Leaves of 4 thyme sprigs
1½ pounds mussels, debearded and washed
1½ pounds large raw shrimp, peeled and deveined (thawed if frozen)
1½ pounds skinless cod fillets, cut into 2-inch pieces
Freshly ground black pepper
Crusty bread, for serving
In a very large pot or Dutch oven, heat the oil and butter over medium heat. Add the onion, fennel, parsley, bay leaf, and salt and sauté until the onion and fennel are translucent, about 10 minutes. Add the garlic and crushed red pepper and sauté for 2 more minutes.
Add the crushed tomatoes, chicken stock, white wine, clam juice, tomato paste, basil, and thyme to the pot. Stir, cover, and cook until the mixture comes up to a simmer. Reduce the heat and continue to simmer, covered, for 30 minutes.
Add the mussels, cover, and cook until they begin to open, 5 to 10 minutes. Stir in the shrimp and cod, cover, and simmer until they are just cooked through, another 5 to 10 minutes. Discard any mussels that did not open.
Season the stew with salt and pepper to taste. Ladle into shallow bowls and serve with good, crusty bread.
The Secret Garden
CURRANT BUNS
I’ll admit that I was slightly skeptical about Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden when it showed up on my pillow one night before bed in third grade. My mom had placed it there, hoping I would love it as much as she did when she was my age. It was brand-new, a delicious-smelling cream-colored paperback with elegant green lettering that swirled like wild vines around a little girl in her checkered raincoat who stood surrounded by pink roses. It looked precious, and I was wary of precious.
Only a few weeks earlier I had thrown my copy of Eleanor Hodgman Porter’s Pollyanna clear across the room in frustrated disgust, knocking over my little sister’s cereal bowl and causing an outburst of crying and yelling. It was unlike me to do something so aggressive, but Pollyanna Whittier had been riding my last nerve for days, with her “glad game” and her perfect flaxen hair. As soon as I opened The Secret Garden, though, it was clear that Mary Lennox was no Pollyanna; this was a dark book about dark subjects—neglect and anger, grief, illness, and hunger—I devoured it quickly and thought about it for weeks after.
When The Secret Garden was published in 1911, the genre of children’s literature was in its golden age. In the late 1800s a change occurred in how children were perceived. They were no longer viewed as tiny adults or as creatures born full of sin, but as clean slates with their own unique personalities that needed to be shaped with care and enriched with imaginative play. Authors like Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald, and Charles Kingsley wrote humorous adventure and fantasy stories that replaced the didactic and instructive children’s literature of previous years. Along with this new belief in children’s autonomy came fear and curiosity about what happens when children are left to grow up on their own, outside the domestic sphere and without the guidance of parents. This fear was especially prevalent in England, where the number of orphaned children far outnumbered the available spots in orphanages.
Both children’s and adult literature of the mid-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries is littered with orphans—Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn; Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne Shirley (Anne of Green Gables) and Emily Starr (Emily of New Moon); the Brontë sisters’ Jane Eyre and Heathcliff; Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Pip, Estella Havisham, and David Copperfield; Victor Hugo’s Cosette and Quasimodo; Little Orphan Annie; Heidi; and, of course, Pollyanna Whittier and Mary Lennox.
Every author of this time period had his or her own way of dealing with the orphan problem—the orphans are saved by generous benefactors, by their own positivity, by hard, honest work, by love. For Mary, it is not only the neglected garden she discovers at Misselthwaite Manor and prunes back to health that saves her, but the appetite that this physical work awakens within her. Her transformation from sour, scrawny, and embittered to empathetic, healthy, and joyful can be traced directly to what and how much she is eating.
The first meal we see Mary eat is at her home in India, during the cholera outbreak that kills her parents and most of the house staff. After being completely forgotten and shut up in her nursery for five whole days, she emerges, thirsty and starving, with no idea where anyone is. She wanders into the dining room, which she finds empty, “though a partially finished meal was on the table and chairs and plates looked as if they had been hastily pushed back when the diners rose suddenly for some reason.” It is in this creepy, postapocalyptic scene that Mary scrounges up a meal of “some fruit and biscuits, and being thirsty she drank a glass of wine which stood nearly filled.”
