Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life Read online

  Eventually we'd decided to set our garden into the south-facing mountainside, halfway up the slope behind the farmhouse. After clearing brambles we carved out two long terraces that hug the contour of the hill--less than a quarter of an acre altogether--constituting our only truly level property. Year by year we've enriched the soil with compost and cover crops, and planted the banks between terraces with blueberry bushes, peach and plum trees, hazelnuts, pecans, almonds, and raspberries. So we have come into the job of overseeing a hundred or so acres of woodlands that exhale oxygen and filter water for the common good, and about 4,000 square feet of tillable land that are meant to feed our family. And in one little corner of that, on a June day three years earlier, I had staked out my future in asparagus. It took a full day of trenching and planting to establish what I hope will be the last of the long trail of these beds I've left in the wake of my life.

  Now, in March, as we waited for a sign to begin living off the land, this completely bare patch of ground was no burning bush of portent. (Though it was blackened with ash--we'd burned the dead stalks of last year's plants to kill asparagus beetles.) Two months from this day, when it would be warm enough to plant corn and beans, the culinary happening of asparagus would be a memory, this patch a waist-high forest of feathery fronds. By summer's end they'd resemble dwarf Christmas trees covered with tiny red balls. Then frost would knock them down. For about forty-eight weeks of the year, an asparagus plant is unrecognizable to anyone except an asparagus grower. Plenty of summer visitors to our garden have stood in the middle of the bed and asked, "What is this stuff, it's beautiful!" We tell them it's the asparagus patch, and they reply, "No, this, these feathery little trees?"

  An asparagus spear only looks like its picture for one day of its life, usually in April, give or take a month as you travel from the Mason-Dixon line. The shoot emerges from the ground like a snub-nosed green snake headed for sunshine, rising so rapidly you can just about see it grow. If it doesn't get its neck cut off at ground level as it emerges, it will keep growing. Each triangular scale on the spear rolls out into a branch, until the snake becomes a four-foot tree with delicate needles. Contrary to lore, fat spears are no more tender or mature than thin ones; each shoot begins life with its own particular girth. In the hours after emergence it lengthens, but does not appreciably fatten.

  To step into another raging asparagus controversy, white spears are botanically no different from their green colleagues. White shoots have been deprived of sunlight by a heavy mulch pulled up over the plant's crown. European growers go to this trouble for consumers who prefer the stalks before they've had their first blush of photosynthesis. Most Americans prefer the more developed taste of green. (Uncharacteristically, we're opting for the better nutritional deal here also.) The same plant could produce white or green spears in alternate years, depending on how it is treated. If the spears are allowed to proceed beyond their first exploratory six inches, they'll green out and grow tall and feathery like the houseplant known as asparagus fern, which is the next of kin.

  Older, healthier asparagus plants produce chunkier, more multiple shoots. Underneath lies an octopus-shaped affair of chubby roots (called a crown) that stores enough starch through the winter to arrange the phallic send-up when winter starts to break. The effect is rather sexy, if you're the type to see things that way. Europeans of the Renaissance swore by it as an aphrodisiac, and the church banned it from nunneries.

  The earliest recipes for this vegetable are about 2,500 years old, written in ancient Greek and Egyptian hieroglyphics, suggesting the Mediterranean as the plant's homeland. The Caesars took their asparagus passion to extravagant lengths, chartering ships to scour the empire for the best spears and bring them to Rome. Asparagus even inspired the earliest frozen-food industry, in the first century, when Roman charioteers would hustle fresh asparagus from the Tiber River Valley up into the Alps and keep it buried there in snow for six months, all so it could be served with a big ta-daa at the autumnal Feast of Epicurus. So we are not the first to go to ridiculous lengths to eat foods out of season.

