The Food Voice

On the eve of Bastille Day (anniversary of the day I started to write ‘My Little Town: A Brooklyn Girl’s Food Voice’ chapter in Gastropolis: Food and New York City), the growing season is well underway. But weather has made it something of a killing season. Despite two plantings, the herbs, the dark green leafy and salad greens that we rely on for meals from our Mahopac kitchen garden has been decimated by the rainless and relentless heat wave. I traveled to the country alone after the 4^th of July weekend to assess; the succulents didn’t stand a chance and were, essentially absent, the unstaked tomatoes snaked along the ground, robustly and the straw fort compost bin was fine. I staked, watered, mulched and otherwise tended to the tomatoes, turned straw and Ft. Tilden NPS horse manure and bedding in to the compost and watered the ground that had been planted but was barren.

 The following Saturday, July 10, Annie Novak and I went on a cow manure and chicken feed run upstate; first to Ancramdale. At the Ronnybrook Dairy Farm, we shoveled up shit for our city gardens, then on to the Agway for her chicken feed and my compost bin’s needs, and finally to McEnroe Farms compost-processing area- big! Nice!

I am back in the country and much needed rain has fallen today. I am hankering to get to the Elmhurst Gas tank bin when the rain stops; this one is an all vegetarian- ovo -  compost bin (egg shells included), and am curious to turn it to see how the fermented greens that Alana’s teacher has been collecting in his fire-escape bucket are breaking down. My Mom and I went to the garden last evening, I upended, added in fresh and fermented greens, and straw, from the peripheral bales surrounding the ‘Straw Fort’ bin, and encirecled it back with the chicken wire, connected with a rubber band my Mom conveniently had around her wrist.

Voila! Looks like the Elmhurst Gast Tank, green-style.

April 22 Earth Day.  Earth Day - yay!

It’s on everyone’s radar to act on it; fellow urban agriculturalists around town are hopping; working in and with their communities; seeds, soil, and plants in hand. One Brooklyn College student in the Foods Lab is planting trees in Staten Island this weekend, three others are nurturing eggplant and tomato seedlings for transplanting on Rooftop Farms which opens on Sunday. My sister and my husband returned from Queens (the ‘Garden Capitol of the United States’ in the late 1800’s) with three 6′ tall fruit trees yesterday (2 peach, one apple). A new friend, Ewa is restoring a food market in the center of the old part of Krakow; we share concern as middle class Poles abandon farms. Those that stay farming are fast replacing long time farm ways to conform with more antiseptic ’standards’ of the EU, now that they are members. Echos of the 1960’s and ’70’s here; shades of  TV dinners, frozen fish sticks kept stocked in home freezers with a drive to the supermarket in burgeoning suburbs being built on farmland; recipes, essentially, of a lost generation whose fingers – early on in life – did not feel the pulse of  the earth for the food that sprouted from the ground or was hunted and gathered from the waters, rarely bought from the people that grew or gathered it, much less grew or gathered it themselves.

But hot house pink tomatoes tasting like damp flannel neatly packaged and wrapped in plastic cartons 
did not satisfy for the longer run; instead, a hunger evolved and a taste grew for today’s equivalent of Jersey beefsteaks here – and that’s the tomato, not the roast beef, bread and beer tradition of our neighbor across the Hudson.

In August in the 1960’s and ’70’s, at Nappy’s down on 5th Avenue in the Slope and at other green grocers around town, bushel baskets poured onto the sidewalks, bulging with tomatoes. Local ones. Beef steaks the size of an adult’s open hand, ready for slicing- thickly- with a topping of crushed garlic, olive oil and chopped parsley. Salt and squeeze of lemon, too. Juice soon running on the plate. Tomatoes that remained on the vine until they were sun ripened before the reasonably short trip across the Hudson to us anticipating in Brooklyn. 

Italian Brooklynites also waited for another Jersey tomato delivery in August in preparation for the winter ahead. Oblong crates of plum tomatoes were stacked 6 high on the sidewalk outside of places like Nappy’s,too, and in driveways in neighborhoods like Bensonhurst and Dyker Heights, garage doors opened to folding tables set with a hand cranked tomato grinder, bowls and pots at the ready. These plum tomatoes were milled al fresco, and in the gravy kitchens, cooked down with garlic, basil, olive oil and oregano maybe, packed into canning jars, processed in boiling water baths and stacked en masse on pantry shelves; in grey frigid February they were there with the flavor of warm summer.

Forty years ago on April 22 was a beautiful Spring day in Brooklyn. St. Saviour marked the first Earth Day with a Folk Mass in Prospect Park celebrated by one of the haimisch priests of the parish. We teens lined the hillside of the Sugar Bowl (I, wearing a mod black and white jumpsuit that I had attempted to make in Tuesday night sewing classes held in the high school basement. My Mom ‘finished’ it to a wearable state; there’s a limit to my skills with interfaces and setting in zippers) and we sang our peace and love songs. In that gentle 1970 evening, in soft conversation, we shared our hopes and dreams for the Earth and the future.

Theory behind a straw bale compost bin: create a container into which organic matter is put; this container insulates, carries in air from vents alongside, and from the ’straws’ of straw throughout. Is ultimately part of the decomposition process; a compost bin to the core. Thanks to Elliot Coleman for sharing. Brilliant.

Last night, had the pleasure of attending ‘The Communal Table’, a participatory dinner event in Soho created by artists Deena Lebow and Ame Gilbert. The theme ‘Pickles and Roots’ was a jumping off point for Nancy Ralph of the NY Food Museum to speak about the wonderful history of International Pickle Day, an event that she started in 2001 and is now anticipated with excitement every Fall on the Lower East Side. Between delicious and warming dinner courses that followed a wintry thread of preservation prepared by Deena and Ame, Deena led a workshop where we kneaded salt and chili into shredded napa cabbage, cut in scallions and turnips and packed all in to Mason jars for a take-home kimchi. Before dessert, I spoke about Polish family kapusta-making traditions and practices, related it to the multi-layered kapusta dish that I cooked up at the start of the event. I showed how Alana has been making kapusta in Brooklyn since she was 9 years old. I then read Gastropolis excerpts from ‘My Little Town: A Brooklyn Girl’s Food Voice‘ that touched on some gathered, preserved and re-generated foods in Brooklyn. A salon followed with poetry readings.

It was a wonderful gathering of lovely, interesting people (many of them fellow dedicated composters) Abundant thanks to Deena and Ame for their creativity and hard work and congratulations to them on such a successful event.

My husband Danny wrote a haiku for me to read there. Here it is:

                                Green, yet brinely aged

                         Barrel, jar or vacuum-wrapped

                                Escape to sour crunch