Savage Feast

by Boris Fishman

  On my first day, I worked a pickax to loosen some soil in a greenhouse for “the three sisters.” Beans, which need a stalk to wind around, get planted between corn seeds that will become those stalks. The corn gets help keeping down weeds from squash, which flowers horizontally. And the squash gets the shade it needs from the corn leaves. (The cultivars had wondrous names—Gold of Bacau beans, Country Gentleman corn, Galeux d’Eysines squash.) It would be like the old Communist slogan—“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”—and if the human hand could just stay mostly away, perhaps this communism could succeed. (Later in the season, I would notice two tomato plants that had intertwined as thickly as a tangle of hair. My fingers were in there unwinding before I knew what was happening. “They probably know far better than we do what to do,” Louise called out as I broke one of the stems.)

  The handle of the pickax soon tore through my work gloves, a nice blister forming in the seat of my palm. Periodically, something nauseating began to spin in my stomach and I’d have to pause and straighten myself. However, the ache in my hands eventually subsided to a dull burn, and the strain in my stomach eased as I learned to wield the pickax from the right part of my body. I swung, sank, pulled, and hefted, then switched to a rake; then fell to my knees to gather the mound in which I’d bury the seeds. When I was done, there were three long rows and I couldn’t move. But my mind felt like water resting in a cool jug, exhausted into silence.

  On Saturdays, I woke at 6 a.m.—animals summon a sense of responsibility that even one’s own well-being does not, and I was out of bed before the clock turned 6:01—and by 9 a.m. I was a hundred miles away, rolling a punctured oil drum to make divots for plantings or coaxing milk from udders. At quitting time, I dragged myself like a ghost to the stallion barn, showered, and, feeling a measureless hunger, in one meal devoured more food than I had in the previous week. Physical labor—especially when food was involved—was a more effective emollient than rage. By the time I drove home after another shift the next day, I felt as if I were returning from another country. As if I had a secret.

  Farm life, at first, seemed ritualistic: You do the same thing every day, partly to maximize already thin profits, partly because of natural facts—cows like to milk in the morning; when summer comes, you hay in the late afternoon, after the grass has received that day’s nutrients but before it has sent them down to the root. The humans fit in between: Chores start at 5:00 a.m.; you pause at 7:30 a.m. for coffee and a plan for the day; 1:30 p.m. for fresh bread slathered with whatever’s at hand, whether peanut butter or tuna salad or the cheese that the farm makes from the cows’ milk; a mind-vacated dinner at 8:00 p.m. Coming from a city where routine felt impossible, and where no authority greater than my own directed my days, I found myself submitting eagerly to the implacable requirements of cattle and grass.

  But then, like the haze that burns off on a hot day, that impression dispersed. After enough weekends, it began to seem like actually you could rely on very little routine. You didn’t know if the seeds in the garden would sprout, so you planted extras, except if they all sprouted, the plants would throttle one another. One morning, after something spooked the cows on the way to the milking barn and they dispersed wildly—my eyes filled with a dozen near-tonners with horns that could go through armor—we managed to get them back together, but not before the day’s schedule went to shit. And if we hadn’t tarped that hay before the rain started, it would have cost the farm twenty thousand dollars. The notion of control was so laughable that, counterintuitively, the anxiety fell away. I had never greeted failure and lack of control in this way.

  And then that impression went away. Farm life was ritualistic. And it was improvisational, too. Brunhilde won’t milk from her hind left teat, and the calves don’t help by gravitating to the others, from which it’s easier to suck. But the milk has to come out—unmilked cows can develop mastitis, an inflammation of the mammary glands—and the farm needs that milk to go into a vat, where it will curdle after the addition of rennet and harden into a wheel, which, after aging, will head off to the farmers’ market, where it will inspire exclamations about the agrarian life. The swollen sac that empties into Brunhilde’s left hind teat bulges painfully.

