The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [203]
With dessert I would serve a tisane, or herbal tea, made from wild chamomile I’d picked in the Berkeley Hills earlier in the spring and dried, mixed with mint and lemon balm from the garden. I also had a jar of honey made by a friend in town, the foraging in this case having been done in the Berkeley Hills by his bees.
Now I had my menu and I wrote it out on a card; this being Berkeley, I felt compelled to add a few pretentious restaurant menu flourishes:
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Fava Bean Toasts and Sonoma Boar Pâté
Egg Fettuccine with Power Fire Morels
Braised Leg and Grilled Loin of Wild Sonoma Pig
Wild East Bay Yeast Levain
Very Local Garden Salad
Fulton Street Bing Cherry Galette
Claremont Canyon Chamomile Tisane
2003 Angelo Garro Petite Syrah
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It was still just a menu, okay, and admittedly it broke several of my own rules and leaned rather heavily on Angelo’s generosity and talents, yet it promised an interesting meal and accomplished most of what I had set out to do.
As I looked over the menu, it occurred to me that besides representing several wild species and three edible kingdoms, not to mention the city and the country, this was a dinner drawn in large part from the forest. Here was the meal at the end of a woodland food chain, and that as much as anything else made it a little different. The pig and the morels came directly from the forest, obviously, but the cherry, too, is originally a woodland species that found its way to the orchard and then the city. (Cherry trees came originally from the forests of the Transcaucus, between the Black and Caspian seas. The Bing cherry is a chance seedling discovered in a Willamette Valley orchard in 1875 and named for a Mr. Ah Bing, the Chinese farmhand who tended it.) What this means is that the calories we’d be consuming represent energy captured by trees rather than, as is typical now, by annuals in farm fields or grasses in pastures. The sweetness of the dessert was made in the leaves of a cherry tree; the morels nourished themselves from sugars originally created in the needles of a pine tree and then absorbed from its roots by their mycelia; and the acorn-fed pig is a walking, snorting manifestation of the oak. Reversing the historical trajectory of human eating, for this meal the forest would be feeding us again.
2. IN THE KITCHEN
I started cooking Saturday’s meal on Tuesday morning, when I made the stock and started the wild yeast culture for the bread. For the stock I used bones from both my pig and, because I’d never heard of a pure pork stock, from a grass-fed steer. A neighbor had recently bought a quarter of a beeve that arrived with a big bag of bones she didn’t know what to do with, so I asked if I could forage them from her freezer. Similarly, I foraged from the depths of the produce bin in my refrigerator some past-due vegetables. After roasting the bones in the oven for an hour, I simmered them in a stockpot with the vegetables and some herbs for the rest of the day.
Gathering wild yeast turns out to be no big deal. The spores of various yeasts are floating in the air just about everywhere; collecting them is a matter of giving them a place to rest and something to eat. Some species of yeast taste better than others, however, and this is where geography and luck enter in. The Bay Area has a reputation for its sourdough bread, so I figured the air outside my house would be an excellent hunting ground for wild yeast. I made a thick soup of organic flour and spring water (the idea is to avoid any chemicals that might harm your yeast); then, after briefly exposing