When I returned to the farmhouse, there were steaming mugs of coffee on the table, topped off with milk from the dairy cow, Lucy, that was so grassy and sweet that I didn’t even need to add sugar. There were heaps of eggs, their shells blue and brown and white and their yolks nearly orange, and there was a pile of fragrant bacon made from pigs from that very farm, pigs that we had butchered and cured and smoked ourselves in the weeks before. From where I sat at the table I could see the chickens in their small red henhouse, snuggled close on their bleachers. Lucy’s jaw was working over some hay in the field below us, and the pigs were rooting and rolling around just beyond us, and everything felt circular and happy and warm, and I think I forgave myself a little.
CHARLOTTE’S WEB
Pea and Bacon Soup
My first instinct was to give you a recipe for bacon, but somehow that didn’t seem quite right. So I’ve decided to focus on E. B. White’s love of peas for this recipe and provide a recipe for pea soup with an optional bacon garnish. This soup can be made completely vegetarian by substituting vegetable stock for the chicken stock and using croutons instead of bacon for crunch. If you decide to go that route, use an extra tablespoon of butter in place of the bacon grease.
Serves 4 to 6
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
½ cup diced cooked bacon, for garnish, 1 tablespoon bacon grease reserved
1 cup chopped yellow onion
1 leek, roughly chopped
2 garlic cloves, minced
2 teaspoons kosher salt, plus more to taste
4 cups chicken stock
5 cups fresh or frozen peas
½ cup sour cream or crème fraîche
Freshly ground black pepper
Heat the butter and bacon grease in a large, heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium-high heat until the butter is melted. Add the onion and leek and cook until translucent, about 7 minutes. Add the garlic and salt and cook until the garlic is lightly browned, about 3 more minutes. Add the chicken stock and bring the mixture to a boil. Add the peas and cook until tender, about 5 minutes (frozen peas will take less time).
Remove the soup from the heat and transfer about one-third of it to a blender. (Note: Hot soup creates steam, and this steam has nowhere to go in a blender, which can lead to scary explosions if you don’t follow this tip: On the lid of your blender there should be a hole that is covered by either a cap or a wand. Remove the cap or the wand and cover the hole with a clean kitchen towel. This gives the steam room to escape, which means the hot soup won’t explode all over you.)
Blend the soup in batches until it is very smooth. You can also use an immersion blender for this step if you have one, and simply blend the soup in the stockpot. For extra-smooth soup, pass it through a fine-mesh sieve after blending.
Transfer the soup to a large bowl, whisk in the sour cream, and season with salt and pepper to taste. Portion the soup out into bowls and sprinkle the crispy bacon on top.
Where the Red Fern Grows
SKILLET CORNBREAD with HONEY BUTTER
When I was thirteen I used to babysit for a family with two young kids and an ancient golden retriever named Sammy. Whenever I babysat, I had to complete a long and messily handwritten checklist of tasks to keep poor, ravaged Sammy alive. She was forever having accidents on the carpet and staring at me with exhausted, sorry eyes. Often I was so overwhelmed by the pill crushing and ointment spreading that I would forget to bathe or feed the kids, or I would lose track of time sautéing ground beef for Sammy’s dinner and end up putting the kids to bed an hour late.
One night, I put Sammy’s dinner down and took the kids downstairs to go to sleep. When I came back upstairs, Sammy was lying next to her untouched dinner, eyes rolled back, foam spilling from her mouth. Terrified and hysterical, I called the parents and they rushed home immediately. They scooped up her tired body and whisked her off to the animal hospital in their blue Volvo station wagon, and I said a little prayer that rather than getting more pills and shots, Sammy would finally be allowed to be at peace.
The relief that I felt for Sammy when she did in fact pass that night immediately disappeared when I saw how devastated the mom was. She was inconsolable when she returned home, and I felt immense guilt on the walk back to my house, a tiny part of me wondering if my small prayer had somehow caused this giant sadness.
