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By Root 580 0

harvested my fava beans, prepared the brine for the pig loin, made the stock and the chef, and soaked the dried morels in warm water to rehydrate them, a procedure that yielded an earthy black liquor that I decided would be good to add to the braising liquid. On Friday night, when I made a to-do list and schedule for Saturday, it hit me just how much I had to do, and, scarier still, how much of what I had to do I had never done before, including bake a wild yeast bread, pit a gallon of cherries, make a galette, and cook a wild pig two different ways. I also hadn’t toted up until now how many total hours of oven time the meal would require, and since braising the pig leg at 250 degrees would take half the day, it wasn’t clear how exactly I could fit in the bread and the galette. For some reason the very real potential for disaster hadn’t dawned on me earlier, or the fact that I was cooking for a particularly discriminating group of eaters, several of them actual chefs. Now, dawn on me it did, and it left me feeling more than a little intimidated.

To give you a more comprehensive idea of exactly what I’d gotten myself into, here’s the schedule I wrote out Friday evening on an index card:

8:00 brine the loin; shell and blanch and skin the fava beans. [Favas are one of nature’s more labor-intensive legumes, requiring two separate peelings, with a blanching in between.]

9:00 make the bread dough. First rise.

10:00 brown the leg; prepare liquid for braise.

10:30 pit the cherries. Make pastry crust; refrigerate. Preheat oven for pig, 250°.

11:00 Pig in oven. Skin fava beans. Roast garlic, puree favas.

12:00 knead bread dough; second rise.

12:30 clean morels; harvest and chop herbs, sauté morels.

1:00 harvest and wash lettuce. Make vinaigrette.

2:00 knead dough again; proof loaves. Prepare grill, teapot, cut flowers, set table.

3:00 roll piecrust, make galette. Remove pig and heat oven for bread (450°). Score loaves and bake.

3:40 remove bread; bake galette (400°).

4:00 remove galette from oven; put pig back in (250°).

5:00 build fire. Crush peppercorns.

6:15 remove leg to rest; prepare loin (lard with garlic and herbs; roll in crushed pepper). Put loin on grill.

7:00 guests arrive. Remove loin to rest.

That was my Saturday in the kitchen, though of course the reality of the day unfolded with none of the order or stateliness promised by the schedule. No, in reality the day was a blizzard of harried labors, missing ingredients, unscheduled spills and dropped pots, unscheduled trips to the store, unscheduled pangs of doubt, and throes of second-guessing. There were moments when I sorely wished for another pair of hands, but Judith and Isaac were away all day. Why, I asked myself when I took a ten-minute break for lunch around 4:00, had I ever undertaken to prepare such an elaborate meal by myself?

For a quick lunch I’d picked up a takeaway plastic tray of sushi—Japanese fast food—and, you know, it tasted just great. So how much better could I reasonably expect this dinner—this daylong (indeed, months-long) extravaganza, this extremely slow food feast—to taste? Did I really need to cook the pig two different ways? For dessert, why not just serve the cherries in a bowl? Or open a can of beef stock for the braise? Or a packet of fast-acting yeast?! Why in the world was I going to quite this much trouble?

I thought of several answers while I wolfed my sushi, each of them offering some sliver of a somewhat elusive larger truth. This meal was my way of thanking these people, my patient and generous Virgils, for all they’d contributed to my foraging education, and the precise amount of thought and effort I put into the meal reflected the precise depth of my gratitude. A bowl of fresh Bing cherries is nice, but to turn them into a pastry is surely a more thoughtful gesture, at least provided I managed not to blow the crust. It’s the difference between a Hallmark card and a handwritten letter. A cynical person might say that cooking like this—with ambition—is really just another way of showing