It's Day 2 of eating locally, and we've been cheating like undergraduates. First, I ate the granola for breakfast that was labeled as "local" at the Coop but which obviously can't be local because it was composed of oats and peanuts, two not-local crops. But I ate it anyway, because what else was I going to have for breakfast? Then, we both put Hellman's mayonnaise on our leftover Fred sandwiches because what is a chicken sandwich without mayonnaise? Laurie Colwin taught me well about how to make the perfect hen sandwich, and it always means homemade bread, mayonnaise, and celery salt. (I wouldn't have been able to make my mayonnaise, either, because I don't have any local oil!) I added some tomato and a little baby fresh green spinach from Lewis Creek to my sandwich... heaven.
And dinner tonight is bound to be full of cheating, too. But being the geeky historian that I am, I've even found ways to rationalize it. And it all has to do with the Woodcarver of Lympus.
You've probably never heard of the Woodcarver of Lympus, even if you're a Vermonter. But if you've driven across the Bethel Mountain Road on your way to Boston (and who hasn't?), you've probably spotted the sign pointing to Lympus, and thought "Lympus??? what the heck? Shouldn't that be O-Lympus? and what's Lympus, or Olympus doing in Vermont anyway?" Well, once upon a few years ago, I was driving home from Rutland or somewhere, and stopped at a now-defunct antique store in Pittsford. And there, on a shelf, was a book with that magical title: The Woodcarver of Lympus, by Mary E. Wallace, published in Boston by Little, Brown in 1906. And it was a mere $5. Here was my chance to learn what the heck was Lympus!
I don't remember learning why it's called 'Lympus, but I loved, loved, loved that book anyway. Sentimental? Yes. But so what? A young man is felled and paralyzed cutting down the winter's firewood. He falls into despair, while his poor family struggles, until, eventually, he begins to carve, so that his fame eventually spreads far beyond little Lympus and his relative fortune saves them from poverty. There's love (both requited and un-), lovely descriptions, and a fascinating depiction of rural Vermont in a much more isolated time. The opening scene is all about the stagecoach coming -- not to Lympus itself, which is too isolated for that, but to somewhere close by. It's an event!
There's a scene from the book that keeps coming back to me while thinking about eating locally. It marks the moment when our woodcarver realizes how very badly off the family is -- something that they have been trying to hide from him. If I remember correctly, he discovers that while his aunt puts regular old sugar in his morning coffee, she puts maple sugar in hers, and tries to explain that she prefers it that way. He is not fooled (we all know that maple has its place, but coffee is not it!), and realizes that he has to do something to help his family.
What can we learn from this story? (told you I was going to be a geeky historian!) a) They have coffee. They are very, very poor, and very, very isolated, but they do have coffee (not exactly a Vermont crop); b) They also have sugar (cane sugar? beet sugar? it's not clear). It is a sign of abject poverty, real destitution, to have to use a maple sweetener instead of the other kind in one's coffee.
Over our Fred sandwiches (Spread Fred!), we talked about food in pre-modern times, and mused over the fact that networks of food transportation are hardly a modern phenomenon. The Romans got their grain from Egypt, after all (and Sardinia, of course). Trafficking in salt is one of the oldest trades around, because everyone needs salt, and you either need salt deposits or a salt ocean to get it. And I thought of a document I have students read, a list of the tolls at Colibre (Collioure) in 1252. Lots of spices and exotic commodities, yes -- what we've always been taught that people traded in long distance. But there's a surprising number of food items on the list: grains, different types of figs (do you prefer your figs from Alicante or Mallorca? Alicante figs are more expensive, and thus, perhaps, tastier), dates, peas, oats, tuna-fish in barrels, cheese, oil, artichokes, and a blanket category of "vegetables." Food traveled. A lot, sometimes, even in 1252. I have an article somewhere about cheese from Crete being eaten all over the Mediterranean. Think of the Romans and garum. Making garum is a smelly, smelly business, and not everyone wants to do it (certainly not me!), so it was imported from wherever small fish and salt were cheap. Your average 13th-century traveler was doing a fair amount more carting to and fro of foodstuffs than we might imagine.
After all, food and where it's grown isn't static. Teaching the course on the Mediterranean has made me think so much more about how foodstuffs in the Med have changed. We all know that they didn't have tomato sauce in pre-modern Italy (don't we?) because tomatoes are a New World plant (ditto potatoes, squash, maize and peppers). But that's not all. For quite some time now, Clifford Wright has been performing an admirable public service of trying to inform us all about other ways in which the Mediterranean diet is not what it used to be. First, you should read his 900-page book, A Mediterranean Feast: The Story of the Birth of the Celebrate Cuisines of the Mediterranean from the Merchants of Venice to the Barbary Corsairs (William Morrow, 1999) and then you should check out his website, replete with articles on the origins of the artichoke and the like. You'll learn a lot about how food migrated from place to place: the Phoenicians and the Greeks brought crops from place to place, then the Romans, and most famously, the Muslims. We even call it the Islamic Green Revolution, without which I would never have had spinach to put in my quiche this evening.
Here's today's menu:
Breakfast:
coffee and Domino dots
not-so-local granola with local yogurt for me
homemade bread with butter and honey for Stefano
Lunch:
Fred sandwiches, with Hellman's mayo, local tomatoes and spinach
Dinner:
Quite a Quiche: crust made with Lewis Creek spinach, and Gleason's Grains flour and Cabot butter, filled with local leeks, bacon from Maple Wind Farm, local zucchini and tomato, milk and cream from Monument Farms, and Cabot Seriously Sharp Hunter Cheddar. Delicious!
Salad. Now here, we cheated. The lettuce was local (a freckled Romaine from the Midd Farmers' Market), but how could I make a dressing with no oil? So I decided to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and used a bottled soy ginger vinaigrette. Good stuff!
Stefano finished off the meal with a pile of cheese from Twig Farm, and more bread.
No comments:
Post a Comment