  So you wedge between her and Cordelia, off to the side there—cows kick back, not to the side—get your left hand on the teat, dodge the shit-caked tails swatting lazily to and fro, and squeeze. And—squeeze. Over and over. She doesn’t like it when you squeeze with the whole hand, so you clamp your thumb and forefinger over the udder and pull without using the other fingers. That hurts her less. It hurts you more.

  Her skin is warm and taut, eight hundred pounds of muscle. She looks like a bulb laid sideways. You give her a firm squeeze, then harder. It takes you a while to believe it, but they don’t feel pain like we do. Brunhilde’s chewing her cud and staring blankly at a calf lounging on the other side of the feeding trough. You don’t know when you cross the line, at once absent and alert (if she kicks, you dodge). The muscles in your hand ache so badly you don’t think you can squeeze again, so you switch hands, but Brunhilde likes the other way, so you go back, and, little by little, you disappear again. Every moment is identical.

  One afternoon, I was in my rubber overalls, shoveling mounds of cow manure, turned soupy by urine, out of the milking barn, when my phone buzzed. It was my grandfather.

  “So?” he said by way of greeting.

  “I’m wearing a smock and it’s covered in shit,” I said. “But I feel good.” I was referring to the story about his brother Aaron, who worked with motors. Though he revered Aaron, Arkady had refused to do the same work—he’d work in a barber’s “clean smock,” not a dirty one.

  Now my grandfather issued a consignment of all mothers to an unspeakable fate—in Russian swearing, as in many things Russian, mothers are at the heart of things—and then said, giving up: “I don’t understand anything.” Then he became convulsed by a fit of terrible coughing and gave the phone to Oksana as my pleasure at needling him turned to regret. Then again, maybe he was faking the coughing—upset or not, he wouldn’t want me to think he didn’t want to talk to me anymore. The line was silent as I heard the muffled sound of Oksana ministering to him. His iron was low—every morning, she poured into him sixteen ounces of beet juiced with other vegetables. But when she got on the phone, she was laughing—he had issued some choice exclamations between sips of his throat-clearing tea—and her laugh was so infectious that I began laughing, too.

  On weekdays, I took the subway down to Brooklyn, and on weekends I drove to the farm. In Oksana’s kitchen, I figured out how chicken liver alchemizes into a crepe. When the time came to flip, Oksana “drew” around the edge of the crepe with a thin wooden skewer, as if she were crossing something out, until it began to separate from the pan; then, in a lightning motion, slid her fingers under the crepe and flipped it onto its backside. My tries tattered the crepes, which Oksana “darned” with more batter, and finally, ten crepes later or thirty, I flipped one without tearing. Then I tore five more. Then another the right way.

  I learned to baby the rabbit in sour cream, tenderer than chicken and less forgiving of distraction, as well as the banosh the way the Italians did polenta. You had to mix in the cornmeal little by little while the dairy simmered—Oksana boiled the cornmeal in milk and sour cream, never water or stock—as it clumped otherwise, which I learned the hard way. I learned to curdle and heat milk until it became a bladder of farmer cheese dripping out its whey through a cheesecloth tied over the knob of a cabinet door; how to use the whey to make a more protein-rich bread; how to sear pucks of farmer cheese spiked with raisins and vanilla until you had breakfast. I learned patience for the pumpkin preserves—stir gently to avoid turning the cubes into puree, let cool for the runoff to thicken; repeat for two days. How to pleat dumplings and fry cauliflower florets so that half the batter did not remain stuck to the pan. To marinate the peppers Oksana made for my grandfather on their
first day together. To pickle watermelon, brine tomatoes, and even make potato latkes the way my grandmother made them.

  Pumpkin Preserves (v)

  Time: 30 minutes, plus 3–4 heating sessions of 20–25 minutes, with cooling periods in between

  Ukraine reaches as far south as Provence—or used to, when it had Crimea—so the Mediterranean vegetables and fruit are in ample supply there: eggplant, melons, pumpkins. The lattermost show up in soups and preserves, and as oil infusions. With pumpkins, it’s color that matters, not size—the brighter the orange, the riper and sweeter the pumpkin. There’s something pleasingly koan-like about this recipe—extremely simple and subtle at once: The syrup has to thicken without turning the pumpkin and fruit cubes floating in it to mush.

