Now, living with Rich’s family, it was time for me to master a whole new list of mysterious dishes. I learned to close my eyes and put my hands into a huge bowl of mushed-up raw pork, to mix it with sage and onion for stuffing. I slowly became adept at boiling up huge vats of meat broth with vegetables, in order to make cawl. I even learned to heat up the ancient cast-iron griddle, called a bake stone, that had once belonged to Rich’s mother, to make proper Welsh cakes, with butter rubbed into flour.
I learned other things, as well. I learned to grow tomatoes. I shaved the bristles off a dead pig. I chucked hay bales and drove a tractor. I dug in the mud, got sweaty and dirty, worked till I was physically exhausted and tried to master all the antique skills that women once learned as soon as they could walk.
And one day I stood with my elbows on the gate, looking out over the hills, and I felt an unfamiliar feeling.
I was happy.
I felt peaceful, contented, serene. Alive. Feelings I couldn’t remember having had in all the plastic hustle of my former life.
Lanier was right. The secret was texture.
My life in Wales wasn’t fast-paced or high-powered, but it was loaded with texture. The smooth-worn wood of the old rolling pin, the weight of the heavy cast-iron frying pan, the sharp scent of the rosemary growing outside the kitchen window – these things rooted and grounded me, woke me up, connected me, made me feel, made me want to be alive – made me glad to be alive.
These things created a super-charged sensation that was texture and even more – something I would come to call ‘textureality’.
I could see that my previous life, with all its fast pace and labour-saving devices, had been stripped of many of the things that made me now feel content and whole – in the same way that the bleached, featureless white dust that we call ‘flour’ is stripped of any nutrition and fibre.
The old tasks of growing food, baking bread, making jam, tending animals – we were designed by thousands of years of evolution to do these jobs, to interact with the natural world in a mutually beneficial way. There was a huge, silent, internal satisfaction when I finally began to do the things I was designed to do.
I took the vegetable scraps to the pigs. When the pigs were big enough, we slaughtered them and made sausages and roasts. The pig dung went onto the compost pile, and the finished compost went into the polytunnel – where the vegetables grow. I harvested the vegetables, cooked them, served them to my family – and took the new scraps out to the pigs. A connected, richly textural cycle.
There wasn’t a lot of texture left in my previous processed, plasticized, pre-packed, sanitized city life. Plop me into a sterile cubicle in front of a computer all day, and then shove me into an air-conditioned car to get home, where I eat a microwaved meal and sit in front of the television until it’s time to go to sleep – there’s no texture in that. I’d been slowly starving, because I was deprived of texture, and I need it.
In my efforts to live as leisurely a life as possible, I’d outsourced many of the things that actually gave me the greatest satisfaction. Other people grew my vegetables, milked cows to provide my milk, made my bread, and put my jam into jars, depriving me of the deep textural contentment that these tasks bring. I’d literally thrown a lot of critically important babies out with the bath water.
As a biological creature, I need this texture. I crave it. I’ve not (yet?) evolved to the point where I can be truly happy without it. Perhaps I never will. Technology alone just doesn’t do it for me. There was a nagging, jittery emptiness that comes from the lack of texture in modern life, and I’d just tried to fill it by going faster and buying more stuff. And for me, it simply never worked.
Textureality is hot, cold, hard, wet, soft, warm. It’s leather and mud, wood and stone. It’s sinking your hands into the dirt, digging with a shovel until your arms ache, taking a walk in the rain and coming back inside for a cup of really hot tea. It’s wrapping a cashmere blanket around your child, cooking in a heavy iron frying pan, crushing a stalk of lavender under your nose and inhaling the heavenly scent. It’s simmering a pot of homemade soup on the stove all day, so that it perfumes the air and becomes, over time, something that even scientists agree has healing properties.