At home I went straight up to my room and immediately dissolved into the kind of self-indulgent crying fit that only a thirteen-year-old can muster. A half hour later I pulled myself out of bed and went digging for my well-loved copy of Where the Red Fern Grows. All of the dog drama had reminded me of the story and I thought that maybe the book, which I had loved so much as a kid, and which tells the story of a boy who loses his beloved dog, would comfort me.
I had read it for the first time in second grade after choosing it from one of those Scholastic book fair packets they used to pass out once a year in elementary school. Was there anything more exciting than those colorful, book-filled, whisper-thin packets? I was always a sucker for any books that looked slightly spooky or adventure-packed, and I remember distinctly the third grade book fair in which I picked up Maniac Magee, Wait Till Helen Comes, and Where the Red Fern Grows based on their promising-looking covers. It was the first book ever to bring me to tears—I remember crying dramatically into my dog Henry’s fur upon completing the last lines.
The book put me at ease enough to realize that I was absolutely starving, not only from the hour of full-body sobbing I had just done, but also from all of Wilson Rawls’s delicious food descriptions. The farm-freshness of everything in Billy’s meals was dazzling to me, both as a kid and as a teenager. Books like these had me searching my backyard for edible berry bushes, mushrooms, and roots before sitting down at night to a meal of Weaver chicken nuggets and canned fruit cocktail (no complaints, Mom, it was delicious).
One food that appears repeatedly throughout the book is cornbread—Billy stuffs it in his rucksack to go camping, he sells stale chunks of it as bait to the fishermen, he makes salt pork sandwiches between its crumbly layers, and he eats it with jarred peaches, fried potatoes, fresh huckleberry cobbler, or honey and butter. Inspired by the book and desperately wanting to clear my conscience of the guilt I felt over Sammy’s death, I decided I would make a batch of cornbread for Sammy’s family. Baking the cornbread succeeded in comforting me where the book hadn’t, and by the time I was done cracking eggs and measuring milk I felt almost back to normal.
The next morning, I walked the cornbread over to the family’s house. I was expecting that maybe in the light of day, having had the night to mourn Sammy and reflect on her long and happy life, Sammy’s mom would feel better, but I’ll never forget how exhausted and deeply, unreachably sad she still looked when she opened the door and saw me standing there with a tray full of cornbread squares. I felt very young and very silly when she patted my head distractedly before closing the door.
What I know now, having lost both of my childhood dogs, is that the grief of losing a beloved pet—especially one that has been in the family for many years—is as much about recognizing the passing of time and the closing of chapters as it is about mourning companionship.
I learned this firsthand when Henry died, right before I left for college. Henry was a miniature dachshund and my constant companion from the time I was seven until I was eighteen. He was a tiny, anxious thing who followed at my heels and slept on the pillow beside my face every night.
Henry loved to eat crayons so much that he even learned how to remove the paper wrappers in order to consume just the wax. At first we blamed my little sister for all the missing crayons, but then Henry started to poop the most beautiful, colorful jewels all over the yard. They were speckled with neon pinks and greens, oranges and purples—just gorgeous poops. They were so beautiful it took everything I had to convince my best friend that they weren’t candy and she couldn’t eat them. My sisters and I would walk around the yard, pointing to the little piles and matching
them to their crayon names: “Burnt Sienna!” “Carnation Pink!” “Screamin’ Green!” “Wild Watermelon!” A week before I left for college Henry died. He was never sick, he never seized or foamed or got tumors—he just came in from playing in the yard one day, curled up on the rug, and passed. He looked very small and very peaceful.
WHERE THE RED FERN GROWS
Skillet Cornbread with Honey Butter
As an East Coaster I wasn’t always familiar with the less-sweet Southern iteration of cornbread, but it is lovely, especially paired with this sweet honey butter. If you don’t have a cast-iron skillet it is worth investing in one, if only to make a cornbread with edges this sweetly crisp.
Serves 8
4 tablespoons (½ stick) unsalted butter, plus extra for the skillet
¼ cup vegetable shortening
1¼ cups fine yellow cornmeal
¾ cup all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
1 cup buttermilk
⅓ cup whole milk
2 large eggs, beaten
1 or 2 pieces of bacon, ham, or salt pork (optional)
Honey Butter
¼ cup honey
5⅓ tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
Kosher salt
Preheat the oven to 375°F.