It’s a sad and lonely meal, made even sadder when Mary, who is so young she doesn’t really know what wine is, gets drunk and stumbles back to the nursery “frightened by cries she heard in the huts and by the hurrying sound of feet.” The now-orphaned Mary is quickly swept away from the abandoned house in India and sent to live in the sprawling mansion of her mysterious uncle Archibald Craven, whom she has never met before, in the moors of England. The next time food is offered to her, it is on her train ride to Misselthwaite Manor with the head servant, Mrs. Medlock, who presents a cozy meal of “some chicken and cold beef and bread and butter and some hot tea” in a lunch basket. Mrs. Medlock is cheered up considerably with this meal, but there is no mention that Mary eats any of it. Instead she sits and stares at Mrs. Medlock, who, after eating a great deal, falls sound asleep.
When Mary arrives at Misselthwaite Manor, however, she isn’t as easily able to avoid eating without notice. When she awakes the first morning, the table in her room is set “with a good substantial breakfast. But she always had a very small appetite, and she looked with something more than indifference at the first plate that Martha set before her.” In Mary’s former life, no one seemed to notice if she ate or not, but Martha, the maid at Misselthwaite, is incensed and baffled by her refusal to eat her porridge, telling her “Tha’ doesn’t know how good it is. Put a bit o’ treacle on it or a bit o’ sugar.” She tells her how much her brothers and sisters, who are “as hungry as young hawks an’ foxes” and have “scarce ever had their stomachs full in their lives” would love to eat the breakfast that Mary is spurning, to which Mary responds, “I don’t know what it is to be hungry.”
After a few days spent wandering outside in the fresh air of the moors, chasing a friendly robin and poking around the walls of the garden, Mary wakes up hungry for the first time ever, and much to Martha’s delight devours all of her porridge without any prodding. The more time Mary spends outside with Martha’s brother Dickon, restoring life to the garden that she had found in a state of neglect and isolation similar to her own, the hungrier she becomes. Soon she’s plotting ways to sneak snacks between meals and boasting to her cousin, Colin, “I’m getting fatter and fatter every day. Mrs. Medlock will have to get me some bigger dresses. Martha says my hair is growing thicker. It isn’t so flat and dull and stringy.”
The meals that signal Mary’s final and total transformation are the ones that she, Dickon, and Colin eat in the garden. Burnett describes these garden picnics with such enthusiasm that I remember actually salivating over them as a child. There is “hot tea and buttered toast and crumpets,” “home-made bread and snow-white eggs, raspberry jam and clotted cream,” as well as eggs and potatoes roasted in the ground and slathered in fresh butter and salt. My favorite meal of all, though—the one that I pined for nearly as much as I pined for Dickon himself—was the “two tin pails full of rich new milk with cream on the top of it, and cottage-made currant buns folded in a clean blue and white napkin, buns so carefully tucked in that they were still hot.”
When I was a child, the closest I ever came to cottage-made currant buns were the hot cross buns that appeared in my local grocery store every year around Easter, stacked high in plastic clamshells, all perfectly uniform in that conveyor belt kind of way. Even though those buns were far from homemade and never warm, I loved them,
with their hard little currants and frosting crosses.
I didn’t taste a homemade currant bun until a couple of years ago, when my older sister and I were living together while she was going to pastry school. After making them at school one night, she brought a box of them home and presented them to me. I nearly cried when I opened the box and saw them, all shiny and round and studded with tiny black currants. They were still warm, even after their long ride on the L train back home, and unlike the ones I had grown up eating, they were heavy with the intoxicating smell of fresh yeast and orange peel. We curled up on the couch, both of us still covered in flour from long days of pastry making, and ate the whole box.
