From Word To Word

The Senior High class I teach at my church met at our local coffee shop this morning, and we got on the topic of found fruit, which is a term that is often applied to the fruit that can be found and harvested for free in urban areas.  For example, I have for years been harvesting apples and pears from behind one of the city community centres where there had been an orchard when the building was still a nurses’ residence for the local hospital.  I also pick serviceberries and elderberries from various housing developments around the city, and there are places where I can also find wild grapes, red currants, rose hips, and raspberries.  Then there are the various neighbours who have planted fruit trees but do not harvest them and let me pick grapes and cherries and whatever else.  All this saves me a not inconsiderable amount of money, and it also lets me use what already grows around me and would otherwise go to waste.

Picking found fruit in this way seems very natural to me.  My parents often took my brothers and me to collect windfall apples from the side of rural roads, apples that could not be eaten but were great for making applesauce.  We also picked the berries that grew in the housing developments where we lived over the years.  When I was first married, I discovered and began picking the wild grapes that grew near our apartment, and I was eventually joined by several of the other residents for the yearly harvest. Though I have moved from these places, I still return to them to gather fruit each year, and I am taking cuttings from some of these plants for my own garden.

Though this behaviour seems very normal to me, however, my students were clearly a little disconcerted with the idea.  They wanted to know whether I had to pay people, which I never do, or get their permission, which I always do unless the fruit is on public land.  They also wanted to know whether this kind of fruit might be more likely to carry bugs or diseases.  The whole thing seemed a little inapropriate to them, something like sneaking into a movie theatre or hacking a computer.  It might be possible, they seemed to imply, but surely there was something about it that was immoral if not actually illegal.

This response, now that I think about it, was a predictable one given our culture’s ideas about property.  We have so internalized the notion that everything is and should be owned and that everything does and should cost something, that we are immediately wary when something appears to be unowned and available to be used freely.  I have seen very similar responses to open source software, for example, or even to the neighbourly gesture to shovel a driveway.  We assume that these things can only be free to hide another kind of cost.  We assume that everything must have an owner, and that what is owned by one person would surely not be freely given to another except as a kind of advertisement or loss leader.  What is freely given or freely found, we believe, will be of worse quality and will obligate us in other ways.  We worry that the real owner of these things will appear and demand that we pay for them in one way or another.

We feel this way, unfortunately, because it is too often the case that what is free does indeed come at a hidden cost, but this should make it all the more necessary that we actively use those few things that are in fact freely found and freely given.  To pick and use found fruit, or to use open source software, or to lend tools freely between neighbours, these become ways, not only to save money, but to maintain economies that do not circulate around money at all, but around the local community and the local environment.  They become ways to value things apart from the dollar value that might be attached to them.  They become ways to understand value differently, to reevaluate, to value more highly what is given and discovered without any value at all.

Midway through canning tomato sauce yesterday, my children began to lose patience.  This is understandable.  Tomato sauce day is a long, hard day.  So we turned off the pots, gathered ourselves, and set off for the park.  We picked up a neighbourhood friend along the way, a girl of five years old, one of the few children I have met who is capable of matching my eldest for energy.  Our time in the park was a good respite for everyone concerned, and we left far more agreeably than we had come.

On the way home, I discovered a small shrub growing in a garden along the street.  It had leaves reminiscent of a rosebush and small, yellow fruit that looked much like a miniature apple or pear.  As I was trying to determine, with my rudimentary gardening knowledge, what exactly this plant was, our young friend decided to pick one of the fruit and bite it.  We stopped her before she swallowed anything, and there are very few fruit that will do any great damage in small quantities, but I thought it might be best if I could identify it as quickly as possible.  I could hear the owner of the house behind the back fence, so I leaned over and asked if she knew what species the plant was.  She had no idea that the little bush even grew fruit.  All she could tell me was that it had pretty flowers in the spring, which was rather less than helpful.

By the time we reached our young friend’s house, shed was still showing no ill effects, and her parents informed us that she had eaten almost every berry in the area once already in any case, but I was still interested to know what plant we had discovered.  A brief internet search revealed what many other people probably would have known from the beginning, that it was a flowering quince, or a chaenomeles japonica, which is not only harmless but often used in jams and jellies.  The flowers, which range from white through pink to red, are quite attractive, and I have decided to plant a few in my garden.