Melt the butter and shortening in a seasoned cast-iron skillet over medium-high heat. Pour the melted butter and shortening into a dish and rub the remaining grease around in the skillet with a paper towel, making sure to coat the sides. Put the skillet in the oven while you prepare the rest of the ingredients.
Sift together the cornmeal, flour, sugar, baking powder, and baking soda in a large bowl. Add the buttermilk, milk, beaten eggs, and melted butter-shortening mixture. Mix until incorporated, being careful not to overmix; it’s okay if the batter is a little bit lumpy.
Remove the skillet from the oven. If you have some bacon, ham, or salt pork, fry it up in the skillet until crispy and remove, leaving the grease in the pan. If not, add a little bit more butter and spread it around the hot pan. Pour the batter into the skillet and bake until a tester inserted into the center comes out clean, about 20 minutes.
While the cornbread is in the oven, make the honey butter. Whip the honey into the softened butter until emulsified. Season with salt to taste. Allow it to set up in the fridge for 5 to 10 minutes before spreading on the hot cornbread.
Strega Nona
BLACK PEPPER–PARMESAN PASTA
For as long as I can remember, my sisters and I have called my dad Noodle. The name fits him in a number of ways, but it originally stemmed from the fact that no matter what or how much was on the dinner table, my dad never felt that the meal was complete unless it was accompanied by an enormous bowl of pasta. There could be roast beef, potatoes, and a salad, and he would still be in the kitchen fifteen minutes before we sat down, crushing and frying garlic and stirring the pasta pot, the steam blanketing his face with a sheen of tiny, precipitous droplets.
He always made the same thin spaghetti, doused in garlic oil and butter, tossed with loads of crushed black and red pepper, and coated in an avalanche of salty Parmesan. No matter how much we razzed him for it, the bowl was almost always empty by the time we started clearing the table. If it wasn’t, the noodles ended up in our lunch the next day, and we munched and slurped them cold, washing down the chewy Parmesan with bright yellow boxes of Yoo-hoo.
Every once in a while my mom would take issue with this ritual, frustrated that she had labored over dinner and still Noodle needed his noodles. One night, my dad had to walk away from the boiling pasta and he asked my mom to stir it. “Make sure you really stir it, Deb,” he said. She nodded. “You don’t want it to get clumpy,” he said, to which my mom turned on her heel and snapped, “OKAY, BIG ANTHONY, I’VE GOT IT.” There was a moment of thick silence before they both dissolved into a fit of laughter so powerful that my sisters and I started laughing uncontrollably, too.
“Big Anthony” is the duncelike apprentice to Tomie dePaola’s Strega Nona, the grandmotherly witch doctor in his enduringly popular series, who unleashes a landslide of pasta through the town of Calabria when he misuses Strega Nona’s magic pasta pot. This book was a mainstay of bedtime reading at the Nicoletti house—my parents read it to my older sister, then to me, then to my younger sister, and my mom still reads it to her nursery school students to this day. DePaola based his story loosely on a fairy tale recorded by the Brothers Grimm entitled “The Magic Porridge Pot,” but the characters of Strega Nona and Big Anthony are all his own. There are now eleven Strega Nona stories, the most recent of which was published in 2011.
Despite being original tales, the Strega Nona books have the folkloric feel of old family stories, passed down through generations. They feel so familiar, in fact, that dePaola once said that many people come up to him and tell him that their Italian grandparents used to tell them tales of the good witch Strega Nona, as if she had existed for centuries before he created her. This feeling of familiarity is probably one of the reasons the books remain so popular nearly forty years after the first one was published—there is great comfort in tradition. It’s this longing for the comfort of tradition that sends me to the pasta pot every time I feel homesick, or lonely, or overwhelmed. I always feel better once the garlic is fried, the noodles are steaming, and the cheese is grated. It’s as if my family is all around me, loud and hungry and warm.
