From farm to table: cookbooks that make the connection
The word farm appears on the cover of a spate of cookbooks that have crossed my desk in the past while. They tend to be beautifully illustrated books that draw you in with recipes and stories about farm life and farm food. They’re fun to read even if you’re fairly certain that farming is not in your future — and the recipes are seasonal and wholesome. Here are a few of my favourites:
I have long admired the work of food writer and cookbook author Susie Middleton (www.sixburnersue.com). Here’s how she opens her latest book, Fresh From the Farm: A Year of Recipes and Stories (The Taunton Press, 2014): “One day you wake up and your fantasy has become reality, and you are more surprised than anyone at what you’ve managed to pull off. This is how it happened to me: I longed for a simpler life, I quit my big job and my fancy suburb, moved to a rural island, became a freelance writer, sold my high heels and frilly skirts at a consignment shop, and bought a pair of work boots.
“I planted a teeny little garden. Then a bigger one. I met a carpenter, fell in love, moved into a creaky old farmhouse on the edge of an endless hay field, and planted an even bigger garden,” she writes. “Then the carpenter built me a little farm stand from salvaged wood. We stuck it at the end of the dirt driveway and neighbours and friends and visitors came shopping for lovely lettuce and skinny string beans and glossy cherry tomatoes from our market garden.”
There was more: baby chicks and hens. A much larger garden. Four more acres of farmland. You get the picture. The book is divided into three parts: late spring and early summer, high summer and Indian summer and early fall. A lovely book, with recipes ranging from Tangy Garden Gazpacho with Sun Gold Salsa and Grilled Croutons to Marinated Roast Chicken and Harvest Veggies with Herbed Pan Sauce. “But the vegetables,” Middleton writes, “are the real stars.”
Jennifer McGruther, creator of the award-winning traditional foods website Nourished Kitchen (www.nourishedkitchen.com), observed during a recent online chat with Postmedia food writers and editors: “For me, traditional foods are the foods that nourished generation after generation of healthy peoples before the advent of modern food processing. Across the world you find that traditional foods bore striking similarities: they were whole, they were nutrient-dense, and they included good sources of fat, with a balance of raw, cooked, and fermented.”
Her beautiful new book, The Nourished Kitchen: Farm-to-Table recipes for the Traditional Foods Lifestyle (Ten Speed Press, 2014), focuses on traditional foods, which she defines as “the foods of our great-great grandmothers — the foods of gardens and of farms.”
The traditional foods movement “celebrates the connection between the farm that produces the food, the cook who prepares it, and the individuals who eat it,” she writes. “Traditional foods is a system of connection, emphasizing support for time-honoured ways in farming, cooking and eating, and finding a place for fat and lean, animal and vegetable, raw and cooked.”
And in choosing what — and how — to cook, she focuses “on a simple philosophy that combines sustainability, balance, tradition and community involvement.”
Their first few years on the Missing Goat Farm, 40 minutes outside Vancouver, Heather Cameron, her husband and her mother “bumbled our way through everything,” as Cameron writes in the introduction to Farm Fresh Recipes from the Missing Goat Farm (Cico Books, 2013). “Killing lavender plants by the dozens. Pruning apple trees to death. Drowning rhubarb plants and feeding my ridiculously expensive organic vegetable seeds to all the birds in the neighbourhood. Darned if I knew why nothing was coming up.”
They got better at being farmers. And Cameron discovered the pleasures of canning, preserving and baking. The book, organized by season, features more than 100 recipes.
Sylvia’s Table: Fresh, Seasonal Recipes from Our Farm to Your Family (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013) is a family cookbook about a place born out of a family tragedy: In 2004, Liz Neumark’s youngest child, Sylvia, died suddenly of a brain aneurysm at the age of 6. The Sylvia Centre, its mission “to bring children together with good, delicious foods through joyful experiences in the fields and with cooking,” was established to honour her memory. Neumark, who runs a catering company in New York City, and her husband bought 60 acres in New York’s Hudson Valley, established a farm they called Katchkie Farm, and hired an experienced organic farmer to run it. The 418-page book, written by Neumark with Carole Lalli, includes recipes for dishes ranging from Butternut Squash Bread Pudding to Grilled Tamarind Turkey Burgers. Recipes are from Neumark, family and friends — and from well-known chefs and food writers.