THE SECRET GARDEN
Currant Buns
Makes 1 dozen
4 teaspoons active dry yeast
¾ cup whole milk, warmed slightly (about 110°F)
3¾ cups bread flour
⅓ cup sugar
3 large eggs, at room temperature
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 teaspoon finely grated fresh orange zest
¾ teaspoon kosher salt
¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
⅓ cup dried currants, soaked in warm water until plumped and softened
Glaze
½ cup sugar
3 tablespoons water
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
½ teaspoon finely grated fresh orange zest
In a small bowl, stir the yeast into the warm milk until it is completely dissolved, and set it aside to activate. If it doesn’t start foaming within 12 minutes, discard it and try a new batch of yeast.
In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a dough hook, mix the bread flour, sugar, eggs, butter, orange zest, salt, nutmeg, and milk-yeast mixture on low until the dough comes together, then increase the speed to medium and knead until the dough is smooth and elastic, 5 to 7 minutes.
When the dough is nearly there, strain the plumping currants and add them to the dough, kneading until they are incorporated. Transfer the dough to a well-oiled bowl, cover it with plastic, and let the dough rise in a warm place until it has doubled in bulk, about 1½ hours.
Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a silicone baking mat. Once the dough has risen, turn it out onto a well-floured surface and divide it into a dozen even pieces. Roll the pieces into balls using the palm of your hand against the floured surface. Place the balls on the lined baking sheet, leaving about 2 inches of space between the buns.
Cover the sheet with plastic and allow the dough to rise again for 45 minutes to 1 hour.
Near the end of the rising time, preheat the oven to 350°F. Bake the buns until they are nicely golden brown, 25 to 30 minutes.
When the buns are close to done, prepare the glaze by combining the sugar, water, vanilla, and orange zest in a small saucepan and bringing to a simmer over medium heat, stirring until the sugar is completely dissolved. Once the buns are ready, brush the glaze over the buns while they are still hot. Transfer the buns to a cooling rack and allow them to cool slightly before serving.
Charlotte’s Web
PEA and BACON SOUP
I have to say that, on the lengthy list of the most challenged and banned books, I’m surprised Charlotte’s Web doesn’t show up more often. The book certainly hasn’t gone unnoticed by teachers and parents looking to protect the innocent—it’s been banned in Kansas for including talking animals, which some educators deemed “unnatural,” and avoided by others who think the themes of death and sacrifice are too heavy for its young audience. It has also been challenged in England by teachers worried that the discussion of eating pork would be offensive to Muslims. My teachers, however, never gave a second thought to the repercussions of assigning this book to a butcher’s granddaughter.
The popularity of Charlotte’s Web in third grade certainly didn’t do me any favors socially, and it was single-handedly responsible for turning half of my class, as well as my sisters and my cousin Caroline, into vegetarians for a short period of time. I ended up eating the bacon for all of the girls in my family that year, terrified that my grandfather would notice the strips untouched on the side of their lumberjack breakfast plates at Bickford’s and start asking questions.
That year my older sister got into the torturous habit of whispering “Wilbur” into my ear whenever she saw me eating pork, a practice that never failed to bring me to the brink of tears. I loved animals desperately and dearly as a child—I still do—and this book made me feel incredibly guilty. I was nervous that my classmates would find out that my grandfather butchered pigs, or that my friends who knew would tell everyone. I was in a constant state of self-conscious paranoia.
The wave of vegetarianism that Charlotte’s Web inspired wasn’t isolated to my family members and childhood friends. I have at least one adult friend who never ate pork again after reading the book as a child. While the book didn’t turn me away from meat, reading it was an enormous turning point in my understanding of the food I ate and where it came from. I knew a good deal, certainly more than most of my classmates, about what the meat I ate looked like before it was run through a grinder and neatly shrink-wrapped for the supermarket case, and I knew, logically, of course, that what I saw on the cutting room tables at my grandfather’s shop had only recently been a live animal, but that was where my thought process stopped. It’s hard to wrap your mind around the enormity of death when you’re a child—harder, in some ways, if you happen to stare it casually in the face every day after school.
