Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

by Barbara Kingsolver

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  STEVEN L. HOPP

  I’ll now add my own cautions to this recipe: don’t scrape too hard, and don’t overbake. I confess I may have hoped for a modest flutter of kiss-the-cook applause as I set our regal centerpiece on the table, instead of the round of yelping and dashes for the kitchen towels that actually ensued. The whole thing collapsed. Fortunately, I’d baked it in a big crockery pie dish. We saved the tablecloth, and nine-tenths of the soup.

  My loved ones have eaten my successes and failures since my very first rice pudding, at age nine, for which I followed the recipe to the letter but didn’t understand the “1 cup rice” had to be cooked first. Compared with that tooth-cracking concoction, everyone now agreed, my pumpkin soup was great. Really it was, by any standards except presentation (which I flunked flunked flunked), and besides, what is the point of a family gathering if nobody makes herself the goat of a story to be told at countless future family gatherings? Along with Camille’s chard lasagna, our own fresh mozzarella, and the season’s last sliced tomatoes, we made a fine feast of our battered centerpiece. If anyone held Dad and me under suspicion of vegetable cruelty, they didn’t report us. We remain at large.

  A pumpkin is the largest vegetable we consume. Hard-shelled, firm-fleshed, with fully ripened seeds, it’s the caboose of the garden train. From the first shoots, leaves, and broccoli buds of early spring through summer’s small soft tomato, pepper, and eggplant fruits, then the larger melons, and finally the mature, hard seeds such as dry beans and peanuts, it’s a long and remarkable parade. We had recently pulled up our very last crop to mature: peanuts, which open their orange, pealike flowers in midsummer, pollinate and set their seeds, and then grow weirdly long, down-curved stems that nosedive the seed pods earthward, drilling them several inches into the soil around the base of the plant. Many people do realize peanuts are an underground crop (their widespread African name is “ground nut”), although few ever pause to ruminate on how a seed, product of a flower, gets under the dirt. In case you did, wonder no more. Peanuts are the dogged overachievers of the plant kingdom, determined to plant their own seeds without help. It takes them forever, though. Our last ritual act before frost comes is to pull up the peanut bushes and shake the dirt from this botany-freak-show snack food.

  We were ready now for frost to fall on our pastures. We had eaten one entire season of botanical development, in the correct order. Months would pass before any new leaf poked up out of the ground. So…now what?

  Another whole category of vegetable used to carry people through winter, before grocery chains erased the concept of season. This variant on vegetable growth is not an exception but is auxiliary to the leaf-budflower-fruit-seed botanical time lapse I initially posted as the “vegetannual rule” for thinking about what’s in season. A handful of food plants are not annuals, but biennials. Their plan is to grow all summer from a seed, lay low through one winter, then burst into flower the following spring. To do it, they frugally store the sugars they’ve manufactured all summer in a bulky tuber or bulb that hides underground waiting for spring, after their leaves have died back.

  Humans thwart them opportunistically, murdering the plant and robbing its savings account just when the balance is fattest. Carrots, beets, turnips, garlic, onions, and potatoes are all the hard-earned storage units of a plant that intended to live another season in order to fulfill its sexual destiny. As a thrifty person myself, raised to trust hard work, I feel like such a cheat when I dig the root crops. If I put emotion in charge of my diet I would not only be a vegetarian, I’d end up living on air and noodles like a three-year-old because I also feel sorry for the plants. In virtuous green silence they work as hard as any chicken or cow. They don’t bleat or wail as we behead them, rip them from their roots, pull their children from their embrace. We allow them no tender mercies.

  But heaven help me, I eat them like nobody’s business. Root crops are the deliverance of the home-food devotee. Along with dry beans and grains, they bring vegetable nutrition into months when nothing else fresh is handy. Because they store well, it’s easy enough for gardeners to produce a year’s worth in the growing season. Some of my neighbors grumble about the trouble of growing potatoes when a giant bag at the store costs less than a Sunday newspaper. And still, every spring, we are all out there fighting with the cold, mucky late-winter soil, trying to get our potatoes in on schedule. We’re not doing it for the dimes we’ll save. We know the fifty-pound bag from the store tastes about like a Sunday newspaper, compared with what we can grow. A batch of tender new Carolas or Red Golds freshly dug in early summer is its own vegetable: waxy, nutty, and sweet. Peruvian Blues, Russian Banana fingerlings, Yukon Golds: the waxy ones hold together when boiled and cut up for potato salad; others get fluffy and buttery-colored when baked; still others are ideal for oven-roasting. A potatophile needs them all.

