Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [21]
You can find your nearest farmers’ markets and local producers on the USDA Web site: www.ams.usda.gov/farmersmarkets. Also check: www.localharvest.org and www.csacenter.org.
STEVEN L. HOPP
Each of our purchases so far was in the one-to three-dollar range except the nuts, which were seven a pound—but a pound goes a long way. I frankly felt guilty getting so much good fresh stuff for so little money, from people who obviously took pains to bring it here. I pushed on to the end, where Lula sold assorted jams and honey. We were well fixed for these already, given to us by friends or made ourselves last fall. Lula’s three children shivered on the ground, bundled in blankets. I scanned the table harder, unwilling to walk away from those kids without plunking down some bucks.
That’s where I spotted the rhubarb. Big crimson bundles of it, all full of itself there on the table, loaded with vitamin C and tarty sweetness and just about screaming, “Hey, look at me, I’m fruit!” I bought all she had, three bundles at three dollars apiece: my splurge of the day.
Rhubarb isn’t technically fruit, it’s an overgrown leaf petiole, but it’s a fine April stand-in. Later at home when we looked in Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse Fruit for some good recipes, we found Alice agreed with us on this point. “Rhubarb,” she writes, “is the vegetable bridge between the tree fruits of winter and summer.” That poetic injunction sent us diving into the chest freezer, retrieving the last package of our frozen Yellow Transparent apple slices from last summer. For dinner guests we threw together an apple-rhubarb cobbler to ring out the old year and ring in the new. Rhubarb, the April fruit. I’m a monkey’s uncle.
If not for our family’s local-food pledge to roust us out of our routine, I’m sure we would not have bothered going down to the market on that miserable morning. Most of us are creatures so comforted by habit, it can take something on the order of religion to invoke new, more conscious behaviors—however glad we may be afterward that we went to the trouble. Tradition, vows, something like religion was working for us now, in our search for a new way to eat. It had felt arbitrary when we sat around the table with our shopping list, making our rules. It felt almost silly to us, in fact, as it may now seem to you. Why impose restrictions on ourselves? Who cares?
The fact is, though, millions of families have food pledges hanging over their kitchens—subtle rules about going to extra trouble, cutting the pasta by hand, rolling the sushi, making with care instead of buying on the cheap. Though they also may be busy with jobs and modern life, people the world over still take time to follow foodways that bring their families happiness and health. My family happens to live in a country where the main foodway has a yellow line painted down the middle. If we needed rules we’d have to make our own, going on faith that it might bring us something worthwhile.
On Saturday morning at the market as we ducked into the wind and started back toward our car, I clutched my bags with a heady sense of accomplishment. We’d found a lot more than we’d hoped for. We chatted a little more with our farmer friends who were closing up shop behind us, ready to head home too. Back to warm kitchens, keeping our fingers crossed in dogwood winter for the fruits of the coming year.
The Truth About Asparagus
BY CAMILLE
When I was little, asparagus season wasn’t my favorite time of year. The scene was the same every spring: my parents would ceremoniously bring the first batch of asparagus to the table, delicately cooked and arranged on a platter, and I would pull up my nose.
“Just try one, Camille, you might like it this year,” Mom would say, enthusiastically serving me a single green shoot.
Yeah, right! I would think. Ever so gingerly, I would spear the menacing vegetable with my fork and bring the tip of it to my tongue. That’s as far as I would get before dramatically wincing and flicking the asparagus down in disgust.
“Okay, good,” she would respond with