  Northern Europeans didn't catch on to asparagus until much later, but by the time they came to the New World, they couldn't leave it behind. It's a long-lived plant whose seeds are spread by birds from gardens to hedgerows, so we have wild populations of it growing in every temperate part of North America where enough rain falls to keep it alive. It likes light soils where the top few inches of the ground freeze in winter. It's especially common along roadsides and railroad right-of-ways that are kept clear of overlying vegetation. Wild asparagus is not always tastiest but offers the advantage of being free. My father used to love bringing home bundles of it in early spring when house calls took him out on the country roads where it grew. The biggest problem is finding it, among tall weeds, in the first day after emergence when it has to be cut. Dad always made it a point to notice tall stands of wild asparagus later in the summer wherever they waved in the breeze. He would stop his car, get out, and mark the location of the patch with orange flagging tape he carried for this purpose. If the highway department or winter weather didn't take down his flags, we'd have well-marked asparagus checkpoints all over the county the next spring. We kids loved the idea of eating anything stolen, especially with lots of butter.

  In my adult life I have dug asparagus beds into the property of every house I've owned, and some I rented--even tiny urban lots and student ghettoes--always leaving behind a vegetable legacy waving in the wake of my Johnny-Asparagus-seed life. I suppose in those unsettled years I was aspiring to a stability I couldn't yet purchase. A well-managed asparagus bed can keep producing for twenty or thirty years, but it's a ludicrous commitment to dig one into the yard of a student rental. It's hard work to dig the trench, fill it with compost, and tuck in a row of asparagus crowns ordered from a seed company. Then you wait three years for a harvest. A too-young plant gets discouraged when you whack off its every attempt to send up new shoots in the spring, abuse that will make the plant sink into vegetable despair and die.

  After the plant has had two full summers to bulk up, then you can begin cutting off its early efforts--but only for two weeks in the first year of harvest. Even with fully mature plants, the harvester must eventually back off from this war between producer and consumer, and let the plant win. After about eight weeks of daily cutting, the asparagus farmer puts away the knife, finally letting the spears pass beyond edibility into the lanky plants they long to be. For most crop species, the season ends when all the vegetable units have been picked and the mother plant dies or gets plowed under. Asparagus is different: its season ends by declaration, purely out of regard for the plant. The key to the next spring's action is the starch it has stored underground, which only happens if the plant has enough of a summer life to beef up its bank account. Of all our familiar vegetables, the season for local, fresh asparagus is the very shortest, for this reason.

  Don't expect baby asparagus tips any time other than March, April, or May, unless you live in New Zealand or South America. Some California farmers have worked out a way to cut a brief second harvest in late fall, but this is exceptional. For most of us, if we see asparagus in any month far removed from April, we're looking at some hard traveling. At our house we only eat asparagus for the weeks it's in season, but during those weeks we eat it a lot--the spears must be cut every day. About the same time the asparagus plant is getting weary of our management plan, we're starting to feel the same way. It works out.

  From the outlaw harvests of my childhood, I've measured my years by asparagus. I sweated to dig it into countless yards I was destined to leave behind, for no better reason than that I believe in vegetables in general, and this one in particular. Gardeners are widely known and mocked for this sort of fanaticism. But other people fast or walk long pilgrimages to honor the spirit of what they believe makes our world whole and lovely. If we gardeners can, in the same spirit, put our heels to the shovel, kneel before a trench holding tender roots, and then w
ait three years for an edible incarnation of the spring equinox, who's to make the call between ridiculous and reverent?

  The asparagus plant's life history sets it apart, giving it a special edge as the year's first major edible. It's known botanically as a perennial, with a life span of many years. The rest of our plant foods are almost always the leaves, flowers, fruits, or seeds of plants that begin life in spring as seedlings and perish just a few months later when they're frozen by autumn, or eaten, whichever comes first. (The exceptions are the fruits we call "fruits," which grow on berry bushes or trees, and root crops, which operate a bit differently; more about these later.) Annuals tend to grow more quickly than perennials and have been cultivated as food crops for thousands of years. The grass family (whose seed heads are our grains) is especially speedy, with corn the clear winner in the carbon-fixing efficiency race. But asparagus wins the vegetable prize for living longer than one year. That's why it is the very first one to leap up in springtime, offering edible biomass when other vegetables are still at the seedling stage; it had a head start.

