by Amy Thielen
Hank, my new appendage, was wide-eyed, with a flirtatious smile and a near-constant sigh. Sometimes his sighs sounded like contentment and other times just as if he felt the need to put some sound on the passing moment, to make us aware that he was taking up new space in the world. I woke up every day with the sinking feeling that I had only dreamed his sweet skin, that he didn’t really exist after all. I was so relieved when his cries turned out to be real.
After going through our morning routine, I laid the fragile, sleeping Hank in the bassinet for his nap and went to the fridge to find the block of headcheese. The hunger I’d lost in the events of the previous week had returned with a vengeance. The chunks of pork in golden gelatin looked like fossils floating in amber, caught in time. When I tried to carve a thin refined slice, the cake crumbled like a bunch of stacked stones. So I cut a thick slice—a proper Grandma-size hunk—set it on hot toast made from plain supermarket-white, and tasted it. Sadly, it was nowhere near as good as the Italian testa. My aspic was the right strength, but I’d thrown in too much fat. The meat tasted vaguely swinish, and yet curiously still bland. I should not have short-shifted the brining. That two-day salt cure was not optional. I opened my pine cabinet, found the white wine vinegar, plugged the top with my thumb, and sprinkled droplets over the headcheese.
Just like my mother’s butter, the salty golden pork juice seeped all the way to the bread’s bottom edge. It wasn’t perfect. But it was close. Not by degrees, but literally—like a local who’d never left, it was born, raised, and ceremoniously consumed within ten miles of home.
—
That fall, sticking to the plan, we moved back to Brooklyn with Hank. Aaron got to work on finishing the sculptures for his second solo show at his Chelsea gallery.
Brooklyn, with Hank at my side, felt almost unrecognizable. I took Hank with me everywhere, to the large suburban supermarket in Red Hook, to the nearby playground where he clung to the monkey bars like jailbait and shook his diapered booty, to the coffee shop where I checked my empty email in-box. There was not a minute of taking care of him that I begrudged him the brief derailment of my working career. Well before he could speak, his expression conveyed perfect comic timing, and his eyes glimmered with unspoken punch lines to my doofy jokes; he was that delightful of a companion.
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.
I catalog the few jars in the pantry that will survive the trip back east. Roma tomatoes canned in their thickened juice. Homemade harissa from my sweet, fleshy Alma paprika peppers. Spicy green schug, packed with herbs and hot green chilies. Smooth black currant jam that tastes like grape, but muskier and more interesting.
I look at all the things in my freezer that I’ll have to leave here: chive oil, frozen shell beans, smoked eggplant. My eyes canvass the stuff I’ve made that won’t last the week: the pot of cream sitting on my counter solidifying into the pudding of crème fraîche, the homemade cheese in my fridge that I mash and mix with heavy cream for Hank’s first cottage cheese. I dip my spoon into the cheese, pull out a divot, and mix it with the harissa: delicious. I pull out another divot and mix it with some black currant jam: another world of good. I spread a heel of bread with jam, then another with cheese, then spicy green schug, and the flavors swirl up and around my head, and I experience the familiar flavor wheel of cooking on the line on a busy night, the endless parade of strong tastes and bright colors.
And finally I know. The dream I have for my cooking life doesn’t live and die in the professional kitchen. My affliction belongs here. It lives in both my successes and my mistakes. In the batches of overfermented sauerkraut I’ve tossed over the fence. The black currant jam that tastes like a feral grape. The thin skins of freshly dug potatoes that pop at the bite. The ripe face of a cut tomato gushing all over my morning toast. All my years of nearsighted devotion to tiny plates culminate in this moment: This is as close range as my cooking bug can get. It was so near to me that I couldn’t see that I was standing on top of it. The best food is fleeting, and unlike Aaron and me, it tolerates no wanderlust. Its flavors don’t travel.
—
“Have you enrolled Hank in pre-K yet?” my friends in Brooklyn email me to ask.
“No. God. Already?”
When I hesitate to enroll my crawling toddler on a waiting list for his school career, they call it. They’ve seen it happen before.
“You’re not coming back.”
I insist to the contrary. When the first frost arrives to kill the tomatoes, the old familiar feeling of seasonal migration returns. As I tug the chilled red tomatoes from the vines to make one final batch of tomato sauce, summer feels over. It’s time to go back to New York, our city, to our friends and our work. But when I walk into Aaron’s studio to check on his packing progress, I’m doubtful. The nine-foot-tall anchor piece he’s making for his winter show in Berlin—an intricately carved wooden sculpture that weighs an actual ton—is really amazing, maybe the best thing he’s ever made, and obviously unfinished.
“Are we…taking that back?” I ask, vowing then and there not to let myself and Hank ride in the truck that will be pulling that behemoth.
“Actually, I think it’s too big.” He sighs.
“For the trailer?”
“No. For my Brooklyn studio.”
“Oh.”
And so, just like that, we decide to stay in Two Inlets for the winter.
