Millers – the men who ran grist mills – were a grumpy bunch, so says Bruce and Jack, tour guides at The Dexter Grist Mill in Sandwich, MA, where last week I watched organic corn ground in the three-hundred-year-old machinery, and scooped into a nice cotton bag for me to take home and stir into American polenta. Click to continue »
I recently considered a magnificent pile of cherry tomatoes, almost too beautiful to cook, on my kitchen counter. Click to continue »
Wedding Cake, Oil on linen over panel
Tea and cake, on the pristine tabletops of Barbara Kassel’s interiors, are this week’s food special from The Clark Gallery. After I posted last week’s Clark Gallery share, I realized both week’s I’d somehow included tea in the recipes, and here it is again, this time in the paint.
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Years ago, I saw in some beautiful magazine – Martha Stewart or Gourmet – seductive pages of gorgeously composed meals layered in lidded jars. Tuna Nicoise in a jar. Chicken Mirabella in a jar. Steak au Poivre and Potatoes Anna in a jar. The photos glistened with glass and ingredients, and the idea was excellent, but I remember thinking morosely, who the heck is ever going to make all these elements, and put them together in glass containers (who has all these perfectly sized glass containers?!), and then stroll off to a river bank for a picnic? I, for one, don’t live my life that way, as much as this magazine spread makes me want to. This was a magazine spread doing what it does best, making me want a different life.
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It’s the middle of August in New England, and suddenly the boldly voluptuous eggplant is appearing everywhere from finger-size to udder-like. It always happens too fast. There they are, burgundy opulence by the pound, and the only recipe you can remember is Parmigiana, which represents a tired option at the ski resort’s hot lunch counter. Bleck. Who wants to bury these stunning feats of nature, (if Rembrandt were a nightshade) in breadcrumbs and jarred tomato sauce?
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Squash, Harmony Free Fair 16 x 20 inches color photograph
Though the origins of the county fair can be traced back to centuries past, Thomas Birtwistle portrays the subject with a decidedly 21st-century inflection.
At one of the farthest edges of Massachusetts the best curried chicken salad sandwich you’ve ever eaten awaits your picnic basket, along with pastries – strawberry mascarpone cake, key lime mousse cake, fresh blueberry tart – that rival any patisserie to the east – and that means Europe – of this one.
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Food in Art has been around since at least the Ancient Romans, who believed the images of fruits painted on tombs became real in the afterlife, thus sending snacks along with the dead. To the glistening tabletop catalogues of the 16th century Dutch, to Cezanne’s tumbling peaches which pointed the way to Cubist interpretations of bread and fruit, no culture has ever tired of painted interpretations of what we eat.
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Maggie Mehaffey married into a farming story that dates back to at least 1718, so says the historic plaque on the Mehaffey Farm homestead in Rowley. She and the rest of the family - Maggie’s husband, their two sons Ross and Michael, respective wife and girlfriend Acacia and Desi, Maggie’s sister-in-law Marcia and husband, and the family matriarch Louise – have all pooled cash, time, muscle and heart to save this farm, where Mehaffeys and Tenneys have been born and buried for 300 years.
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Everyone cooked in my family, even my brothers. We subscribed to Gourmet Magazine and hungrily read the articles about what people in little French villages were having for supper, and then my mother and I tried to recreate them ourselves.
My academic background is in painting and writing, but I waitressed at Jasper’s and Hammersly’s Bistro in the 1980’s, when dining in Boston was just becoming exciting, and the people in it - waitstaff and kitchen staff - were like a small university of students and faculty. Everyone knew each other, ate in each other’s restaurants, and were aware that dining in Boston had just turned a corner, inspired by youth, global awareness - these were chefs who had traveled to Europe - and new respect for American ingredients. It was a wonderful community of people who cared about all sorts of good food and wines. Because they cared about these arts, they also cared about growing food, preserving space for it to grow, preserving the lifestyles of people who grow it. We were all beginning to understand that caring about what was served on a plate was to care about the bigger picture.
Married, the mother of two daughters, I now live in Rockport, Ma. My daughters cook. Everyone in our house welcomes a new cookbook for the dinner and dessert possibilities it might offer, which really means the possibility of changing our lives just a little, pretending we live in a little French village for a night. Isn’t that what food does, too - a little bit of theater every single day? “What are we having for dinner tonight?” is really the question of “What is the performance tonight? Where are we traveling? Who will we be?”
I write a column called “Food for Thought” for The Gloucester Daily Times. In it and on this blog, I’m always looking for the possibility food offers for transformation and I’m looking for those wonderful communities of all kinds who care about preparing a great dish, setting a beautiful table, drinking a good glass of wine, and then having a great conversation.
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