Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

by Barbara Kingsolver

  I’m drawn to this celebration, I’m sure, because I live in a culture that allows almost no room for dead people. I celebrated Dia de los Muertos in the homes of friends from a different background, with their deceased relatives, for years before I caught on. But I think I understand now. When I cultivate my garden I’m spending time with my grandfather, sometimes recalling deeply buried memories of him, decades after his death. While shaking beans from an envelope I have been overwhelmed by a vision of my Pappaw’s speckled beans and flat corn seeds in peanut butter jars in his garage, lined up in rows, curated as carefully as a museum collection. That’s Xantolo, a memory space opened before my eyes, which has no name in my language.

  When I’m cooking, I find myself inhabiting the emotional companionship of the person who taught me how to make a particular dish, or with whom I used to cook it. Slamming a door on food-rich holidays, declaring food an enemy, sends all the grandparents and great aunts to a lonely place. I have been so relieved lately to welcome them back: my tiny great-aunt Lena who served huge, elaborate meals at her table but would never sit down there with us herself, insisting on eating alone in the kitchen instead. My grandmother Kingsolver, who started every meal plan with dessert. My other grandmother, who made perfect rolls and gravy. My Henry grandfather, who used a cool attic room to cure the dark hams and fragrant cloth-wrapped sausages he made from his own hogs. My father, who first took me mushroom hunting and taught me to love wild asparagus. My mother, whose special way of beating eggs makes them fly in an ellipse in the bowl.

  Here I stand in the consecrated presence of all they have wished for me, and cooked for me. Right here, canning tomatoes with Camille, making egg bread with Lily. Come back, I find myself begging every memory. Come back for a potholder hug.

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  Food Fright

  BY CAMILLE

  When I travel on airplanes I often indulge in one of my favorite guilty pleasures: trashy magazines. Nothing makes the time fly like most-embarrassing-first-date stories and completely impractical fashion advice. And of course, always, the diet dos and don’ts. Which ten foods you should eat to melt fat and have more energy. On a recent trip I came across an article warning about the Danger Foods for Dieters: the hazards of hidden calories and craving triggers, revealed in a tone I’d thought was reserved for shows like Unsolved Mysteries. Would I even be able to sleep that night for fear of an 800-calorie smoothie (disguised as a healthy fruit drink) jumping out from under my bed and pouring itself down my esophagus? Yikes!!

  Can we really be this afraid of the stuff that sustains human life? Of where our food comes from, and what it might do to us? We can, we are. TV dinners and neon blue Jell-O are unsolved mysteries. As far removed as most of us are from the processes of growing and preparing our food, it makes a certain kind of sense to see food as the enemy. It’s very natural to fear the unknown.

  The first step toward valuing and trusting food is probably eating food that has some integrity. People who hold their traditions of food preparation and presentation in high regard don’t tend to bargain-shop for cheap calories. Associating food with emotional comfort can lead to a life of scary habits and pitfalls, if the training ground is candy bars for good report cards and suckers for bravery during a booster shot. But there are other ways to go. Some of my happiest family memories involve making and eating elaborate meals for special occasions. Food turns events into celebrations. It’s not just about the food, but the experience of creating and then consuming it. People need families and communities for this kind of experience. Kids need parents, or some kind of guide, to lead them toward the food routines our bodies need. Becoming familiar with the process of food production generates both respect and a greater sense of calm about the whole idea of dinner.

  This Thanksgiving corn pudding goes with one of our roasted turkeys, baked sweet potatoes, steamed Brussels sprouts or braised winter squash, and more than enough stuffing. Here, also, is a recipe for pan de muerto, the traditional food for Day of the Dead celebrations. Finally, I’ve included some recipes we developed for our preserved tomatoes. Dried tomatoes are one of many foods that are ridiculously expensive to buy, inexpensive to make. If you have (or can borrow) a food dryer, you can save a hundred dollars fast by purchasing five extra pounds of small tomatoes every time you visit the market and dehydrating them. In winter we toss them into soups and stews as well as making this antipasto and pesto, which we often pack in fancy anchovy jars for holiday gifts.