What intrigues me though, is that none of the books or the sites that I have read, and I have read more than a few, ever listed flowering quince among the edible plants that could be grown in our climate.  Of course, none of them listed may apples or paw paw trees either, and I am curious about why these lists are so limited.  Many even omit common edible berries like saskatoon berries and elderberries.  Is this simply because they are not a viable commercial crop?  If so, how did the commercial viability of a food crop come to be equivalent with its edibility, where lists of edible plants include only the small fraction of edibles that are grown on a commercial scale?

These questions interest me because I wonder whether this is another way in which gardening can become a guerilla activity.  I have already mentioned my one friend who plants flower gardens in unattractive public spaces, and my other friend who rescues interesting local specimens from areas that are about to be developed.  Various others, including myelf to some extent, do what might be called guerilla gardening by growing only those plants that are local or those that are edible.  Many of us, though I have had some difficult decisions in this regard, have made a similarly guerilla decision to garden organically.  Might there also be a necessity for an intervention with respect to the kinds of edible plants that are grown, not just in terms of growing noncommercial varietals of commonly grown commercial crops, which is certainly necessary, but in terms of growing plants that are not viable commercially at all?  Is there a need for the home garden to develop these plants precisely because commercial gardens will not?  Is this a place where home gardens might perform a useful intervention?

I am not sure to what degree these questions are significant, but I am discovering that much of what commercial agriculture has passed over is good and useful and viable in the home garden, and I will make it a part of my gardening practise to include these plants whenever I find them.  It may not ever be very effective as activism, but, if nothing else, it will make my own cooking and my own table more varied and more interesting, and this is no small thing in my estimation.

I picked elderberries at Dave Humphrey’s place yesterday.  My eldest son came with me and picked a few berries as well before the mosquitoes became too much for him. After Dave was gracious enough to walk him back to the house, I spent an hour or so alone in the woods, following the elderberry bushes as they followed the stream.  Along with the berries, I managed to find a wild turkey feather and two nests for my son’s eclectic and ever-expanding nature collection.  The sun was lowering but not yet setting, and I finished just as it was casting through the big maple beside the lake.  It was the first evening that I could smell autumn.

Last night and much of today I spent picking the berries from the stems, a process so tedious that it is virtually impossible to buy elderberries commercially, despite how wonderful they taste.  Customers would simply never pay the real cost of pulling all those little berries from the stems with the gentleness required to keep the berries from bursting and the stems from coming with the berries.  I had something like half a bushel to pick, a matter of almost ten hours. This kind of labour can only be justified by a pie, or, to be more precise, by several pies and a substantial batch of jelly.

Tomorrow I will make jelly, bake pies, and fill the house with elderberryness.  It will hold the aroma of a passing summer and a ripening fall, the scattered light of a descending sun through a solitary and giant maple, and the stained fingers of ten hours of picking berries from stems.  There will never have been anything exactly like it before in the history of the world, and there will never be anything exactly like it until the end of time.  It will be entirely and irrevocably irreplaceable.

My family and I have just returned from Manitoulin Island, where both my parents were raised and where both sets of my grandparents still live.  We stayed at my Mother’s place in Providence Bay, an old family house that she purchased a few years ago as a kind of cottage and will now be using as a full time residence and a place to run art workshops and summer programs.  She calls the place Providence House, and she was gracious enough to let us use it for a week and to bring along our friends the Humphreys.

Manitoulin is a deeply significant place for me.  I spent almost every summer there as I child, either at the farm of my Grandparents Hill, which is just outside of Mindemoya, or at the hunting camp of my Grandparents Gordon at Carter Bay, which is on the south shore of the Island east of Providence Bay.  I am by no means a farm boy, but it was during my summers on the island that I learned to ride the workhorses by leaping onto their bare backs from the apple trees, to drive a tractor poorly, to help birth a breach position calf, and to mow more hay than I care to remember.  I am no more a naturalist than I am a farmer, but the island was also the place where I learned to identify some animal sign, to distinguish one tree from another, to cut trails, and to fish.  My most vivid memories are of picking raspberries from along the dirt roads, of fishing in the little Mindemoya river, of wandering among the dunes at Carter Bay, and of reading in the old stuffed arm chair at the camp, the night already black, the moon hidden by the trees, the only light coming from the coals of the open wood stove.  It is into these memories that I always return when I come to Manitoulin.

