But having an infant in New York shows you how inhospitable this city, with its many stairways and rarely working elevators, can feel to the infirm, the elderly, and to those who tote the very young. When I wasn’t picking up his stroller like an oversize package and scaling the subway stairs, Hank and I were spending an inordinate amount of time inside our four walls. Staying in, eating in, napping in, playing together on a six-foot-by-six-foot square of rug in our windowless living room. Hank’s world in this huge city, I worried, was so interior and so small. It would have been fine if we’d had a nicer place, but when you have to turn on the oven and let the door hang open so the baby doesn’t freeze because your landlord insists on turning off the heat during the day, baby’s first year in Brooklyn is not so hot. Thankfully, Hank’s range of vision was so narrow he never knew it.
In May, after throwing Hank a blow-out first birthday party on our roof deck, we packed up our stuff to return to Park Rapids for the three months of summer, where he could practice taking his first steps in bare feet, on the grass.
20
PRIMARY SOURCES
Back in Two Inlets for the summer of 2008, Aaron jump-starts his mornings in country fashion, by immediately going outside and hopping onto the tractor to mow the trails, not returning until his eggs have grown ice-cold on the table. He’s like Pa from Little House on the Prairie (book Pa, not the TV one who’s detained indefinitely in Walnut Grove), giddy with outdoorsy possibility. After a full day of making sculptures in his studio, he gets out his chain saw in the evening and cuts down surplus trees—of which we have many—reductively carving out the landscape as if it were a chunk of wood, making more and more of the hillside visible. As scrabbly jack pines thud to the ground and wiry brush meets its maker, he reveals a new yard stuck with multiple bunches of birch clumps. They are a single organism, connected to one another via a mushroomlike network of root mycelium, and seem to hold down the hill. With our new view we can see that the creek doesn’t just flow in front of the house but surrounds us on three sides.
From my kitchen, I can hear swans on the creek exchanging hot, guttural words; an annoyed blue heron thunders out for silence from his dock perch. The sun streams through the leaf bunches of the trees and hits the ground in round spotlights that dance with the surging wind, which can’t decide its mood today. Despite my amused baby, who’s enthralled by everything at his feet from grass to rugs, a garden that’s ripening as fast as an oncoming train, and my flowers spilling rambunctiously over their rock barriers, neither can I. Aaron might resemble Pa, but I am not as relentlessly cheerful as Ma—not by half. I am, in fact, a very conflicted homesteader, far less resolute than the girl who pounded a sand point well here just eight years before. Divorced from the world of haute cuisine, but still infatuated with its visuals and high standards, my future in food flickers in the air with uncertainty.
I’m no longer a professional cook, and yet not quite a civilian. My tastes have changed. I’ve become accustomed to braising chicken with the wrinkled black olives I couldn’t hope to ever find here. I’ve grown a taste for other rarities: bitter endive, raw ocean fish, and ricotta salata. I’m used to shuffling six pots to make a meal—a protein, a starch, a vegetable, a sauce. After years of layering bold, exotic flavors, I’ve grown insatiable for them. Now I was back to where I’d started, with a basket of zucchini, some dirt-stained potatoes, and a simple plan to make a decent plate of supper. I wonder if and when the convergence of my two worlds—high and low, the clouds and the dirt—will ever take place.
As always, my current mood hinges on the success or failure of my most recent kitchen project. My first stab at making sauerkraut came out smelling like sour wine mixed with barn bedding, like ten full pounds of failure. Hopelessly overfermented. I chucked the entire crock over the compost fence, the slimy strands landing with a resounding slap.
It was the shortest of all recipes, just two ingredients—cabbage and salt—and shouldn’t have been that hard. But I’d failed to consider the third ingredient—time, the wild card of all ingredients, the one that requires the real skill.
I dial Grandma Dion for a dose of her blunt, firsthand knowledge but don’t reach her. So I call Katie, my neighbor down the road—first for commiseration and second to beg for advice.
She laughs, because preserving failures are like colorful foreign currency around here, more valuable than the silent successes. “You made some cabbage wine, did you?”
“More like cabbage schnapps,” I tell her. The odor had been closer to fifty-proof. She tells me to use a cabbage so fresh that water runs like juice out of its cut sides and to check it sooner, after ten days. I cut a fresh cabbage from my garden and this time decide to go for broke: I mix chilies and hot paprika into the cabbage, until it glows orange like kimchi. After shredding and salting and packing, my kitchen floor is covered with hair-thin debris like a cabbage barbershop. I tie a string around the dishtowel covering the crock and vow to coddle it.
Ten days later, I nervously check the kraut. Carefully unwrapping the towel, I pull back the whole leaves lying on top and dip in my fork. It looks right: light and springy, like hay. It tastes right: fizzy, adamant, alive. Not low-down and mushroomy like sake, but as clean and tingly as bone-dry sauvignon blanc.
The chilies make it racy. Just like the fermented pickles I remember from childhood, where the tartness shot straight to my spine and plucked my nerves like guitar strings, where it played me. I remember my mom watching me clink my fork around the cloudy brine in the jar of fermented pickles and, not finding any, tip up the jar for a shot of fizzy juice instead. The acidity shook through my body like a seizure, and when I came up for air she laughed and gave me a knowing smile. Good? The taste fairy had chosen rightly. I was no sweet tooth.
I decide to put a little sauerkraut on Hank’s high chair tray to see which of these fairies—sweet or sour—has captured his soul. He wraps a yellow strand around his fat fist and backhands it into his mouth. Then another strand. And another. He gums the spicy kraut, enlisting his few teeth to chew. And then his face flushes and his small body shivers—three small familiar zaps that look like the ignition of a small car twitching to life. Could it be his first spark of fermentation love?
But no, maybe not. He’s reaching for it, but he’s starting to cry. His mouth is burning. I pick him up but can’t hold on to his fitful body. What was I thinking, giving my baby something spicy? He twists his torso out of my pretzeled arms, flinging himself into full backbend, his arms trying to reach the tray, the tears on his face now flowing upriver instead of down.
“Moah!” he screams.
He wants more. It’s genetic. He’s what my mom refers to as “one of ours.” A sour tooth.
—
My sauerkraut wasn’t just slow food—though it was—it was stubbornly territorial. If I preserve it in a water bath, I’ll kill all its living juices. I can’t take it back with us to Brooklyn.