  HOLIDAY CORN PUDDING A NINE-YEAR-OLD CAN MAKE

  3 cups corn kernels

  2 eggs, beaten

  1 cup milk

  1 cup grated Gouda or Jack cheese

  2 tablespoons parsley (dried)

  1 tablespoon marjoram (dried)

  Salt and pepper to taste

  Combine ingredients and pour into greased baking dish. Bake at 350° for 45 minutes or until top is puffy and golden.

  FRIDA KAHLO’S PAN DE MUERTO

  This recipe makes 30 small breads. The hard part is making them look like she did: shaped like skulls and dancing whirligig bones. Just making it tasty is not complicated, but you do have to start the dough the evening before your party is scheduled, then bake them just beforehand.

  7½ cups white flour, sifted

  2 cups sugar (or 1½ cups honey)

  1¼ cups butter

  2 packages active dry yeast dissolved in 5 tablespoons warm milk

  12 eggs

  2 teaspoons cinnamon

  2 teaspoons vanilla extract

  Put flour into a large bowl, cut in the butter, make a well in the center, and pour in the yeast and milk, eggs, sugar or honey, cinnamon, and vanilla. Work it with a spoon, then your hands, until it pulls away from the sides of the bowl. If dough is too soft, knead in more flour. If using honey, more flour will be necessary. Shape into a ball, grease and flour it lightly, and let stand in a warm place for 2 ½ hours, until doubled. Refrigerate overnight. Shape chilled dough into balls the size of a peach. Then shape or decorate them in any way that makes you think of your deceased ancestors. Place on greased baking sheets and let rise until doubled, about 1½ hours. Dust with powdered sugar and cinnamon, and bake at 350° for 30 minutes, until the bottoms sound hollow when tapped.

  ANTIPASTO TOMATOES

  Lots of tomatoes

  This step involves thinking ahead. Small tomatoes work best for drying—Juliets, Principe Borgheses, Sun Golds, or cherry types. Cut in half and arrange skin-side-down on trays in a food dehydrator, or the sun if you live in a dry climate. Dry until they feel between leathery and brittle.

  Vinegar

  Dried thyme

  Capers

  Olive oil

  Place dried tomatoes in a bowl. Heat vinegar in a saucepan or microwave, then pour enough into the bowl to cover the tomatoes. Soak for 10 minutes, then pour it off and save (it makes a great vinaigrette). Press off excess vinegar with the back of a wooden spoon. Then toss the damp tomatoes with thyme, or other spices that appeal to you. Pack loosely in glass jars with capers and enough olive oil to cover. They will keep on the shelf this way for several weeks, but taste so good they probably won’t last that long.

  DRIED TOMATO PESTO

  2 cups dried tomatoes 1 cup coarsely chopped walnuts

  ¾ cup olive oil

  1/3 cup grated Parmesan

  ¼ cup dried basil

  4 cloves garlic

  2 tablespoons balsamic or other good vinegar

  ½ teaspoon salt

  Puree all ingredients in a food processor until smooth. Add a little water if it seems too sticky, but it should remain thick enough to spread on a slice of bread.

  Download these and all other Animal, Vegetable, Miracle recipes at www.AnimalVegetableMiracle.com

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  18 • WHAT DO YOU EAT IN JANUARY?

  “January brings the snow…,” began the well-thumbed, illustrated children’s book about the seasons that my children cleaved to as gospel, while growing up in a p
lace where January did nothing of the kind. Our sunny Arizona winters might bring a rim of ice on the birdbath at dawn, but by midafternoon it would likely be warm enough to throw open the school bus windows. Tucson households are systematically emptied of all sweatshirts and jackets in January, as kids wear them out the door in the morning and forget all about them by noon, piling up derelict sweatshirt mountains in the classroom corners.

  Nevertheless, in every winter of the world, Arizona schoolchildren fold and snip paper snowflakes to tape around the blackboard. In October they cut out orange paper leaves, and tulips in spring, just as colonial American and Australian schoolchildren once memorized poems about British skylarks while the blue jays or cockatoos (according to continent) squawked outside, utterly ignored. The dominant culture has a way of becoming more real than the stuff at hand.