E. B. White is unapologetic about the baldness with which he talks about death in Charlotte’s Web. From the startlingly stark first line of the book, “Where’s Papa going with that ax?” White forces his young readers to confront an uncomfortable reality, one that he himself struggled with—that animals die for our consumption. As a child, after having read Charlotte’s Web, I assumed that E. B. White must himself be a vegetarian. I was shocked when I started reading his essays in high school and college and learned that not only was he a meat eater, but he also raised his own pigs for slaughter.
There are two distinct voices in the book, that of Mr. Arable, who views his animals from the practical standpoint of a farmer—as property and a means of survival—and that of Fern, who views Wilbur’s death from an emotional standpoint, as a terrible injustice. White himself seems to fall somewhere between these two. He connects deeply with animals, humanizing them and using them to communicate about loss and friendship and death in both his children’s books and personal essays. He is also, however, a man who writes in “Good-Bye to Forty-Eighth Street” about his trip to the Fryeburg Fair, where he attends “the calf scramble, the pig scramble, and the baby-beef auction” and “enjoy[s] the wild look in the whites of a cow’s eyes.”
The secret guilt that I felt as a child after reading Charlotte’s Web was still present when I reached adulthood, and I wrestled daily with questions of the ethics of my job as a butcher. Many of my vegetarian friends would ask me how I could love animals and do what I did for a living, and as often as I spouted answers back at them I still wondered, privately, if it actually was possible. Then I read White’s essay “Death of a Pig,” which perfectly demonstrates that eating and loving animals are not mutually exclusive, or at the very least that it’s okay to be unsure about the answers to these enormous questions and that I wasn’t alone in asking. In the essay, White, who had been happily raising pigs for years, finds himself “shaken to the core” over the illness and sudden death of one of his animals—a pig who had “evidently become precious” to him, and who in the end he mourned “not as the loss of a ham, but the loss of a pig,” as a creature who “had suffered in a suffering world.”
When White published Charlotte’s Web in 1952, factory-farming practices were on the rise, and while there were animal protection laws in place in Europe, not many people in the United States were talking about the ethical treatment of animals, especially in connection with farming. With the Great Depre
ssion still fairly fresh in their minds, Americans were more concerned about having enough food than they were about where that food came from. White took great pride in the fact that his pigpens were comfortable and his pigs well fed and happy. He was, in many ways, far ahead of his time in his farming practices and his thoughts on sustainable, traceable food.
In “A Report in January,” White talks about the new factory farm process of cleaning eggs, a process so harsh it leaves their shells looking like “a cheap plastic toy,” and adds, “If that’s an egg, I’m a rabbit.” In “Coon Tree” he worries about the future of vegetable farming, citing a speaker he heard at the American Society of Industrial Designers who said that “we would push a button and peas would appear on a paper plate,” to which he responds, “I’m not much of an eater, but I get a certain nourishment out of a seed catalogue on a winter’s evening, and I like to help stretch the hen wire along the rows of young peas on a fine morning in June, and I feel better if I set around and help with the shelling of peas in July. This is part of the pageantry of peas, if you happen to like peas.”
Ethical farming practices and food traceability are on everyone’s minds these days—certainly I think about, talk about, read about, and hear about these issues on a daily basis. Today I work in a butcher shop that sources beautiful pastured pigs from two local farmers that we visit often. The first time I went on a farm trip it was late October and freezing rain was coming down in thick, stinging droplets. For weeks leading up to the trip I had been anxious about how I would feel seeing the animals that I knew would eventually end up on our cutting tables. When we got to the farm I stood staring at the pigs for a long while, their strong speckled backs and their busy snouts, and I was struck by the fact that I didn’t feel sad. I had pictured myself, upon seeing the field of pigs, filled with the sudden, melodramatic urge to run at them with my arms flung wide, screaming apologies, snot and tears flying, but instead I just stayed quiet while the pigs snorted and squealed and croaked.
Voracious Page 6