Chèvre Comes to America

Slow Food not only supports the recognition of distinct regional foods and heritage breeds.  It also recognizes the importance of local food processing techniques.  Until the late 1970s, the production of goat cheese was limited to Europe, with France the acknowledged star.  The United States had no commercial operations to produce goat cheese, now a wildly popular artisanal product.

If Slow Food ever publishes a list of people important to expanding the types of food processing practiced in the United States, Laura Chenel must appear on the list.  It was her single-minded effort to study French-style goat cheese production and replicate it in California that brought chèvre to America.  After participating in a series of cheese apprenticeships in France, Laura returned to Sonoma County with a viable recipe to make a bright, white, tangy cheese that quietly announced itself as made from goat milk.

Laura began production of her signature chèvre in the late 1970s.  I met her shortly thereafter.  As I remember, her cheese production at the time was housed in a cinder block building on the outskirts of Santa Rosa.  Inside, the building was cool, the light dim.  The interior climate contrasted sharply to the day’s summer temperature.  Wooden racks with slatted shelves held the current batch of carefully placed pillows of cheese dusted with a coating of gray ash. 

Across the Bay, another important taste-maker was building her business.  Alice Waters opened her now famous restaurant, Chez Panisse, in Berkeley in 1971.  The restaurant was inspired by a tip to France during college.  Originally conceived as a semester to study French literature, the trip turned into an extended excursion that became a serious study of French food: where it came from, how it was cooked, how it was presented.  Alice haunted Paris’ open-air markets, cooked her way through Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking, visited southern France where sumptuous flavors spilled from hillside fields into local markets: fresh picked herbs, garden grown vegetables, olive oil, garlic.

Heritage Foods

Heritage foods are also called artisan or artisanal foods.  Slow Food’s Ark of Taste, contains several New England candidates, including a quince and a chicken.  Meech’s Prolific Quince, originally discovered in Connecticut around 1850, is rarely grown today.  In fact, I’ve not discovered the variety in any nursery catalogue.  According to reports, the highly fragrant fruit resembles pineapple. 

The second nominee is Rhode Island Red chickens.  These well-tempered birds, developed in the 1880s, were once the best-know breed in the world.  Their tawny to dark brown feathers and bright red comb represents the universal chicken in children’s storybooks.  Remember the Little Red Hen? 

Members of the breed are good layers, producing over 200 eggs a year.  Also good in the pot, Rhodys produce deeply flavorful chicken dinners.  Rhode Island Reds, once ubiquitous, are now rare.  The American Livestock Breeds conservancy estimates fewer than 2,500 exist in North america.  The variety is indeed in need of rescue.

Chickens today are bred to new food standards, industrial standards.  The “broiler industry” rules the roost.  An acceptable breed must now meet the following production specifications: fast-paced growth, a broad plump breast, efficient conversion of feed to meat.  The bird of choice is the white-feathered Cornish Cross.  The breed has great virtues:  ability to live in very close quarters, lack of desire to forage, fast-paced growth.  Its greatest virtues, however also create the breed’s biggest failures.  The Cornish Cross grows to market weight in seven or eight weeks. (Rhode Island Reds takes twelve weeks.) Along the way, however, the phenomenal growth rate produces physical breakdowns such as broken legs and heart failure.  Close quarters demand antibiotics to ward off disease.  

Unfortunately, the predominance of the Cornish Cross has effected the entire species.  Breeders concentrate their resources on producing only one breed of chicken, the industry standard.  Heritage breeds have fallen under a pall of disrespect and their numbers are in decline.

Slow Food

The Slow Food organization not only celebrates currently popular local foods, it also honors foods and culinary techniques that are close to extinction by listing then in a special catalogue: The Ark of Taste.  Revered Ark of Taste products include the Kerry, an Irish breed of cattle; Navajo-Churro sheep; and the Gravenstein apple.

I encountered the last on the list, the Gravenstein apple, when I lived in California in the 1970s and l980s.  This smallish, tart green apple with unique slashes of red on its shoulders is primarily grown in Sonoma County, 50 miles north of San Francisco.  Once grown on almost 7,000 acres, orchard now occupy less than eight hundred acres.  Land used to grow apples is under pressure from both housing and viticulture developments. 

I was only one member of a large crowd of fervent supporters of this plucky little apple. To announce the Gravenstein’s merits, the Sebastopol Chamber of Commerce once rented a billboard situated along the freeway that links apple country to the Bay Area.  A huge green apple with its distinctive narrow bands of red stood proudly on the billboard’s white face:  “These apples have earned their stripes!”

In 2005, Slow Food agreed.  The organization declared the Gravenstein a heritage food and added it to The Ark of Taste.  The Gravenstein joins a list of 158 other heritage varieties grown throughout the United States. 

A potato is a potato is a potato ... or is it?

I think that most Americans would respond that dirt is just dirt no matter where you find it.  Other variables like fertilizer and water are considered minor.  And a potato is a potato is a potato.  When all is said and done, if a farmer plants a half basket of Red Norlands in Connecticut, and another farmer plants the same variety in Maine, they will each end with more or less the same product. Should we expect a difference in each potato’s taste and texture? To most, that seems doubtful.  After all, Connecticut’s growing conditions are not THAT much different from Maine’s seasons and soil.  Or are they?