  The plant's edible portion, however, is direly short-lived. The moment the asparagus neck goes under the knife, an internal starting gun fires "Go!" and it begins to decompose, metabolizing its own sugars and trying--because it knows no other plan--to keep growing. It's best eaten the day it is cut, period. When transported, even as refrigerated cargo, the plant's tight bud scales loosen and start to reveal the embryonic arms that were meant to become branches. The fresh stems have the tight, shiny sex appeal of dressed-up matrons on the dance floor of a Latin social club, but they lose their shine and crispness so quickly when the song is over. The sweetness goes starchy.

  We don't even know all the things that go wrong in the swan song of a vegetable, since flavor and nutritional value both result from complex interactions of living phytochemical systems. Early in the twentieth century, Japanese food scientist Kikunae Ikeda first documented that asparagus had a flavor that lay outside the range of the four well-known tastes of sweet, sour, bitter, and salty. Its distinctive tang derives from glutamic acid, which Dr. Ikeda named "the fifth taste," or umami. This was, for once, the genuine discovery of a taste sensation. (Later came the invention of an artificial umami flavoring known as monosodium glutamate.) But the flavor chemicals quickly lose their subtlety. Asparagus that's not fresh tastes simple or even bitter, especially when overcooked.

  Pushing a refrigerated green vegetable from one end of the earth to another is, let's face it, a bizarre use of fuel. But there's a simpler reason to pass up off-season asparagus: it's inferior. Respecting the dignity of a spectacular food means enjoying it at its best. Europeans celebrate the short season of abundant asparagus as a form of holiday. In the Netherlands the first cutting coincides with Father's Day, on which restaurants may feature all-asparagus menus and hand out neckties decorated with asparagus spears. The French make a similar party out of the release of each year's Beaujolais; the Italians crawl over their woods like harvester ants in the autumn mushroom season, and go gaga over the summer's first tomato.

  Waiting for foods to come into season means tasting them when they're good, but waiting is also part of most value equations. Treating foods this way can help move "eating" in the consumer's mind from the Routine Maintenance Department over to the Division of Recreation. It's hard to reduce our modern complex of food choices to unifying principles, but this is one that generally works: eating home-cooked meals from whole, in-season ingredients obtained from the most local source available is eating well, in every sense. Good for the habitat, good for the body.

  A handful of creative chefs have been working for years to establish this incipient notion of a positive American food culture--a cuisine based on our own ingredients. Notable pioneers are Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in San Francisco, and Rick Bayless of Chicago's Frontera Grill, along with cookbook maven Deborah Madison. However, to the extent that it's even understood, this cuisine is widely assumed to be the property of the elite. Granted, in restaurants it can sometimes be pricey, but the do-it-yourself version is not. I am not sure how so many Americans came to believe only our wealthy are capable of honoring a food aesthetic. Anyone who thinks so should have a gander at the kitchens of working-class immigrants from India, Mexico, anywhere really. Cooking at home is cheaper than buying packaged foods or restaurant meals of comparable quality. Cooking good food is mostly a matter of having the palate and the skill.

  The main barrier standing between ourselves and a local-food culture is not price, but attitude. The most difficult requirements are patience and a pinch of restraint--virtues that are hardly the property of the wealthy. These virtues seem to find precious little shelter, in fact, in any modern quarter of this nation founded by Puritans. Furthermore, we apply them selectively: browbeating our teenagers with the message that they should wait for sex, for example. Only if they wait to experience intercourse under the ideal circumstances (the story goes), will they know its true value. "Blah blah blah," hears the teenager: words issuing from a mouth that can't even wait for the right time to eat tomatoes, but instead consumes tasteless ones all winter to satisfy a craving for everything now. We're raising our children on the definition of promiscuity if we feed them a casual, indiscriminate mingling of foods from every season plucked from the supermarket, ignoring how our sustenance is cheapened by wholesale desires.

  Waiting for the quality experience seems to be the constitutional article that has slipped from American food custom. If we mean to reclaim it, asparagus seems like a place to start. And if the object of our delayed gratification is a suspected aphrodisiac? That's the sublime paradox of a food culture: restraint equals indulgence.