Textureality has to do with slow magic. It takes time to plant a tomato seed, to water it and watch it grow, to pick the tomatoes and eat them, to compost the plant at the end of the season. But it’s rich, fulfilling, satisfying, and it brings contentment. In the same way that food that you really have to chew is better for you, so I discovered that my life began to nourish me once I put some of the ancient textures back into it.
The alchemical transformation of disparate bits of water, meat and vegetables into a rich stew – that’s slow magic. The rising process of yeast transforming flour and sugar into bread – more slow magic. Watching a skein of wool turn into a scarf, or a piece of wood turn into a spoon under your hands – that’s magic, as well.
And it produces happiness, and cures boredom. I’ve never heard an avid gardener, or a horsewoman, or a quilter, complain of boredom. For these people, there are never enough hours in the day. They are deeply engaged with processes that feed their spirit. They have textureality in their lives, and their lives are enriched. People who follow a craft, who grow things, who interact with animals, who make things from scratch, all draw from the well of this ancient alchemical magic.
Mind you, we’re not completely antique on the farm. Nor would we choose to be. I’m more than grateful to live in an age of technological marvels, vaccinations and running water – where I have the luxury of drifting back through previous decades and centuries, cherry-picking the bits I prefer.
I can do my grocery shopping online, and spend the free afternoon I gain making my own blackberry jam. Not because it’s quick, or easy (although making jam is a lot easier than I used to think!) but because the process itself is intensely pleasurable and it makes me feel good.
Real comfort food, I discovered, was not empty calories that I ingested and immediately regretted, but traditional farmhouse dishes that comforted me in the making of them. The process itself – baking the bread, making the pies, stirring the jam – was where the comfort was hidden. Happiness and serenity were waiting for me, decanted like the glistening dark blood of the blackberries, hidden in the tasks of the past.
For me, it has to do with a sense of place. There’s a certain and specific magic in this place, and the magic is mined by interacting with it – by planting, by milking the goats that eat the plants, by turning the milk into food that we eat, soap that we use to wash ourselves. There’s a crystalline beauty to the interaction of each piece of this puzzle that actually does create elation.
Best of all there were the goats.
The goats came about in a strange way.
It all started, as these things so often do, with a need. Both Rich and I value family above everything else, and we’d do anything to keep our family safe and healthy. So when there’s a medical challenge, we set out to fix it, using the tools that the farm gives us – nature, our animals, our pots and pans and the farmhouse kitchen table.
So really, the story of the goats begins with the day that I took Benji, as a toddler, to see a doctor, to check a nasty chest infection.
The doctor listened through his stethoscope and looked at me over Benji’s head.
‘Bronchiolitis,’ he said briefly.
‘Is that serious?’ I asked.
‘I’m afraid it is.’ He picked up the phone. ‘Ambulance to the front door, right away, please,’ he said into the handset.
He rapidly stripped off all my son’s clothes and thrust him back into my arms, dressed only in his nappy.
‘Run,’ he said. ‘The ambulance will be waiting by the door.’
‘But it’s December. It’s freezing out there,’ I said stupidly.
‘His temperature is too high,’ the doctor said. ‘Run.’
I ran.
Benji had always had bron
chial infections, asthma and eczema. He got congested easily and once he caught a cold, the infection would settle into his lungs. We were forced to give him dose after dose of antibiotics, and the problem just seemed to get worse every time.
On this occasion, he stayed in the hospital overnight. And as I hovered over him, unable to relieve his laboured breathing, I determined that we were going to do something – anything – to change things.
‘What can we do?’ I asked Rich. By this time I had unshakable faith in him – I asked him things, and he always knew the answer. He didn’t fail me this time, either.
‘We need a goat,’ he said.
‘A goat? Why?’
I’d never kept goats – or animals of any sort, really, apart from the odd dog. But I was desperate, and ready to try anything. Rich had kept goats before, when his girls were young, and knew of the traditional reputation of goat’s milk for easing allergies, asthma and chest infections.
So, after another particularly harrowing appointment with the GP, during which Benji was yet again stuck full of antibiotics, we drove directly from the surgery into the hills around South West Wales, to see a man who had a goat for sale.
