Arugula, Basil, Lavender, Lettuce, Onion, Peppers, Hot peppers, Potatoes, Hot pepper, Radishes, Shallot, Tomatoes, Cherry tomatoes
We dropped off Sam at boarding school on Saturday. We had been told he would have a roommate, but we knew nothing about the kid. When we got to Sam’s room the roommate had already moved in, but he was not there. So we spent some time trying to guess what he would be like based on the few clues his belonging offered. He had a New Orleans Saints pennant, a snowboarding picture, a Jamaican flag on the little table by his bed, a calendar from some boat club, and his name, Quint, was on the door. We came up with a number of interesting and unusual profiles.
But I had to remind the others that it is always safest to go with the base rate. Thus I predicted that he would turn out to be not some snow-loving Caribbean or boating Cajun, but a rich kid from a wealthy old New England town, with a summer house on the Cape and well-dressed, well mannered parents. As we discovered when we finally met Quint and his father, however, I was wrong. Their summer place is on Fisher’s Island.
I got the rest right. Quint (a nickname based on the fact that he is the fifth in line to have his name) lives in a historic village in Connecticut. His parents have a wonderfully easy social manner that comes from good schooling, broad experience and generations of wealth. Quint’s father looked liked he had been dressed for the part by a detailed-obsessed costume director, everything perfect right down the soft leather pseudo-yachting shoes and the nonexistent socks. I had forgotten how small a part socks play in this culture, and spent a lot of time looking at other fathers’ feet to see just how many of them had gone without socks for this occasion. A lot of them. It must have something to do with sailing, which was a frequent topic of conversation amongst this not overwhelmingly diverse group of parents. I got the feeling that given a couple more hours they would find they had all already met at some regatta or other.
Perhaps when we get together again at parents’ weekend we can have a good chat about the pros and cons of socks. After all, I have a job that’s probably even less sock friendly than sailing and fully appreciate just how unpleasant wet socks are. Granted, mine get wet from working in muddy fields, not taking waves over the port side, but surely that is a minor distinction. Wet socks are wet socks, and a shared antipathy to them can bring together people from all walks of life.
It is always possible, though, that I won’t fit in. Maybe because my socks get not just wet but filthy. Maybe because I don’t have much of an idea of how to sail close to the wind. Maybe because I am a vegetable farmer in a small rural community in northern New York and the work I do sets me apart from the world most prep school parents inhabit. And it is not just that they might consider my work a little odd, a little grubby. In fact, they are probably not seriously trouble by farming at all, and anyway they are far too polite to show it if they are.
But farmers have an odd sense of defensive pride. So many people in this country gave up farming for something “better.” Farmers became the dumb hicks left behind, about as unchic as you could get. There’s a sentimental strain in our national culture that looks back at our (real or imagined) agrarian past fondly, but even that veers towards the patronizing, imagining farming as the lost simple life, the antithesis of sophisticated, fast-paced, successful urban existence. In response, farmers tend to regard city dwelling, book learning, office work, conspicuous success and just about any activity that does not involve oil stains with a certain quiet scorn. Many of my neighbors have funny stories about rich folk coming out to the country and humiliating themselves trying to do things that any farmer handle with little effort: hauling feed sacks, shooting geese, fixing engines. As a newcomer to farming (16 years does not count for much), as a former inhabitant of that other world—I went to the school Sam now attends—as a spindly guy with bad aim and meager mechanical skills, I cannot entirely share in my neighbors sense of amusement over such tales. Nor, however, can I entirely resist the attraction of this pigheaded disdain for self-assured, neatly coifed, pointlessly sockless, nautical types.
I hope that farm life has not completely infected Sam with this point of view. We did not send him to this school to learn to be one of those people, but he does have to live amongst them for four years. He will be a lot happier if he finds a way, however cynically, to fit in. I worry, of course, that he may not, that he is not ready, that we have sent him to the wrong place, that they won’t know what to do with him, they won’t like him—all standard parental concerns that set in more or less as soon as we started to drive away from his dorm.
Of course, I have many of the same concerns about the vegetables each week. I don’t worry so much about their social and academic prospects. But I feel a little anxious about their virtues, about how they will be received (and if they will be received) and what will become of them. Don’t worry, I do not actually think of the vegetables as my children. But like Sam, they are to some extent the product of my efforts on their behalf and I want them to do well and be liked.
Fortunately, most of the things in this box are pretty easy to get along with. They don’t demand special treatment. You can pamper them if you want, but you need do little more than slice the tomatoes and sprinkle them with salt, or steam the potatoes and put a little butter on them, or toss the greens in a salad. There are, however, a couple of crops that might require a little more explanations for you to enjoy them, such as the small hot peppers. Especially the crinkly red or pink one, which can be quite hot and should be used with a little caution. Or the shallot (the smallish, reddish, onionish fellow), which you could use like an onion, but is particularly good in a salad dressing (slice it thinly and let it sit in the dressing for a couple of hours to bring out the flavor) or sauce. And then there’s the lavender, which people tend not to think of as a culinary herb. You could just hang onto it for the scent. But you can also use it in just about any recipe that calls for rosemary (such as sautéed peppers and onions or roast potatoes). I recently had a tasty drink made of lemonade, gin and lavender, and I have had lavender crème brule. You want to keep the lavender flavor in any dish at a restrained level unless you like eating things that taste like soap, but a little lavender can add a pleasant perfumy quality to food.
Obviously, I have spent a lot of time with these crops and know a fair amount about their culture. But just as there’s no one right way to raise a kid, there’s no one right way to prepare a vegetable. Certainly there are things to avoid in either case (I trust you are not kicking your share down the stairs or locking it away in a closet for weeks at a time), but there is considerable latitude in how to approach the task, and methods that might sound completely wacky can have excellent results. If you have good vegetable recipes, however unusual, I hope you will send them to me so I can add them to the ones already on the web site. We all tend to have our way of doing things, our particular sense of taste. It is refreshing, sometimes, to encounter other, alien ways—whether by discovering someone else’s recipe for tomatoes or spending a little time with people who have a lot more to say about tacking than plowing.