  Now, at our farm, when the fully predicted snow fell from the sky, or the leaves changed, or tulips popped out of the ground, we felt a shock of thrill. For the kids it seemed like living in storybook land; for Steven and me it was a more normal return to childhood, the old days, the way things ought to be. If we remembered the snow being deeper, the walks to school harder and longer, we refrained from mentioning that to any young person. But the seasons held me in thrall.

  And so those words from the Sara Coleridge poem, “January brings the snow,” were singing a loop in my head as I sat at the kitchen table watching the flakes blow around in one of those featherweight boxing-match snowstorms. It was starting to drift at bizarre angles, in very odd places, such as inside the eaves of the woodshed. The school bus would likely bring Lily home early if this kept up, but at the moment I had the house to myself. My sole companion was the crackling woodstove that warms our kitchen: talkative, but easy to ignore. I was deeply enjoying my solitary lunch break, a full sucker for the romance of winter, eating a warmed-up bowl of potato-leek soup and watching the snow. Soon I meant to go outside for a load of firewood, but found it easy to procrastinate. I perused the newspaper instead.

  Half the front page (above the fold) was covered by a photo of a cocker spaniel with an arrow running entirely through his poor fuzzy torso. The headline—A MIRACLE: UNHARMED!—stood in 48-point type, a letter size that big-city newspapers probably reserve for special occasions such as Armageddon. Out here in the heartland, we are not waiting that long. Our local paper’s stance on the great big headline letters is: You got ’em, you use ’em.

  The rest of it reads about like any local daily in the land, with breaking news, features, and op-eds from the very same wire services and syndicates that fill the city papers I also read. What sets our newspaper apart from yours, wherever you live, is our astounding front-page scoop—the unharmed transpierced dog, the burned-to-the-ground chicken house, the discovery of an unauthorized garbage dump. That, plus our own obituaries and a festive, locally produced lifestyle section.

  We newspaper readers all have our pet vexations. Somewhere in one of those sections is the column we anxiously turn to for the sole purpose of disagreeing with the columnist. Volubly. Until family members, rolling their eyes, remind us it’s a free country and you don’t have to read it every time. My own nemesis is not in the World or Op-Ed sections; it’s the food column. While I am sick to death of war, corporate crime, and science writers who can’t understand the difference between correlation and causation, I try to be open-minded. And yet this food writer has less sense than God gave a goose about where food comes from.

  I’d worked on our relationship, moving through the stages of bafflement, denial, and asking this guy out loud, “Where do you live, the moon?” I knew the answer: he didn’t. He was a local fellow writing just for our region of bountiful gardens and farms, doing his best I’m sure. But no one was ever keener on outsourcing the ingredients. The pumpkins of his world all grow in cans, it goes without saying. If it’s fresh ingredients you need, you can be sure the combinations he calls for won’t inhabit the same continent or season as one another, or you. On this cozy winter day when I was grooving on the snow that stuck in little triangles on my windowpanes, he wanted to talk pesto.

  To lively up anything from pasta to chicken, he said, I should think about fresh basil pesto this week. How do I make it? Easy! I should select only the youngest, mildest flavored leaves, bruising them between my fingers to release the oils before dumping them in my blender with olive oil to make a zingy accompaniment to my meal.

  Excuse me? The basil leaves of our continent’s temperate zones had now been frozen down to their blackened stalks for, oh, let’s count: three months. Sometimes at this time of year the grocery has little packages containing approximately six leaves of the stuff (young and mild flavored?) for three bucks. If I hauled a big bag of money out to my car and spent the next two days on icy roads foraging the produce aisles of this and the neighboring counties, I might score enough California-grown basil leaves to whip up a hundred-dollar-a-plate pesto meal by the weekend. Gee, thanks for the swell idea.

  Okay, I know, it’s a free country, and I’m a grouch. (Just two weeks later this chef took off for other work in a distant city where he remains safe from my beetle-browed scrutiny.) But if Arizona children have to cut out snowflakes in winter, maybe cooking-school students could be held to a similar standard, cutting out construction-paper asparagus in springtime, pumpkins in the fall, basil in summer. Mightn’t they even take field trips to farms, four times a year? In our summer garden they’d get a gander at basil bushes growing not as a garnish but a crop. When the leaves begin releasing their fragrance into the dry heat of August, we harvest whole plants by the bushel and make pesto in large batches, freezing it in pint-sized bags. At farmers’ markets it starts showing up by the snippet in June and in bulk over the next two months: fresh, fragrant, and inexpensive enough for nongardeners to put up a winter’s supply.