  The standard advice on potato planting time is the same as for onions and peas: “as early as the soil can be worked.” That is a subjective date, directly related to impatience. I always get stirred up around Saint Patrick’s Day and go through my annual ritual of trooping out to the potato bed with a shovel, sticking it in the ground, and scientifically discerning that it’s still a half-frozen swamp. You don’t need a groundhog for that one: wait a few more weeks. We generally get them in around the first of April.

  Potato plants don’t mind cool weather, as long as they’re not drowning. They were bred from wild ancestors in the cool, dry equatorial Andean highlands where days and nights are equal in length, year-round. They don’t respond to changes in day length to control their maturity. Other root crops are triggered by summer’s long days to start banking starch, preparing for the winter ahead. In fact, onions are so sensitive to day length, onion growers must choose their varieties with a latitude map.

  Temperatures are not a reliable cue—they can rise and fall capriciously during a season, giving us dogwood winter, Indian summer, and all the other folklorically named false seasons. But no fickle wind messes with the track of the sun. It’s a crucial decision for a living thing: When, exactly, to shut down leaf growth and pull all resources down into the roots to stock up for winter? A mistake will cost a plant the chance to pass on its genes. So in temperate climates, evolution has tied such life-or-death decisions to day length. Animals use it also, to trigger mating, nesting, egg-laying, and migration.

  But potatoes, owing to their origin in the summerless, winterless, high-altitude tropics, evolved without day-length cues. Instead they have a built-in rest period that is calendar-neutral, and until it’s over the tubers won’t sprout, period. I learned this the hard way, early in my gardening career, when I planted some store-bought potatoes. I waited as the weather grew warm, but no sprouts emerged. Potatoes are often treated with chemicals to keep them dormant, but I’d planted organic ones with no such excuse for sloth. After about a month I dug them up to see what in the heck was going on with the lazy things. (I’m much more relaxed with my children, I swear.) My potatoes were still asleep. Not one eye was open, not a bump, shoot, or bud.

  Now I know: potatoes have a preprogrammed naptime which cannot for any reason be disturbed. Seed potatoes aren’t ready to plant until after they’ve spent their allotted months in cool storage. I had assumed a spring potato was a spring potato, but these I’d bought from the grocery in March must have been harvested recently in some distant place where March was not the end of winter. The befuddlements of a seasonless vegetable universe are truly boundless.

  If the potatoes in the produce section are already sprouting, on the other hand, it means they’re ready to get up. They’re edible in that condition, as long as they haven’t been exposed to light and developed a green cast to the skin. Contrary to childhood lore these photosynthesizing potatoes won’t kill you, but like all the nightshades—including tomatoes and eggplants—all green parts of the plant contain unfriendly toxins and mutagens. Sprouting and a tad wrinkly, though, they’re still okay to eat. Rolle
d in a sturdy paper bag in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator they’ll keep six months and more. But when I open our labeled bags of seed potatoes in April I always find a leggy mess, the whole clump spiderwebbed together with long sprouts.

  That means the wake-up call has come. We toss them in the ground and hill them up. From each small potato grows a low, bushy plant with root nodules that will grow into eight or more new potatoes. (Fingerling potatoes produce up to twenty per hill, though they’re smaller.) The plants have soft leaves and a flower ranging from white to pink or lavender, depending on the variety. In the Peruvian Andes, where farmers still grow many more kinds of potatoes than most of us can imagine, I’ve seen fields of purple-flowered potatoes as striking in their way as a Dutch tulip farm in bloom.

  The little spuds in the roots continue to gain size until the plant gets tired and dies down, four to five months after planting. Few garden chores are more fun for kids than recovering this buried treasure at the end of the season. We plant eight different kinds, plus a mongrel bag that Lily calls the “Easter egg hunt” when we dig them: I turn up each hill with a pitchfork and she dives in after the red, blue, golden, and white tubers. For my part it’s a cross between treasure-hunt and ER, as I have to shout “Clear!” every time I dig, to prevent an unfortunate intersection of pitchfork and fingers.