  On a Sunday in early April we sat at the kitchen table putting together our grocery list for the coming week. The mood was uncharacteristically grave. Normally we all just penciled our necessities onto a notepad stuck onto the fridge. Before shopping, we'd consolidate our foraging plan. The problem now was that we wanted to be a different kind of animal--one that doesn't jump the fence for every little thing. We kept postponing our start date until the garden looked more hospitable, but if we meant to do this for a whole year, we would have to eat in April sooner or later. We had harvested and eaten asparagus now, twice. That was our starting gun: ready, set...ready?

  Like so many big ideas, this one was easier to present to the board of directors than the stockholders. Our family now convened around the oak table in our kitchen; the milk-glass farmhouse light above us cast a dramatic glow. The grandfather clock ticked audibly in the next room. We'd fixed up our old house in the architectural style known as recycling: we'd gleaned old light fixtures, hardware, even sinks and a bathtub from torn-down buildings; our refrigerator is a spruced-up little 1932 Kelvinator. It all gives our kitchen a comfortable lived-in charm, but at the moment it felt to me like a set where I was auditioning for a part in either Little House on the Prairie or Mommie Dearest.

  They all sat facing me. Steven: my faithful helpmeet, now quite happy to let me play the heavy. And whose idea this whole thing was in the first place, I'm pretty sure. Camille: our redheaded teenager, who in defiance of all stereotypes has the most even temperament in our family. From birth, this child has calmly studied and solved every problem in her path, never asking for special help from the Universe or her parents. At eighteen she now functioned in our household as a full adult, cooking and planning meals often, and was also a dancer who fueled her calorie-intensive passions with devotedly healthy rations. If this project was going to impose a burden, she would feel it. And finally, Lily: earnest, dark-pig-tailed persuader and politician of our family who could, as my grandfather would say, charm the socks off a snake. I had a hunch she didn't really know what was coming. Otherwise she'd already be lobbying the loopholes.

  Six eyes, all beloved to me, stared unblinking as I crossed the exotics off our shopping list, one by one. All other pastures suddenly looked a whole lot greener than ours. All snack foods come from the land
of Oz, it seems, even the healthy ones. Cucumbers, in April? Nope. Those would need passports to reach us right now, or at least a California license. Ditto for those make-believe baby carrots that are actually adult carrots whittled down with a lathe. And all prewashed salad greens emanate from California. Even salad dressing was problematic because of all the ingredients--over a dozen different foods logging their own mileage to get to a salad dressing factory, and then to us. As fuel economy goes, I suppose the refrigerated tropicals like bananas and pineapples are the Humvees of the food world, but multi-ingredient concoctions are sneaky sports cars. I drew a pencil line through one item after another. "Salad dressing is easy to make," I said. The vinegar and oil in our pantry were not local, of course, but with a small effort, thirty seconds spent shaking things together in a jar, we could improve the gas mileage of our vinaigrette. In the herb garden we already had garlic chives and oregano, the hardiest of the spicy Mediterranean perennials, braving the frosts of late winter.

  We were getting plenty of local eggs too, so in a reckless burst of confidence I promised to make mayonnaise. It's supposed to be pretty easy. I had a recipe I'd been saving since my high school French class, waiting for the right time to try it, because of one irresistible step that translates as follows: "Whip heartily for two minutes while holding only pleasant thoughts in mind."

  Back to the grocery list, trying for that positive mindset: a few more items fell without significant protest. Then I came to block letters in Camille's hand, underlined: FRESH FRUIT, PLEASE???

  We were about to cross the Rubicon.

  I shifted tactics. Instead of listing what we can't have, I said, we should outline what we knew we could get locally. Vegetables and meat--which constitute the bulk of our family's diet--would be available in some form throughout the coming year. We had met or knew of farmers in our county who sold pasture-fed chickens, turkeys, beef, lamb, and pork. Many more were producing vegetables. Like so many other towns, large and small, ours holds a farmers' market where local growers set up booths twice a week from mid-April to October. Soon our garden would also be feeding us. Our starting point would be this: we would take a loyalty oath to our own county's meat and produce, forsaking all others, however sexy the veggies and flesh of California might be.