  Pesto freezes beautifully. When made in season it costs just a fraction of what the grocery or specialty stores charge for pestos in little jars. It takes very little space when frozen flat in plastic bags, then stacked in the freezer like books on a shelf. A pint bag will thaw in a bowl of warm water in less time than it takes to boil the pasta. Tossed together with some pecans or olives, dried tomatoes, and a grind of Parmesan cheese, it’s the best of easy meals. But the time to think of bruising those leaves with our fingers to release the oils would be August. Those of us who don’t live in southern California or Florida have to plan ahead, not just for pesto but for local eating in general. That seems obvious. But apparently it isn’t, because in public discussions of the subject, the first question that comes up is always the same: “What do you eat in January?”

  I wish I could offer high drama, some chilling tales of a family gnawing on the leather uppers of their Birkenstocks. From childhood I vividly recall a saga of a family stranded in their car in the Mojave Desert who survived by eating the children’s box of Crayolas. I hope in those days crayons were made of something yummy like rendered lard, rather than petroleum. In any case, my childish mind fretted for years about the untold bathroom part of the tale. Our family’s story pales by comparison. No Chartreuse or Burnt Sienna for us. We just ate ordinary things like pasta with pesto, made ahead.

  In the winter we tended more toward carnivory, probably in answer to the body’s metabolic craving for warm stews with more fats and oils. Our local meat is always frozen, except in the rare weeks when we’ve just harvested poultry, so the season doesn’t dictate what’s available. A meat farmer has to plan in spring for the entire year, starting the Thanksgiving turkeys in April, so that’s when the customer needs to order one. But the crop comes in, and finishes, just as vegetables do. When our farmers’ market closed for the winter we made sure our freezer was stocked with grass-finished lamb chops and ground beef, crammed in there with our own poultry. And we would now have fresh eggs in every month, thanks to Lily’s foresight in raising good winter layers.

  People who inhabit the world’s colder, darker places have long relied on lots of cold-
water ocean fish in their diets. Research on this subject has cracked open one more case of humans knowing how to be a sensible animal, before Little Debbie got hold of our brains. Several cross-cultural studies (published in Lancet and the American Journal of Psychiatry, among others) have shown lower rates of depression and bipolar disorder in populations consuming more seafood; neurological studies reveal that it’s the omega-3 fatty acids in ocean fish that specifically combat the blues. These compounds (also important to cardiovascular health) accumulate in the bodies of predators whose food chains are founded on plankton or grass—like tuna and salmon. And like humans used to be, before our food animals all went over to indoor dining. Joseph Hibbeln, M.D., of the National Institutes of Health, points out that in most modern Western diets “we eat grossly fewer omega-3 fatty acids now. We also know that rates of depression have radically increased, by perhaps a hundred-fold.”

  In the long, dark evenings of January I had been hankering to follow those particular doctor’s orders. We badly missed one of our imported former mainstays: wild-caught Alaskan salmon. We’d found no local sources for fish. Streams in our region are swimming with trout, but the only trout in our restaurants were the flying kind, we’d discovered, shipped on ice from Idaho. And we weren’t going to go ice fishing. But instead of plankton eaters our local food chain had grass-eaters: pasture-finished beef has omega-3 levels up to six times higher than CAFO beef; that and Lily’s egg yolks would get us through. Steven threw extra flax seeds (also rich in omega-3s) into his loaves of bread, to keep the troops happy.

  Legumes were one of our mainstays. Our favorite meal for snow days starts with a pot of beans simmering all afternoon on the woodstove, warming the kitchen while it cooks. An hour before dinnertime I sauté a skillet of chopped onions and peppers until they sweetly melt; living half my life in the Southwest won me over to starting chili with a sofrito. Apart from that, my Kentucky chili recipe stands firm: to the bean pot I add the sautéed onions and peppers, two jars of our canned tomatoes, a handful of dried spicy chilies, bay leaves, and a handful of elbow macaroni. (The macaroni is not negotiable.)