The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [202]
For the real menu’s appetizer, I had to turn to the garden, where there were fava beans ready to pick. I’d planted them as a cover crop back in November, and by May had scores of fat glossy pods, which I held off harvesting in anticipation of the big meal. The fava, a bean native to the Old World, is a broad, flat, bright green shelling bean that if picked young and quickly blanched has a starchy sweet taste that to me is as evocative of springtime as fresh peas or asparagus. But by June many of my beans were a bit long in the tooth, so I decided to make fava bean toasts: I’d mash the beans with roasted garlic and sage and serve them on toasted rounds of homemade sourdough bread. (The younger, sweeter beans I’d reserve for the pasta.) For a second appetizer, I asked Angelo to bring a block of the pâté he’d made from the liver of my pig.
So yes, okay, here was another exception to the rules: Angelo made the pâté. I also asked him to make the pasta for the first course: morels sautéed in butter with thyme and, for color, the tiny fava beans, over fresh egg fettuccine.
Wild California pig was the main course, but which cut and how to prepare it? Angelo recommended slowly braising the leg, in his opinion the most flavorful cut. I was curious to try the loin, and grilling outdoors over a fire seemed to me more in keeping with the season as well as the hunter-gatherer theme. Unable to choose between the two approaches, I decided to try both. I would braise the leg in red wine (Angelo’s) and homemade stock, and serve it with a reduction of the cooking liquid. The loin I would brine overnight, to keep the lean meat from drying out on the grill, cover it with crushed peppercorns, and then roast it fairly quickly over olive wood. The stock I could make earlier in the week, and the olive wood I would forage not in an olive orchard but, with Jean-Pierre’s blessing, in the woodshed behind Chez Panisse.
I wanted to make my own bread and decided it would be fitting to use wild yeast, thereby introducing a second species of foraged fungus into the proceedings. I found a recipe (in an excellent cookbook called Bread Alone) that gave instructions for gathering wild yeast, in a process that took several days but didn’t sound too difficult. For the wine I had a couple bottles of Angelo’s 2003 Syrah and he offered to bring a few more.
After the main course there would be a salad, which I had originally hoped to assemble from foraged wild greens. Earlier in the spring I had found a lush patch of miner’s lettuce and wild rapini in the Berkeley Hills, but by June the greens had begun to yellow, so I decided to go instead with a simple salad of lettuces from the garden.
Which left dessert, and for a while that posed a problem. My plan was to forage fruit, for a tart, from one of the many fruit trees lining the streets in Berkeley. I see no reason why foraging for food should be restricted to the countryside, so in the weeks before the dinner I embarked on several urban scouting expeditions in quest of dessert. Actually these were just strolls around the neighborhood with a baggie. In the two years we’ve lived in Berkeley I’ve located a handful of excellent fruit trees—plum, apple, apricot, and fig—offering publicly accessible branches, but none of the usual suspects had quite ripened yet, with the exception of a Santa Rosa plum on Parker Street that was already past its peak.
So I started asking around, hoping somebody might point me in the direction of a promising neighborhood dessert tree. It was my sister-in-law, Dena, who saved my dessert. She reported that her neighbor’s Bing cherry tree was so heavily laden with ripe fruit that several of its branches were at that very moment bending low over her backyard. I wasn’t quite sure if picking cherries from a neighbor’s tree was exactly kosher, either by my