Secret Ingredients

by David Remnick

  Gibbons went on to tell me that in 1960 his wife volunteered to support him through her teaching for as long as he needed to write—and do nothing but write—until he was satisfied that he had won or lost his long conflict with that particular genie. “Freda pushes me, and I resent it sometimes, but I couldn’t get anywhere without the pushing,” he said. “She is quick and simple, and I am complicated. No matter what situation she finds herself in, she can rise to the occasion and do the sensible thing, and, of course, I’m not like that at all. She doesn’t like to forage, and when I come home with wild food she sometimes says, ‘Euell, could you please leave that stuff on the back porch?’ Yet she supported me for two years while I wrote my first book, and it never would have been written without her.” They moved from Pendle Hill to an old farmhouse at Tanguy Homesteads, a rural interracial cooperative community near Philadelphia. Within a year, he had produced Mr. Markel Retires, his novel about the schoolteacher who retreated into a world of wild food, and another year was required for Mr. Markel to be boiled in three waters and utterly metamorphosed into Stalking the Wild Asparagus. Gibbons had been hesitant to try a straightforward handbook of wild food, mainly because several of them existed—Nelson Coon’s Using Wayside Plants, Oliver Medsger’s Edible Wild Plants, sections of the Boy Scout Handbook, and, most detailed of all, Edible Wild Plants of Eastern North America, by Merritt L. Fernald, Reed L. Rollins, and Alfred C. Kinsey—the same Alfred C. Kinsey who attracted a much wider audience with reports on sexual behavior. Gibbons had never been fully satisfied with any of the wild-food manuals, however. Fernald, Rollins, and Kinsey, in Gibbons’s view, had written a “dry list” and may not have tried out some of the recipes they suggested. “I can’t believe they ever cooked skunk cabbage,” he told me. Gibbons gathered, cooked, and ate everything he wrote about, and he rejected some foods that had been generally reported to be edible because he had found them unpalatable. “I have never successfully eaten arrow arum,” he said, to give me an example. “Same with golden club. Both of them prickled my throat and burned my mouth.” He sent wild food to Pennsylvania State University for analysis of its nutritive values. He read The Journal of Lewis and Clark, The Journal of George Vancouver, the observations of Captain John Smith on wild food, and the work of other early observers. He read ethno-botanies of the Iroquois, the Abnaki, the Menomini, the Cherokee, and other Indian tribes. Then, as he wrote, he included his own experiences with the plant he was discussing, gracefully and relevantly weaving his autobiography into his work. When Stalking the Wild Asparagus was published, it quickly established him as the master of his field—which shook him up no end.

  (I was to make a visit, some weeks later, to Tanguy Homesteads, and to find that while Gibbons was doing his research for the book he was a wild Hans Christian Andersen to the children there. He fed them the foods that he tested in his kitchen, took them fishing and foraging, and one day showed them twenty-five wild foods growing within a hundred feet of a supermarket. Gibbons has been gone from Tanguy for five years now, but the children there still collect meadow mushrooms, still make cattail-flour muffins, and, at his invitation, regularly visit him in Troxelville in the summertime. “Without the common weed, Euell wouldn’t have his career,” one child said to me. I also learned that Gibbons had run for Thornbury Township constable on the Democratic ticket while he lived at Tanguy, but his campaign ended in failure.)

  Gibbons moved to Troxelville in December 1963, but he had owned his house there for some years, having noticed in the Friends Journal an ad offering, for five thousand dollars, a farmhouse on eleven acres, with a peach orchard and a stream. He has let the peach orchard go wild, preferring the cornucopian wilderness that has now grown up among the old trees. There are 111 houses in Troxelville. Most of them are on one street and are as close together as houses in Manhattan, and their fronts abut the sidewalks. Gibbons’s house is one of the few that is remote from this compact center. The town looks European, clustered like a walled village, with miles of open land surrounding it. The country is Pennsylvania Dutch, and the people are burghers. “People have a sort of tolerant attitude toward me there,” Gibbons said. “However, it took my neighbors a long time to decide that I wasn’t completely crazy.” (After the trip, I asked a young man in Troxelville what he thought of Gibbons’s fondness for unusual foods, and the fellow said, “It’s okay, if that’s his interest, but to me a weed is a weed.” Several doors down the street, an old man who was sweeping the sidewalk told me proudly that Gibbons had once made violet jelly for the entire town.) Gibbons’s home freezer usually contains items like fresh-frozen day-lily buds, frozen seaweed, Birds Eye lima beans, Pepperidge Farm bread, frozen gooseberries, and hickory nuts, which are easier to crack when they are frozen. Next to one another on the kitchen shelves are things like Decaf, Bisquick, dried elder blow, rose-hip jam, and boneset tea. Gibbons pays taxes of seventy-five dollars a year on his Troxelville property, and he also has to pay something called an Occupation Tax. When he told the assessor what he does for a living, he was listed as a part-time day laborer.