  Even though the big score comes at summer’s end, we’d already been sneaking our hands down into the soil under the bushy plants all summer, to cop out little round baby spuds. This feels a bit like adolescent necking antics, but is a time-honored practice described by a proper verb: grab-bling. (Magazine editors want to change it to “grabbing.” Writers try to forgive them.) The proper time for doing it is just before dinner: like corn, new potatoes are sweetest if you essentially boil them alive.

  In late summer we’d finished digging the Yukon Golds, All-Blues, and other big storage potatoes, best for baking. In September we’d harvested the fingerlings—yellow, finger-shaped gourmet potatoes that U.S. consumers have discovered fairly recently. I found them in a seed catalog, ordered some on a whim, and got hooked. The most productive potato in our garden is a fingerling adored by the French, called by a not-so-romantic name, La Ratte. (Means what it sounds like.) The name baffled me, until I grew them. When a mature hill is uncovered it looks like a nest of fifteen suckling baby rodents, all oriented with their blunt noses together in the center and their long tails pointed out. By virtue of incredible flavor and vigor, these little rats take over a larger proportion of my potato patch every year.

  By October all our potatoes were in the root cellar, along with the beets, carrots, and sweet potatoes (a tropical vine botanically unrelated to potatoes). Our onions were harvested too. We pull those up in late summer after their tall strappy tops begin to fall over, giving the patch an “off the shoulder” look with the bulbs bulging sensuously above the soil line. Comparisons with a Wonderbra are impossible to avoid. By the time they’re fully mature, onions are pushing themselves out of the ground. It’s an easy task on a dry, late summer day to walk down the row tugging them up, leaving them to cure in the sun for the afternoon, then laying them on newspapers for a couple of weeks in a shed or garage with plenty of air circulation.

  Garlic gets a similar treatment. No matter how well it’s ventilated, the aroma of the curing shed gets intense; in earlier days children would have been made to sit in there to cure the category of ailment my grandmother called “the epizootie.” She also used to speak of children wearing “asafetidy bags” around their necks to prevent colds. Genuine asafoetida is a European plant in the parsley family, but the root word is fetid. Garlic obviously worked as well, the medicinal property being that nobody would get close enough to your children to cough on them. As they used to say in New York, “A nickel will get you on the subway, but garlic will get you a seat.” In fairness to its devotees, I should point out that real medicinal value has been attributed to garlic, stemming from its antibacterial sulfur compounds and its capacity to break down fibrin and thin the blood. The Prophet Muhammad recommended it for snakebite, Eleanor Roosevelt took it in chocolate-covered pills to improve her memory, and Pliny the Elder claimed it was good for your sex life. I wouldn’t bet on that last one.

  We stick to culinary uses. When the tops of the cured garlic and onions have faded from green to brown but are still pliable, and their odor has tamed, I braid them into the heavy skeins that adorn our kitchen all winter. The bulbs keep best when they’re hung in open air at room temperature, and we clip off the heads as we need them, working from the top down. Garlic is the spice of life in our kitchen: spaghetti sauce, lasagna, chicken soup, just about everything short of apple pie begins with some minced cloves of garlic sautéed in olive oil. I spend it as the currency of our culinary happiness, cutting off the heads week by week, working the braids slowly down to their bottom ends, watching them like the balance of a bank account. With good management we’ll reach the end in midsummer, just as the new crop gets harvested. But we always come down the home stretch on empty.

  Garlic, like the potato, is a more subtle vegetable than most people know, since most groceries carry only one silverskin variety that keeps like Egyptian royalty. Garlic connoisseurs know the rest of the story. Seed Savers Exchange lists hundreds of varieties, each prized for its own qualities of culture and flavor. They fall into two basic categories: the lusty, primitive hardnecks have a “scape”—a flower stalk that shoots up from the center of the bulb in early spring, striking an incomprehensibly circular path, growing itself into something like an overhand knot before it blooms. The more domestic softnecks are better for braiding and storage. Beyond this, garlics are as hard to categorize as red and white wines, with equally enthusiastic legions of fans. Inchelium Red has taken first place in taste-tests on several continents. Red Toch (according to my seed catalog) has “a multidimensional quality, a spicy fragrance, and consummate flavor.” Persian Star, obtained from a bazaar in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, has “a mild spicy zing.” Brown Tempest starts hot and intense, then simmers down to a warm pleasant finish; Music is rich and pungent; Chesnok Red is the best for baking, “very aromatic with an abiding flavor.” Elephant is just plain huge.

