Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [53]
Something had changed for us, a rearrangement of mindset and the contents of our refrigerator. Our family had certainly had our moments of longing for the illicit: shrimp, fresh peaches, and gummy worms, respectively. Our convictions about this project had been mostly theoretical to begin with. But gradually they were becoming fixed tastes that we now found we couldn’t comfortably violate for our guests, any more than a Hindu might order up fast-food burgers just because she had a crowd to feed.
It put us in a bit of a pickle, though, to contemplate feeding a huge crowd on the products of our county this month. If my mother had borne me in some harvest-festival month like October, it would have been easy. But she (like most sensible mammals, come to think of it) had all her children in the springtime, a fact I’d never minded until now. Feeding just my own household on the slim pickings of our local farms had been a challenge in April. The scene was perking up in May, but only slightly. Our spring had been unusually wet and cool, so the late-spring crops were slow coming in. We called a friend who cooks for a living, who came over to discuss the game plan.
Apparently, the customary starting point for caterers in a place that lacks its own food culture is for the client to choose a food theme that is somebody else’s land-based food culture. Then all you have to do is import the ingredients from somebody else’s land. Mediterranean? A banquet of tomato-basil-mozzarella salads, eggplant caponata, and butternut ravioli—that’s a crowd pleaser. And out of the question. No tomatoes or eggplants yet existed in our landscape. Our earliest of early tomatoes was just now at the blossom stage. Mexican? Enchiladas and chipotle rice? Great, except no peppers or tomatillos were going to shine around here. Siberian Tundra was maybe the cuisine we were after. We began to grow glum, thinking of borscht.
Not to worry, said Kay. A good food artist knows her sources. She would call the farmers she knew and see what they had. Starting with ingredients, we’d build our menu from there. As unusual as this might seem, it is surely the world’s most normal way of organizing parties—the grape revels of Italy and France in September, the Appalachian ramp hoedowns in April, harvest festivals wherever and whenever a growing season ends. That’s why Canadian Thanksgiving comes six weeks before ours: so does Canadian winter. We were determined to have a feast, but if we meant to ignore the land’s timetable of generosity and organize it instead around the likes of birthdays, a good travel weekend, and the schedules of our musician friends, that was our problem.
Kay called back with a report on our county’s late May pantry. There would be asparagus, of course, plus lots of baby lettuces and spinach by then. Free-range eggs are available here year-round. Our friend Kirsty had free-range chicken, and the Klings, just a few miles from us, had grass-fed lamb. The Petersons had strawberries, Charlie had rhubarb, another family was making goat cheese. White’s Mill, five miles from our house, had flour. If we couldn’t pull together a feast out of that, I wasn’t worth the Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow Award I won in 1972. (Kind of by accident, but that is another story.)
The menu wrote itself: Lamb kabobs on the grill, chicken pizza with goat cheese, asparagus frittata, an enormous salad of spring greens, and a strawberry-rhubarb crisp. To fill out the menu for vegan friends we added summer rolls with bean sprouts, carrots, green onions, and a spicy dipping sauce. We had carrots in the garden I had nursed over the winter for an extra-early crop, and Camille ordinarily grew bean sprouts by the quart