  2 pounds pumpkin

  1 lemon

  1 orange

  2 pounds sugar

  Peel the pumpkin and cut into small cubes—each piece no larger than a fingernail.

  Deseed the lemon and the orange and cut (with the rinds intact) to the same size.

  Combine pumpkin, lemon, and orange with the sugar. Stir gently. Leave overnight in the fridge, covered by a napkin or paper towel.

  By the next day, the sugar will have interacted with the pumpkin, lemon, and orange to let off liquid. Bring the mixture to a boil, then immediately turn the heat down to medium-low and simmer for 15 minutes. Stir infrequently and gently—stirring breaks up the cubes and hastens their breakdown into paste, which means you will end up with jam instead of preserves.

  Turn off the heat and let cool completely. The goal is to thicken the liquid (by full cooling) without turning the fruit and pumpkin cubes into puree (by stirring too hard).

  Reheat the mixture the same way—bring to a boil, then let simmer for 15 minutes, stirring gently—until the liquid has turned viscous. Again, allow to cool completely.

  Oksana reheats—and lets cool—the mixture three times, and ends up with a quart of preserves. Then the teapot gets filled and the tea biscuits come out.

  Note: The sugar in the preserves will inhibit bacteria, so storage in a sterilized jar isn’t required.

  Sour Cream–Braised Rabbit with New Potatoes

  Time: 1 hour

  Serves: 4–6

  New potatoes are sweeter and make a great counterbalance to the tang in the sour cream and the vinegar used to soak the rabbit.

  1 medium rabbit (about 2 pounds), cut into 8 pieces

  3 tablespoons white vinegar

  1/4 cup vegetable oil

  11/2 teaspoons ground coriander

  1 teaspoon ground caraway

  Kosher salt and black pepper, to taste

  1 large onion, chopped

  1 large carrot, grated

  11/2 cups sour cream

  2 garlic cloves, put through a garlic press

  12 small new potatoes

  Fresh dill, roughly chopped

  Fresh parsley, roughly chopped

  Note: If rabbit is scarce where you are, substitute chicken parts.

  Cover the rabbit with water and add the vinegar to remove gaminess. Let stand 2–3 hours.

  Drain the water without rinsing the rabbit. Heat the oil in a medium-size nonstick pot over medium-high heat. Add the rabbit and sear for 3 minutes per side. Add the coriander, caraway, salt, and pepper, and cook for another minute on each side. Transfer the rabbit to a plate.

  In the same pot, sauté the onion until golden brown. Then add the grated carrot and cook fully, adding salt to taste. Return the rabbit to the pan and cover with the sour cream, but no need to mix it in just yet; it will soak in. Turn the heat down to low, cover, and cook for 5 minutes.

  Now, the sour cream having softened, mix all the ingredients gingerly. Add the pressed garlic and cover again.

  While the rabbit is braising, boil the new potatoes—skin on—in salty water.

  How much time the rabbit needs varies depending on age and toughness. Every 5–10 minutes, swish the liquid around carefully so the sour cream doesn’t stick to the pot and burn, and test the rabbit with a fork. If you’re low on liquid, add water, sour cream, or a mixture of the two. Taste the braising liquid from time to time to see if it needs salt, pepper, or spices. The rabbit should need no more than 30–40 minutes braising at low temperature.

  When the rabbit is ready, add the dill and parsley, quarter the potatoes, and serve alongside each other or mixed.

  Pickled Watermelon (v)

  Time: 30 minutes (and 2 days)

  Serves: 40 Americans or 2 Ukrainians

  The Ukrainian palate adores the contrast of tart and sweet, which shows up at its purest in recipes for pickled fruit. Sounds strange, perhaps, but biting into a cranberry fished out of a jar of pickled cabbage, or a pickled apple, in the dead of winter is the closest I’ve come to enjoying the services of a time machine. The watermelon in this recipe comes out sweet, garlicky, and earthy with dill all at once. Don’t forget to drink the brine—especially after a hangover.