  Who can decide? A sucker for seed-catalog prose, I ordered six varieties and planted about a dozen cloves of each. Buried under the soil with a blanket of straw mulch on top, each clove would spend the winter putting out small, fibrous roots. The plant begins working on top growth in early spring, as soon as air temperatures rise above freezing. By midsummer it will have from eight to a dozen long leaves, with one clove at the base of each leaf nestled into the tight knot of a new head. I pull them in late June, and tend to think of that moment as the end of some sort of garden fiscal year. It never really stops, this business of growing things—garlic goes into the ground again in October, just as other frost-killed crops are getting piled onto the compost heap. Food is not a product but a process, and it never sleeps. It just goes underground for a while.

  October ceded to us the unexpected gifts of a late first frost: a few more weeks of tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and basil. Usually it’s late September when the freeze comes to knock these tender plants down to black stalks—a predictable enough event that still somehow takes us by surprise every time. The late evening newscast predicting it will create a mild hubbub in the neighborhood, sending all the gardeners out in the chill to scoop up green tomatoes and pull peppers in the dark.

  Both peppers and eggplants are tropical by nature, waking slowly to summer and just getting into full swing in late September. We were happy for the October bonus, bringing in bushels of blocky orange, red, and yellow peppers at our leisure instead of under siege. In the evenings we built fires in the patio fire pit and lined the peppers up shoulder-to-shoulder on the grill like sunbathers on a crowded beach. The heat makes their skins sear and bubble. Afterward we freeze them by the bagful, so their smoky flavor can lively up our homemade pizzas all winter. If it’s the scent of burning leave
s that invokes autumn for most people, for us it’s roasting peppers.

  My most nostalgic harvest rituals from childhood are of the apple variety. My parents took us on annual excursions to a family-owned orchard in the next county where we could watch cider being pressed, and climb into the trees to pick fruit that the clay-footed adults couldn’t reach. We ate criminal quantities of apples up in the boughs. Autumn weather still brings that crisp greenish taste to the roof of my mouth. I realized other members of my family must share this olfactory remembrance of things past, when our October gathering spontaneously rallied into a visit to an apple orchard near our farm. We bought bushels, inspired to go home and put up juice and apple butter.

  I don’t know what rituals my kids will carry into adulthood, whether they’ll grow up attached to homemade pizza on Friday nights, or the scent of peppers roasting over a fire, or what. I do know that flavors work their own ways under the skin, into the heart of longing. Where my kids are concerned I find myself hoping for the simplest things: that if someday they crave orchards where their kids can climb into the branches and steal apples, the world will have trees enough with arms to receive them.

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  Splendid Spuds

  BY CAMILLE

  Dietitians seem to love or hate potatoes. This vegetable is a great source of quality carbohydrates that will keep you feeling energized and satisfied. Or else, it should be avoided because its sinful starchiness will make you gain weight like crazy.

  So which is it? First, it’s not safe to generalize. The Idaho spuds at grocery stores are just the tip of the iceberg. I’ve eaten potatoes ranging from gumball to guinea-pig size, golden, brick red, or even brilliant blue. When you dig those out of the ground they look almost black, but after a good scrub they have a deep purplish shine you would expect in a jewelry store, not under layers of caked mud. I’m always amazed to slide my knife into the first Peruvian Blue of the season, finding its insides as vivid as a ripe blueberry. As it happens, the phytochemical responsible for the gorgeous color of blueberries and blue potatoes is the same one—a powerful antioxidant. Some antiaging facial products on the market feature mashed blueberries as a main ingredient. Nobody in my household has tried rubbing potatoes on her face to preserve a youthful complexion, but we take them internally, appreciating all the nutrients in our potato rainbow. Even white potatoes, eaten with their skins, give us vitamins C and B6, and nearly twice the potassium per serving as a banana.