STREGA NONA
Black Pepper–Parmesan Pasta
Serves 4
1 pound thin spaghetti
¼ cup olive oil
4 garlic cloves, smashed
3 teaspoons cracked black pepper
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 cups grated good, salty Parmesan
Kosher salt
1 tablespoon crushed red pepper
Bring a large pot of very salty water to a boil over high heat. Add the pasta and cook until al dente (usually around 8 minutes for thin spaghetti, but check the package instructions).
While your pasta is boiling, heat the oil in a very large skillet over medium heat and add the garlic. Cook until the garlic is lightly browned on both sides. Add 2 teaspoons of the black pepper and cook until the pepper is fragrant, another minute or two.
Once the pasta is al dente, reserve 1 cup of the pasta water and then strain out the rest.
Add the butter to the skillet and whisk until it’s melted in, then add the reserved 1 cup pasta water and bring it to a boil. Add the pasta to the skillet and sprinkle with 1½ cups of the cheese and toss vigorously with tongs until a creamy sauce forms and coats the pasta, 2 to 3 minutes (you will need a very large skillet—if you don’t have one, a large stockpot will also work).
Transfer the contents of the skillet to a large bowl, season with salt to taste, and add the crushed red pepper and the remaining 1 teaspoon black pepper. Garnish with the remaining ½ cup Parmesan and serve.
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
BUCKWHEAT PANCAKES
In the neighborhood where I grew up, there was a family who always went overboard decorating their house for Halloween. Every year it seemed to get more extreme, their lawn decorations veering well past fun and turning sharply into morbid and truly terrifying. The year I was seven, they constructed a headless horseman—a cartoonish stuffed horse mounted by an unsettlingly realistic dummy whose head had been torn off. The stump of a neck was covered in very real-looking blood and gore and the head lay at the feet of the horse, wide-eyed and grimacing—the thought of it haunted me day and night.
In an attempt to ease my terror over the headless horseman, which I had been talking about incessantly since it appeared in mid-September, my dad decided to read me Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” thinking that if I heard how silly the real story was, I might not be so scared. It was during this reading, though, that a new terror presented itself to me—one that w
as much harder for my parents to control.
Early in Irving’s description of Ichabod Crane, he tells us that Crane likes to pass his time by terrifying the old Dutch wives “with the alarming fact that the world did absolutely turn round, and that they were half the time topsy-turvy!” Sensing that it was something to be anxious about, I asked my dad what the sentence meant. My older sister, excited that she knew the answer, pulled out her Simpsons activity book and pointed to a page showing Otto, the bus driver, with a speech bubble rising from his mouth up into the stars, stating that the earth spun at 1,000 miles per hour.
I stayed in bed for the next three days complaining of being dizzy, gripped with nausea and panic. My mom sent her friend, a child psychiatrist, to ask me what was wrong. When I told her, she asked me questions like, “Okay, so does the spinning bother you because you want things to stay in place and stay the same?” No, lady. I want not to be hurtling around through a giant abyss at top speed! Why is that so hard to understand?
For a long time I thought that this personal, world-altering experience was the only reason that I hated Ichabod Crane as much as I did. When I reread the story in high school, though, I realized that, personal feelings and neuroses aside, Ichabod Crane is simply an unlikable character. He is wimpy, opportunistic, and pathologically self-interested—he is so despicable, in fact, that you barely feel a twinge of sadness over his fate at the story’s end.
Nonetheless, I admit that I felt a little bit kindlier toward Ichabod on my second reading for one reason: his insatiable and all-consuming hunger. In the same way that I feel a kindred (if worrisome) connection to Roald Dahl’s greedy Augustus Gloop, who nearly meets his death dunking his face into a chocolate pond, and John Kennedy Toole’s slothful and gluttonous Ignatius J. Reilly, whose love of hot dogs is practically romantic, I understand Ichabod Crane’s ardent love of eating. There is nary a thought that goes through Ichabod’s mind that doesn’t involve food. When he walks by his neighbor’s farm it isn’t livestock that he sees, but rather food:
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