  Few people in Troxelville are Quakers, Gibbons told me, and many of the old and frequently grand meetinghouses in that part of Pennsylvania are now nearly empty on Sundays. He and his wife go to meeting at Bucknell University, in Lewisburg, twenty-five miles away. “In meeting, of course, if anyone is moved to speak he speaks, and college professors are almost always moved to speak,” he said. (A couple of weeks later, I asked one of the professors for his view of Gibbons, and he said, “People are supposed to speak when the spirit moves them. Sometimes we think Euell plans to be moved. Sometimes he speaks like an anarchist in meeting. He has no faith in existing institutions and says that he has no use for institutions that are killing the spirit of society.” Other members told me that Gibbons has “religious depth and insight to an amazing extent” and that “he’s been inspired, and he is inspiring at times, but he’s not like a preacher preaching down.” After meeting, people sometimes thank Gibbons for sharing his thoughts and say to him, typically, “That just spoke to my condition.”)

  At seven that last evening of the trip, the rain was still humming on the roof of the Volkswagen, and Gibbons and I decided that it would be pointless to try to cook in a state park. As a campsite, we chose instead a motel in Mechanicsburg. After we had registered, we unloaded our luggage, and, in the room, we spread a tarpaulin on the floor and sorted things out. Then we put in a request for ice. When it came, we opened the door only enough to get the ice bucket through the crack, since we were both somewhat self-conscious about the appearance of the room. On one of the beds were several ground-cherry plants, loaded with ripe ground-cherries; a wild carrot; a big, airy, fernlike wild-asparagus plant (a souvenir for me), full of berries; and a deadly poisonous jimsonweed, heavy with seedpods (I wanted to take that home, too). On a bedside table were nutpicks and hunting knives. The Coleman stove and the cooking pots were on the bathroom floor, and on the bathroom shelves were salt, oil, wild garlic, and the hammer. Mounds of wild food were spaced out on the tarp. The large outdoor thermometer that we had been using throughout the trip was hanging by a loop of string over the wall thermostat. The temperature indoors was seventy-five degrees. We opened the windows. Gibbons took the red fruits of the staghorn sumac and soaked them and rubbed them in a pot of cold water. After sweetening the water, he poured sumac-ade into glass tumblers, over ice. “This has no food value, but it’s a nice sour drink,” he said. It tasted exactly like fresh lemonade.

  Gibbons set me to work peeling Jerusalem artichokes while he carved chicory crowns. In a market in Gettysburg, we had foraged two porterhouse steaks as a climactic salute to the Susquehanna River and the Appalachian Trail. We had also bought some butter, and the dinner as a whole consisted of buttered mashed Jerusalem artichokes, buttered oyster mushrooms, buttered chicory crowns, porterhouse steak rubbed with the wild garlic of the Gettysburg battlefield, and a salad of watercress, sheep sorrel, brandy mint, salt, oil, wild gar
lic, and red wintergreen berries. The glistening greens dotted with red berries provided an extraordinary variety and balance of tastes, and I have never encountered a salad anywhere that was more attractive or delicious than that one. The chicory crowns had much sharper overtones than the dandelion crowns we had had, and, while good in themselves, served most significantly to put the steak into relief. The steak was excellent and was made trebly so by the taste of the chicory in apposition to it. Gibbons said, “People have forgotten how to use bitter things.”

  At breakfast, the penultimate meal, we introduced eggs, and Gibbons made a fine wild omelette containing winter cress, watercress, and wild garlic. We had bacon as well, and pennyroyal tea. Then we packed up and headed north across the mountains toward Troxelville. The first ridge was Blue Mountain, and from it we could see, about fifteen miles away, the level ridgeline of the next one, Tuscarora Mountain. Between these two was a valley so rich with dairy farms and wooded streams that there had to be, somewhere in it, an incomparable lunch. Slowly, we foraged toward Tuscarora Mountain, passing up practically everything—wild mustard, day-lily tubers, bearing hickories, poke, chicory—in a selective search for excellence. We had crossed about two-thirds of the valley when Gibbons finally stopped. From the car, he studied a colony of small plants that were growing beside a barn. “Mallow,” he said. “Let’s go see if they’re any good.” Roughly one out of ten of the plants was heavy with seed-bearing discs, and it was these that Gibbons was looking for. Each one was round, had wedgelike segments, and, although it was only a third of an inch in diameter, remarkably resembled a wheel of cheese. Gibbons said that mallow fruits are almost universally called doll cheeses but that around that part of Pennsylvania people often call them billy-buttons. We went over to the farmhouse to get the permission of the farmer, who said, “Those billy-buttons are no good to me. Take all you want.” The picking was slow, and we needed about twenty minutes to get a pint of them.

  Across the rest of the valley, nothing of particular interest presented itself, and soon we were moving uphill through hardwood forests on Tuscarora Mountain. The climb became quite steep. Going around one hairpin curve, which Gibbons was somehow attending to with his peripheral vision, he suddenly swung off the road and stopped. Below us, on the inside of the curve, hanging prodigally over a ravine, were hundreds of thick bunches of wild frost grapes. They were as densely concentrated as grapes in a vineyard, probably because they had little room to expand into from such a difficult purchase on the cliffside. The vines were sturdy and about two inches through. They supported us easily, and, out over the ravine, we filled bags and buckets with grapes. Then we drove on up the mountain.