  1/3 of a small (pinkie-size) jalapeño pepper, scissored into rings

  The cloves of 1 head of garlic, divided

  2 tablespoons kosher salt

  1 tablespoon sugar

  1 medium watermelon (about 2 pounds), rind removed and flesh cut into 1-inch cubes

  1 bunch fresh dill

  Cover the bottom of a nonreactive container with half of the dill and the jalapeño rings.

  Slice 5 of the garlic cloves in half and toss those in as well. Add 4 cups of water and the salt and sugar.

  Scatter the watermelon in the container. Put 2 of the garlic cloves through a garlic press and add. Scatter in the remaining garlic cloves. Mix gently with your hands to make sure the garlic, salt, and sugar are well distributed. The watermelon should be peeking out of the water. Over the next day, it will “give” its own liquid and submerge.

  Cover with the rest of the dill.

  Let stand unrefrigerated for a day, and then refrigerate for another day.

  Keep refrigerated while you consume. It should keep for a week.

  When it became warmer, we cooked with what I hauled home from the farm, which was as much as I could load into my car. Oksana had never seen tomatoes in so many colors. She had never laid eyes on Swiss chard, which she hesitantly subbed for the sorrel in her sorrel borshch. She even tried some “leaf salads,” though she went back to cucumbers, radishes, and tomatoes as soon as I left her alone.

  She never brought up what had happened to me. Over the years, I’d become nearly as able to read her silence as my mother’s—sometimes better, as there was none of the occluding anger that makes it so hard to agree to see what a mother wishes one to. But we also knew, without discussing it, that there was a point of intimacy past which we were too different to go. My family was too close, Americans kept too far, but she and I had found the right distance. I don’t mean the ideal distance—just the right one.

  Through a training institute, I found a psychoanalyst. He was as far north of my friend’s apartment as Oksana and my grandfather were south. He was unfashionably Freudian and asked me for my dreams. I told him the one about my grandfather in bed, the gold teeth, the pleading.

  “Gold,” he repeated.

  “Soviet dentistry,” I said. “It’s a long story.”

  “Tell me some words that rhyme with ‘gold,’” he said.

  “Cuckold,” I blurted out.

  He smiled and dipped his head affirmatively. “We’ll have plenty to talk about.” Then he said I should go to a psychopharmacologist to get medicine.

  “Can’t we just figure it out here?” I said.

  “Don’t negotiate with me,” he said. “Tell me another dream.”

  “I don’t remember any. They float up at odd times.”

  “Last night, for instance.”

  “It’s not coherent.”

  “Try it,” he said.

  “I’ve got a heavy pack,” I said. “I used to work as a hiking guide to make money to write—maybe it’s that. And I’m
walking a long way. I’m with a woman, my age. I don’t know who she is. And we get to—a roadblock, I guess. It’s a hole in the ground. And there’s a man in it, a young man. He’s got a thick beard. Dressed in a plaid shirt. And he says, ‘No, you’re not needed here.’ And I say, ‘But I’ve walked with this goddamn pack for how many miles.’”

  He gave me a small smile. “We could spend a year on that dream.”

  The psychopharmacologist he sent me to knew everything about my condition and nothing about how to speak to someone who’d never taken antidepressants. But why should he have been able to see himself clearly? A writer is never more blinded than when writing a memoir. I just wanted desperately to feel myself in competent hands. I was afraid. Afraid of never again being like the person I’d been. (Even as I wished to shed so much of that person.) Afraid because I didn’t know whether drugs would make things better or worse. The longer I delayed, the analyst had said, the more freely my ailment would surge through my neurons, detaching from its cause until it was an ever more permanent part of me. It already was. Just by having experienced it once, I was 50 percent likelier to experience it again.