It will be a lark, I think, a new unexpected move within a lifetime of unexpected moves that have begun to settle into an all-too-predictable pattern. Ironically, now that we have power at the house, our days in the woods have grown more convenient than our life in Brooklyn with a baby, navigating the inconvenient, dense adult playground that is New York.
Then just when the first chilly fall wind arrives to shake all the dry leaves from the trees, the economy dramatically crashes on the news. It appears that it has taken the luxury market down with it. With growing anxiety we assume that no one will be particularly keen to buy a giant, expensive sculpture right now, and that suddenly, we no longer have an income. Our freeing choice to stay at home in Minnesota becomes instead the—unthinkable—most practical thing to do. Our personal economy has always run on hope, though, and for the first time I trust it and classify this situation as temporary. Nevertheless, the familiar feeling of being broke that I’ve known in the past settles around me like an old worn afghan—dusty but garishly bright.
I knew we’d one day move back home, but I didn’t know it would be so soon. The upside is that we have stopped moving. The downside is that for the first time in recent years, I do not have a job and I am not in a place to get one. Aaron works long days and nights in the studio making his best work to date, for which there are no guaranteed sales. He continues to knock away in the studio, the familiar sound of his carving mallet echoing out over the creek, because that is just what he does.
Over the phone, my mom frets, although she’s happy that we’ve expanded and modernized our place. Even with its original gappy floor—“next, you need to replace that”—our house now registers a full two steps above a hovel. But she worries about my stove. “You can’t bake in that old oven,” she says, and she is not wrong. So she buys us a new one, a really beautiful stove with a hammered brown-coppery finish and five burners, big enough to fit my canning kettles and side projects at the same time. I no longer have to light my oven through the blowhole with a long match as I did with the Roper. Now I have burners that poof alight with a gentle push and a light reassuring click-click-click.
Armed with a proper piece of equipment, I can now do what I do. Only when cooking, when I’m standing in front of the stove skimming the gray scum from a cauldron’s worth of shaggy beef bones, do I know that we’re not lost. As I ladle the hot broth over bowls of Swiss chard, they wilt and float to the surface, and I know we’ll be okay. I’ll scrub the rough wooden floorboards until they shine, as Ruth did, and call my kitchen a cooking school. Cooking at Hazelbrush. I’ll invite people to eat, to drink—and everything will come from the garden. They’ll sit around my counter on wooden stools and I’ll serve them five courses, with wine pairings, each set with clean silver as is done in fine dining. I don’t fret over such technicalities as licensing—it’s a cooking class, like my own modern-day forest speakeasy. The money I take in will be like egg money, enough to keep us richly fed. I’ll fill the deep freezer with local animals and blanched garden vegetables and the cupboards with pickles and jam and canned tomatoes, and if things get really bad, I’ll dig deeper into books of peasant cookery; I’ll confit the wild ducks on the creek if I have to.
—
Before we know it, winter comes. I’d forgotten about the winter.
The weather Aaron wished for the entire time we lived in New York arrives in full force, and it’s a character. Petulant, beautiful, roaring, and blindingly arctic, winter in Minnesota is the most histrionic of seasons. My friends back in New York wonder how we can do it, how we can live in such a dull place. I try to describe to them how the dramatics are high, but words fail to capture it.
For fun, we search the in
ternet for places that we think might be colder than our own—Minsk, Moscow, Thunder Bay, Ketchikan—and then roll with delight when we beat them out by being lower. We are victorious! We realize that our location, about as far away from any temperate body of water as you can get, right in the bottom nipple of the Alberta Clipper, creates the ideal conditions for epic, record-breaking cold. And this first winter back is a bruiser, one that defies normal thermometers. Our smiles fade when we realize that the number on the thermometer appears to be stuck at −40, because as the night goes on our world surely grows colder.
Despite the arctic winds, people in town still walk around with polite, ten-percent grins. They gently ask us what it is that we do back there, way out in the woods, with an unsaid Don’t you people have jobs? fluttering behind them. I’d forgotten about Minnesota-nice, too, but I come to a theory about it: The frigid winter wind supplies all the honesty and directness the local population can stand. It knocks everyone’s sharp observations sideways. The weather is meaner than mean, and after a while, there’s nothing you can do but greet it with a shallow smile.
On this wind, childhood memories begin to blow in. In the shine beaming off the bluish snow boulders I see another 25-below day, when my friends and I huddled in the basement of Rocky’s Pizza around the new Metallica song on the jukebox, the tingling bass like heartbeats in our heads, pounding relentlessly like our own teenage perseverance.
I see myself waiting for the bus with my brothers and the neighborhood kids, standing on a beaten-down pad of glittering snow sugar, wearing thin canvas shoes. The hair nearest to my head is still damp, my bangs are curled into a frothing surf, and the cold finds the moisture burning at my scalp. The air is sharp and crystalline, minty. The winter light comes at us from every direction, refracted in diamond cut every place it lands, until it appears that we are the lone humans standing in a white landscape and all of the world’s spotlights are trained right on us, a stiff clump of kids in the middle of nowhere.