The idea that “somewhereness” affects the taste of food, questionable logic to most Americans, spurred an Italian to lead a revolution. The story begins in the late 1980s as McDonalds proposes building a restaurant near the Piazza di Spagna in Rome.  Carlo Petrini, indignant that an outpost of American industrial food might undermine Italy’s fine local cuisine, stages a protest. Petrini not only stops McDonalds; he goes on to build an international association, Slow Food, that combines food politics with culinary pleasure.

A non-profit organization, Slow Food, is based on the concept of “eco-gastronomy;” that is Slow Food encourages its members to recognize “the strong connection between plate and planet” and to celebrate the unique productions of local sun and soil throughout the world.  Over the years, Slow Food has recruited more than 100,000 enthusiastic associates in a hundred countries.  

Does place affect taste?

The author of a pamphlet, A Short Story about Indian Corn Meal, published in the 1850s waxes eloquent about the taste and texture of local corn. 

“... Indian corn raised on the southern coast of Rhode Island, along the fabled Atlantic, where alone the soft, balmy breezes from the Gulf Stream ever fan the celestial plant in its growth, and impart to the grain that genial softness, that tempting fragrance and delicious flavor that cause the Greeks of old to bestow upon Narragansett corn meal the name of Ambrosia, imagining it to be a food originally designed and set apart by the gods exclusively for their own use.” 

I’m startled! I always thought that the concept of specific geographic place affecting the taste of food was a thoroughly modern idea. 

Oddly, the English language still has no one word to describe how a particular location may influence the taste of an agricultural product.  The French describe the idea as terroir : a concept that one locality with its unique combination of soil, weather, water and production methods yields a crop that is qualitatively different from the same product created on a different site.  In other words, if you switch a plant’s geographic position and growing conditions, you change its taste.  

Wines enthusiasts embrace the differences between a “Chalk Hill Chardonnay” produced from grapes grown on limestone hillsides south of Healdsburg, California, and a “Saltwater Farm Chardonnay” produced from grapes trellised in fields bordering Wequetequock Cove, a tidal estuary in Stonington.  While modern Americans may accept the concept of “somewhereness” as important when it applies to high-priced wines, are we willing to use the same principle that “place makes a difference” when we discuss more mundane crops such as corn, tomatoes, and potatoes?

Jonny-cake: a recipe

As Velora stirs, I  pour cups and cups of boiling water into the batter.

“Stop!  I think that’s enough.  It’s supposed to be think and plop onto the griddle.”  She adds a bit of milk and spoons the mixture onto three preheated griddles each covered with a generous layer of oil.

I must admit, I’ve never cooked Jonny-Cake either.  The batter looks like an unappetizing serving of mush to me.  Though mandatory as childhood winter breakfasts, those pasty portions of oatmeal or mush never much appealed to me.

Somehow, we manage to serve all the guests.  We even get compliments, though I consider them nothing more than polite necessities.  As always, the cooks eat last.

“Remember, these are not pancakes,” Velora warns as she pours maple syrup over my serving of Jonny-Cake.  I would never mistake this misshapen mass of the lightest yellow for the elegant, thin round of a pancake.

I poke it with a fork.  It is soft, still gooey inside but brown and crusty around the edge.  In my mouth, the combination explodes with taste and texture.  The Jonny-Cake is warm, smooth as custard, crispy as bacon.  All is bathed in the limpid forest taste of maple syrup.

Here’s the Davis family recipe for Jonny-Cake.

1 cup white corn meal

about 2 cups boiling water

1/2 T salt

a little milk

a little sugar if desired

Combine corn meal and salt in a bowl.  Add enough boiling water to reach the consistency of oatmeal.  Add a little milk.  Drop on greased griddle by tablespoons.  This will make 12 Jonny-Cakes. Cook 5 or 6 minutes.  Keep skillet well-greased with corn oil.   

More Jonny-Cake

The Stonington Historical Society has recently reissued The Davis Homestead, a local memoir of life on the farm in lower Pawatuck written by John Davis, Whit Davis’ father.

Originally published in 1986, the book contains accounts of the Davis Farm and the family's history dating back to before the American Revolution.  This memoir is not only a family history but also a major window into our collective early colonial life.  

To celebrate the arrival of the new edition, the Historical Society hosts a morning event at the Palmer House. Whit Davis, a vibrant, white-haired man now in his 80s, is to cook Jonny-Cake using the farm’s flint corn meal.

As so often happens with Whit, he is quickly surrounded by a crowd and absorbed in telling some vivid anecdote.  He moves with the group from the small kitchen to an adjacent parlor.  It seems the cooking assignment for the assembly of fifty will fall to Velora, Whit’s wife ... and myself. 

Before being called to the other room, Whit measured corn meal, salt, and sugar into a large ceramic bowl to make a triple batch.  On a side table, a small electric coffee pot heats water to a boil.

“Remember, Velora, that water must be boiling.” Whit cautions. “That’s what cooks the corn meal.  Frying just crisps up the edges.”

With Whit busy and the Program’s hostess eager to start feeding her hungry crowd, Velora reluctantly begins to mix the batch.

“I’ve never done this before,” she whispers to me in a tone of slight worry and small conspiracy. “I’ve only watched Whit do it.”