the deer pelt draped over the railing, was—with the addition of food to the mix—becoming a home.
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