It has been meaningful to bring others, first my friends, then my wife, then my children, and now my friends’ children, as I have returned to these memories over the years.  The island that I can introduce to them is not the same as the one of my childhood, of course, but it connects to that childhood in strange ways, and it connects to the person I am now as well.  It is no longer possible to get fresh fish from the dock at Providence Bay, for example, because there are no boats that still fish from there.  It is no longer possible to get icecream at the dairy in Mindemoya, because the dairy has now been demolished.  It is still possible, however, to find fresh fish, even if it is now sold from a truck in the grocery store parking lot, and it is still possible to get icecream made by the local dairy, even if it is no longer quite as local.  These things are still important to me now, though perhaps for other reasons, and it was a real pleasure to share them with the Humphreys.

It was also a pleasure to begin building some entirely new memories with my family.  I returned to Carter Bay to take some photos with my eldest son after the Humphreys had left.  While we were photographing, we met a woman on the beach who was able to confirm my uncertain identification of the sandcherries.  We collected several handfuls of them, my son biting into them, making faces, spitting them out, then biting them again, while I filled my shirt pockets.  We also caught crayfish.  We threw rocks from the tall stones into the water.  We found a stick that looked like a sword.  We saw a bear on the road.  Most importantly, when we returned home, we turned the sandcherries into a startlingly red syrup that went beautifully on icecream before bed and only slightly less beautifully on pancakes in the morning.

It is these kinds of memories that have made Manitoulin so important to me.  I feel it most strongly now, just after I have left it.

There is something ideal about the pace of the simmering pot, the tomato sauce, the soup stock, the reduction, the jam, that rests on the back of the stove, hovering on the edge of my attention as I attend to my other tasks.  Simmering gives a kind of unity to the day or even to the hour, something to which I keep returning, to stir briefly, to taste and smell, or to add some missing ingredient.  It is the setting or the scenery that provides the mood and the rhthym for the narrative of my other activities. It is like music on the stereo or weather through the window. My life is played out over what is simmering in the pot.

I am continually relearning how to share my kitchen.

I had my first lesson the second year that my wife and I were married. We had baked Christmas goodies together every year since Grade 11, when I used to make her skip class to come and cook with me. The tradition was important to me, and I thought to her also, so I was surprised two years into our marriage when she told me that she would rather not do Christmas baking that year. When I asked her why, she pointed out, quite rightly, that we did not really bake together. I baked. She came along for the ride. I chose the recipes, bought the ingredients, set the schedule, and, mostly, took the credit. Her contribution was almost entirely restricted to helping me mix this thing or peel the other one. I had assumed that I was sharing my kitchen because we were occupying it at the same time, but I had not really learned to let anyone else cook in it, so I had not really learned how to share it at all.

That year, and every year since, we have each chosen recipes, alternating in the kitchen between the baker and the assistant from moment to moment. It was a difficult transition for me, but the tradition of our baking together has grown richer because of it, and we are looking forward this year to having our eldest son take a more active role himself, letting him choose a favourite treat to make and to share with the family.

I have had similar lessons repeatedly over the years. When a family came to stay with us several years ago, I had to adjust to having two others in the kitchen with me on a daily basis, putting things in different places, cooking in different rhythms, even decorating the space in different ways. Yet, when we get together with these friends now, I look forward to being in the kitchen with them again, to share the kitchen again in the ways that we learned to share it before.

A Congolese woman and her two sons were living with us until very recently. The differences in our kitchen practices could only be described as extreme. Even her basic ideas about when meals should be served and how they should be eaten were culturally very different. She made dishes with ingredients that I had never seen before. Even so, only a few months since she has found her own apartment, I find myself wishing for some of the dishes that she used to make, and my own cooking has been expanded by what I learned from her.

I am experiencing much the same thing again, as my mother-in-law has come to live with us. I am relearning that sharing a kitchen means, as sharing anything means, being able to relinquish control of it. It means accepting how other people work in the kitchen, and accepting that working alongside them will involve adapting my own rhythms to theirs. This is not always easy for me. I am fairly obsessive about the things that are important to me, and the kitchen is among the most important.

All of which brings me to the experience of having to share the kitchen with my eldest son this morning. We often cook together, but I have been finding lately that he wants to assert himself in that space in ways that are, in themselves, perfectly acceptable, but perhaps different than I would prefer. I am finding myself asking more often the question of how to let him safely and usefully share in the kitchen rather than just help in it.

This morning we were making cookies. The picture of the hickory nut cookies caught his eye, and he would be satisfied by nothing else. He was entirely uninterested in my explanation that these cookies are usually made for Christmas. Well, I thought, should he not be able to choose the recipe himself, and why should his choice be limited by some convention about what cookies should be made when. So, under his direction, the hickory nut cookies were made. They had slightly more salt than the recipe indicated and that the heart and Stroke Foundation would recommend. They had green food dye in them, quite apart from anything I could find in the recipe at all. I was unaware that he even knew where the food dye was. They were partly his and partly mine, the product of sharing the kitchen.