We took lovely black-and-white Buddug the goat home in the trailer, and I learned how to milk her that very night. We gave Benji a glass of the goat’s milk, holding our breath. He drank it straight down – and smiled up at us.
I later discovered that the reason goat’s milk is helpful for people suffering from asthma, bronchial conditions and eczema is because it’s much less likely to cause an allergic reaction than cow’s milk. An allergic reaction can be blamed on a protein allergen known as Alpha s1 Casein, which is found in high levels in cow’s milk. The levels of Alpha s1 Casein in goat’s milk are about 89 per cent lower than in cow’s milk – providing a far less allergenic food.
Goat’s milk is also naturally homogenized. If you put a glass of goat’s milk and a glass of cow’s milk in the fridge overnight, you’ll find that the cow’s milk separates into a thick layer of cream on top and skim milk on the bottom – a natural process caused by something called agglutinin.
To prevent this separation, the dairy industry uses a process called homogenization, which forces the fluid milk through a small hole under pressure. This destroys the fat globule cell walls and allows the milk and cream to stay suspended and well mixed. The problem with homogenization is that once the cell wall of the fat globule has been broken, it releases a free radical known as Xanthine Oxidase. Free radicals can cause problems in the body, including DNA mutations that can lead to cancer.
Goat’s milk, on the other hand, is closer in molecular composition to human milk. It has smaller fat globules and contains no agglutinin, which allows it to stay naturally homogenized. It also contains less lactose than cow’s milk and is, therefore, easier to digest for those suffering from lactose intolerance.
Five years later, Benji’s frightening chest infections are a thing of the past. He’s strong and fit, rarely catches a cold and hasn’t needed antibiotics in years. His asthma inhalers are gathering dust in the cupboard.
When we had too much goat’s milk to drink, I began looking for things to do with the excess – and discovered goat’s milk soap. Then I learned to put the milk into handmade skin cream as well. I used it on Benji, and his eczema disappeared. Soon, mothers on the school run began asking me for our goat’s milk soap and skin cream, for their own children who had eczema. We bought another goat, and then another. And we now own – and milk – an entire herd of goats!
My daughter Joli was a vegetarian when we moved to the farm. She’d come to me when she was six, and announced that she’d no longer eat animals. ‘It’s wrong,’ she’d told me seriously, and looking into her eyes, I couldn’t argue.
‘I’ll support you,’ I said. ‘But I’m still going to eat meat myself.’
The truth is that I’m a Texas girl who loves a good steak. I’ve simply never had the inclination to become a vegetarian.
I’m full of respect – and even awe – for those who are. It’s beyond impressive to me, to live a life in which you never succumb to the smell of bacon.
But I did support Joli in her intention to become a vegetarian, researching carefully to ensure that the meat-free meals I cooked her were nutritionally balanced and healthy. She never once wavered. For three years, no meat crossed her six-, seven- and eight-year-old lips. She seemed quite happy and settled in her resolve, and I became an expert in the offerings of Quorn.
So I wasn’t sure how my little daughter’s philosophical belief that it’s wrong to eat animals was going to go down on this hardcore, ultimately practical, home-slaughtering farm. Or, for that matter, how she was going to feel, living in an environment where the fluffy baa-lamb that she was cuddling and bottle-feeding one day would end up as a roast dinner topped by mint sauce the next.
As it turned out, I needn’t have worried.
Soon after we arrived at the farm, Joli came to sit beside me on the couch.
‘I’ve decided to start eating meat again,’ she said.
‘Why’s that?’ I asked, my mind racing. Had she been feeling pressured? Was it a problem? Had I put her into an unbearable situation?
‘Seeing how the animals live here, they have a good life,’ she said simply. ‘I know they haven’t suffered. It just doesn’t seem wrong to eat them.’
And that, it appears, was that.