  At the summit, there was a turnout area, with a plank table under a stand of oaks. The ridgeline of Tuscarora Mountain is so narrow and its sides are so steep that we seemed to be standing on a wall two thousand feet high as we looked down on either side at villages, rivers, and farms. That day was as extravagantly out of season as most of the preceding days had been, but this time with sunshine and warmth. The temperature there on the ridge was seventy-one degrees. Gibbons lighted the stove and began to cook a large potful of grapes in a little water. He cooked the mallow cheeses in water, too, and as they simmered the fluid around them took on the consistency of raw egg white. “These are the fruits of round-leaf mallow,” he said. “If you cook the fruits of marsh mallow like this, the same sort of stuff comes out. The original marshmallows were made from it. Now there is no more marsh mallow in marshmallows than there are Hungarians in goulash.” He stirred the doll cheeses in their clear, thick sauce. “I used to do a lot of foraging with a friend of mine who was a vegetarian,” he went on. “He was an Oriental, and a vegetarian for religious reasons, and he would not eat eggs, or even gelatin. I once made a May-apple chiffon pie for him, using seaweed for gelatin and mallow instead of egg whites.” When the grapes had simmered for a while, he strained them into another pot, sweetened the juice, and thickened it with flour. After draining the mallow cheeses, he stirred butter into them. Then he served lunch—buttered mallow cheeses and wild-frost-grape flummery. The mallow cheeses were both crunchy and tender, and their taste was more delicate than the taste of any cultivated vegetable I could think of. The frost-grape flummery, deep in color, was quite similar to a Scandinavian fruit soup, and it was filling. Each of these dishes could have been a flourishing entry on any luncheon menu in any restaurant anywhere at all that noon, but on a mountaintop, with hundreds of square miles of forests and valleys falling away in two directions, they were served in an atmosphere appropriate to the attainments of the greatest living wild chef.

  We moved on into the second valley, and followed an indirect route to Troxelville, so that we could stop again and weigh ourselves. From notes, we made sure that we were wearing exactly the same clothes that we had been wearing when we weighed ourselves at the outset, which was not difficult, since we still had them on. We found that I had gained eight ounces. Gibbons had gained two pounds.

  1968

  THE FRUIT DETECTIVE

  JOHN SEABROOK

  One hot summer day not long ago, just as the specialty-food stores around town were putting up FIRST OF THE SEASON signs to advertise their peaches, a rare and extraordinary shipment of apricots appeared in Manhattan. They were white apricots, which you almost never see in the United States. Unlike the familiar tawny-colored varieties, these had pale, almost translucent skin, with a yellow blush. And, unlike the cottony supermarket fruit, the white apricots tasted great: a rush of sugar, with a complex, slightly acidic aftertaste. The flesh almost melted in your mouth, and the juice was so plentiful that you had to bend over while eating one, to avoid staining your shirt.

  The apricots were available at Citarella, which has four branches, and only at Citarella—a fact that pleased the store’s produce manager, Gregg Mufson, a great deal. Like his competitors at the other high-end specialty stores around town, such as Eli’s, Dean & DeLuca, and Grace’s, Mufson tries to titillate his customers by giving them uncommon fruits—curiosities that they may have encountered in a restaurant, on their travels, or on the Food Network. “Anything new, anything different, and if I can get it directly from the grower it’s even better, because there’s no middleman,” said Mufson, who is in his mid-thirties and wears a neatly trimmed goatee. “I want them to go ‘Wow!’ I want to blow their minds with something. They’ll eat these apricots, and they won’t forget that taste, and then they’ll come back and buy some more of my fruit.” Mufson pays attention to the food press, so that he can be sure to have the trendy fruits and vegetables in stock. “When the Times did an article on rambutans”—bright-red, golf-ball-size, tendril-covered fruits from Southeast Asia, with translucent, sweet-tart flesh—“we sold ten cases of them in a couple of days.” Appearance, he added, is the most important quality in attracting people to new fruit—the more colorful the better—followed by sugar. “Basically, if it’s sweet, people like it,” he said.

  At first, not many customers paid much attention to the new apricots. “That’s a white apricot,” one of the produce workers in the store said when a customer asked about the fruit. “First one I ever seen,” he added. But the customer went for the Apriums—yellow-skinned, pink-fleshed plum-apricot hybrids, which have become popular in the past few years.

  Soon, however, word about the white apricots got out. The pastry chef at Citarella thought they were one of the best fruits he’d ever tasted. The chef Daniel Boulud bought two cases of white apricots and was “crazy for them,” Mufson said; Boulud used them to make apricot galettes. The owner of Citarella, Joe Gurrera, gave a white apricot to Martha Stewart when she came into the East Hampton branch of the store, and “she was blown away by it,” Mufson reported. “Blown a-way.” The store sold out of its supply in a couple of days; the next shipment disappeared even more rapidly. Mufson was delighted. “My boss gave me a compliment! My boss never gives me compliments. He said, ‘This is the best fruit ever. We got to get more of this stu
ff.’ All I can say is David really scored this time.”