We were not sharing the kitchen in the way that I share it with my wife or with a friend, of course, but we were certainly finding places in it that could be shared, even if the results were sometimes chaotic. The first batch of dough actually ended on the floor, which was my youngest son’s fault. Several of the cookies tumbled into the oven, which was by own fault. Many more were mashed to bits as they were being dredged in icing sugar, which was my eldest son’s fault, again and again. None of this, however, detracted from what we were able to make and share together.

As we finished, I found myself reflecting on how this kind of sharing differs from what happens in the ideal kitchens that are portrayed on most cooking shows. On television, kitchens are not shared. There is always someone in charge, either explaining cooking simplistically and hygienically in a kitchen that is too immaculate to be a kitchen at all, or screaming at some poor cooking contestants in a kitchen that is too industrial to be a kitchen that I recognize. There is no space in those kitchens for spouses or friends or mothers-in-law or children.

I think this is why so many people are afraid of cooking and of the kitchen. The ideals that have been presented to them do not reflect a functional family kitchen. They may be functional studio spaces, or they may be functional restaurant spaces, but they do not show people how to cook and share in the kinds of kitchens that they know. They do not show how cooking happens in the family and the community and the home. This kind of cooking can only be shared by inviting people into our kitchens and by sharing our kitchens with them.

Today being Canada Day and a holiday here in Canada, my wife had a chance to sleep in while I made pancakes for the boys. Most often I make pancakes from a kind of informal recipe I have from memory. They are never quite the same from occasion to occasion, which is how I like them.

This morning, however, I decided to use a recipe from a cookbook called The Taste of Country Cooking by Edna Lewis. Lewis organizes the cookbook around the major family and community events of the seasons as she recalls them from her childhood on a Virginia farm in the 20’s and 30’s. She presents a typical meal for each of these events, and prefaces each meal with some recollections of these foods and events. She offers, for example, “An Early Spring Dinner After Sheep-Shearing”, and a “Morning-After-Hog-Butchering Breakfast”, and “A Dinner Celebrating the Last of the Barnyard Fowl”. In all of these recipes, she emphasizes ingredients that are grown locally and in season, and she prefers recipes that are traditional and made in traditional ways, even if they take a bit more time and labour.

As I was looking through the table of contents for something that might resemble a pancake, eventually settling on Sour-Milk Griddle Cakes from “Breakfast Before Leaving for Race Day”, I came upon a reference to “A Note on Baking Powder”, which was in the appendix. I will admit at this point that I am an easy sell for an interesting appendix, reference, annotation, index, or other marginalia. I have been known to photocopy the index and leave the rest of the book. It is a sickness, but a sickness that have no intention of curing, so, of course, I immediately flipped to the back of the book. The note on baking powder is short, so I will quote it in full:

“I have discovered recently that Royal Baking Powder, which I call for throughout the book, is no longer being made because of the rising cost of cream of tartar. I would hope that the fact that it will no longer be available will stimulate an interest in searching for other forms of leavening. For my tastes, double-acting baking powder - the only kind you’ll be able to buy now - contains so many chemicals that it gives a bitter aftertaste to baked goods, and even more if the product is held over a day or so.

“The women of Freetown used to make lovely cakes and breads that rose by the power of beaten egg whites, which were folded in at the last minute. For biscuits and corn breads they relied upon sour milk and baking soda as the raising agent, and, of course, yeast can be utilized in many types of cakes as well as breads. If cream of tartar is available, good results can be achieved by mixing 2 parts cream of tartar with 1 part baking soda, and using this in place of baking powder in the same amount the recipe calls for.”

This is the reason I read notes and appendices, for the little things I would never find otherwise. I had never really thought about what baking powder was until I read these two short paragraphs, and I had no idea that there was anything except the double-acting stuff that I bought in the can. I was intrigued, which means I did a little searching online. I did not find a brand of baking powder that still includes cream of tartar, though I have not entirely given up on this possibility. I did find that there are actually two kinds of single-acting baking powder. One mixes cream of tartar or a phosphate with baking soda to create a chemical reaction before heating, producing a powerful but short-lived rising action, useful for pancakes and other quick cooking batters. The other mixes alum with baking soda to create a chemical reaction during heating, producing a less powerful but more sustained rising action, useful for breads and cakes. Double-acting baking powder, as you might expect, contains both tartaric/phosphate and alum, and so can be used in all sorts of recipes.