After a few months of living happily on the farm, decorating rooms for all the kids and trying to squash my full house of furniture on top of Rich’s already full house, Rich asked me to marry him, and I accepted.
We had the ceremony in the dreamily surreal setting of Portmeirion, an Italianate coastal resort in North Wales, with all our friends and family around us done up in Victorian dresses and tail coats. It was the one really perfect day I can remember in my life. The sun was fresh and gold, like the best kind of wine, and we had fireworks on the beach.
For our honeymoon, we decided to go to Provence in southern France. Suddenly the reality of life on a farm caught me up short. You can’t just leave. You’re meshed into a slowly turning wheel of growing plants and animals that need constant care. We were going away in April, which meant that we had to schedule the lambing to happen after we got back. This, in turn, meant the lambs were born late, so they were smaller, so they ate less grass, which affected the hay, which affected the fields in the following year – one small decision, impacting and flowing into areas I’d never imagined.
Suddenly I didn’t have to try to wrap my mind around the ‘one butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane on the other side of the world’ theory. I was living it, every day. Everything on the farm is interconnected to every other thing. And I’m linked into the whole lot, riding the wheel as it slowly turns….
Everything I needed to learn, I realized, could be learned from real things. And from growing our own living food, both plant and animal. I don’t remember when it first occurred to me that our food was alive. After all, it seems obvious. We are alive, and therefore the food we eat must be alive, to sustain us.
But the food in the supermarket didn’t look very alive. Sitting on a shelf, wrapped in plastic, stamped with use-by dates months or even years in the future. As my grandmother used to say, ‘If the bugs won’t eat it, why should I?’
On the farm, the question of the livingness of food became an issue for me. Over the next few years, I’d become fascinated with living food – the live enzymes and nutrients of our raw goat’s milk; the powerful probiotic called kefir that we make from the milk; the way goat’s milk penetrates human skin; the mysteries of sourdough starter; the living yeast that makes the bread rise. And following that fascination would lead us down paths that we’d never anticipated.
As farmers, we are, oddly, a little like priests – privileged to stand at the portals where life begins and ends. The seed becomes the sprout, which turns into the tomato plant, under our hands. The sheep quickens with the l
amb. We harvest the tomato, and cut it up for our family, and bring it to the table. We eat the lamb. And we’re contained irrevocably within its circle – actor and acted upon, bringer of life and death, forever and ever, amen.
2 September 2010
Today I dropped the kids at school, stopped at the feed merchant on the way home and bought one bag of pig food, one bag of beet shreds, two bags of stock mix to feed the goats, and one large container of hypochlorite, the bleach we use to clean the stable and the dairying equipment.
I stood in the drizzling rain while a tall, thin man loaded the heavy bags into my car. I drove home and unloaded them, one by one, laboriously, getting wetter by the minute. They were too heavy for me to lift, so I stacked them onto the sack trolley that Rich had made out of metal bars, and started dragging them up the bumpy, rutted pavement to put them away.
This is exactly the kind of task that I would have had no patience for, long ago in my city life. The kind of job that seems menial and difficult, even pointless. Why perform meaningless drudgery – jobs that strain your muscles and take up your time?
But I’ve learned a different sort of rhythm on the farm. I know how this one goes – I put on my waterproof coat, my waterproof trousers, my wellies, and go out into the rain. I trudge to the shed and get out the sack trolley. I load the first sack onto it. I pull it up the track. I deliver it. And then I go and get another one.
There’s no looking at the watch, no impatient rolling of the eyes, no wondering when this will be finished, or how long it will take. I start into the job with a stolid patience, simply doing what’s right in front of me. I’ll finish when I finish. And this puts me completely in the moment. No racing ahead – because I can’t rush a job like this.
The same goes for hauling in the bales from the hay field – there’s no point in standing at the gate, looking over the 200 bales in the hot sun with a sinking heart, wondering how long it’ll take. I’ll only depress and overwhelm myself.
Secrets from Chuckling Goat Page 3