I also learned that the bitterness Lewis tastes in the commercial double-acting powders is not only from a greater amount of chemicals but from the presence of alum, which is also a primary ingredient in the second kind of single-acting baking powder. What Lewis really wants is the first kind of single-acting baking powder that has only cream of tartar, because this kind does not have the bitterness of the alum. As her own two-ingredient recipe indicates, it is not difficult to make this powder on your own. I did so this morning, and the results were very nice. Because this homemade baking powder is alum-free, however, it should probably not be used in breads and cakes that rise slowly during long baking, not without a willingness to fail in the experiment. On the other hand, the homemade powder should do very well for making cookies and other quickly baked recipes without any residual bitterness. I can hardly wait to try this experiment on my favourite recipes.

I have had something of a rough week.  I am not complaining, only commenting.  I pride myself on not complaining about these things, and I was under the impression that I was coping fairly well, that is, until my wife took the spoon away from me in the middle of feeding my youngest child and told me to go pick strawberries.

Now, to clarify her reasoning, I should explain that picking strawberries is something like therapy for me.  It is not that I like to eat strawberries so much, though I do like a few now and again.  It is more what strawberries represent to me. They are the first fresh produce of the year, the first food that I can pick and eat from my garden after a whole winter of barrenness and a whole spring of growth.  They are also the first preserves of the year, the first jams and sauces, the first canning.  They mean the beginning of a whole summer and a whole autumn of harvesting, eating, cooking, preparing, and preserving.

So, I spent an hour picking strawberries, in the wetness left by this afternoon’s rain, and I realized exactly how stressed I had been at exactly the same moment as I realized how much less stressed I was rapidly becoming, and I ate a few, and I picked several baskets full, and my fingers were stained red, and I smelled summer.

I enjoyed Dave Humphrey’s most recent post on reading Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows to his daughters. Perhaps it is only one of our strange synchronicities, but I identify very strongly with him when he puts himself in the place of Mole, gliding ever further down a stream that he has never seen before, putting himself completely in the hands of his new friend Rat. I have imagined myself in Mole’s place also, as I have imagined myself in the place of Rat and Badger, though never in the place of Toad, whose encounters with the human world always seem to disrupt the unity of the novel for me. There is a quality to these characters that causes me to identify with them and with their world.

I especially appreciated the notice that Dave takes of the hospitality shown by Badger to Rat and Mole when they become lost and beset by weasels in the woods. I have already made mention, in a previous post on open homes, of an earlier episode in which Rat provides hospitality to Mole, but Dave’s reflection reminds me of the other places where Grahame’s story is deeply about hospitality and friendship, the home and the hearth, the table and the meal. There is something beautiful about this world that Grahame creates, something that reaches its fullness in the scene where the nature god appears during the search for the lost otter pup. I love this story, and I envy Dave the few years headstart he has in sharing it with his children.

I need to preface this post by saying that cheese is something of a religion in my family. My paternal grandfather was a dairy farmer. My father is a professor of food science specializing in dairy and in cheese making. I was weaned on yoghurt and buttermilk and cheese, most of it made by students, much of it made with questionable quality, some of it made to be intentionally odd, either coloured green or pink or flavoured with strange spices. When I was young, we made our own yoghurt. We hung around the university labs, stealing cheese curds and watching milk be pasteurized. We wandered through the rooms where the cheese was aged, all filled with the singular smell of mould and ripening cheese. Even today, we treat cheese like some people treat wine or scotch. Cheese is a passion.

So, this past weekend, when my family attended my step-brother’s wedding in Toronto, it should come as no surprise that we gathered early and long around the cheese platters, tasting what there was to taste. Most of it was good, if unspectacular, but there was one cheese that was in my opinion both good and spectacular. It was a gouda, but unlike most of the Dutch goudas I have eaten, which are firm with a nutty kind of taste, this gouda was textured much more like a crumbly old chedder, and its nuttiness had the intensity of an old chedder’s flavour as well. When I saw it on the plate, I assumed it was a gouda, After I had eaten it, I actually had to ask my father to confirm what it was, so different was it in both texture and flavour from what I was expecting.

Later, I located the label from one of the trays. It was indeed a gouda, and the only gouda that is made in Ontario, at Thunder Oak Cheese Farm near Thunder Bay. Apparently it is possible to go there, have a coffee, and watch them make the cheese on certain days of the week. I will certainly do so if I am ever that far North, but for the time being, I will have to content myself by ordering their gouda from afar.