Every year around this time, my partner and I pack up the car with too many books, cooking tools, and our very large dog, and we head north to central Vermont. This escape, which has over the years ranged from 1 week (not ideal) to 2 (more ideal, but still not perfect), ostensibly began as a vacation for the water-loving Macgillicuddy, our Curly Coated Retriever who would like nothing more than to be soaking wet every minute of every day, day after day. But somehow, the timing of our stay in Vermont has nearly always coincided with a messy, unruly complication of some sort that has threatened to turn my life upside down, to unhinge me, to rattle me senseless. Most times, it's been because I've been working too much, on too many things. But on two occasions, with dire elections looming and our country teetering on the brink of chronic insanity, a palpable sense of dis-ease, discomfort, and distraction settled down over us, leaving us clinging to each other with only our dyspeptic, geriatric dog, the lake, the fireplace, and our books, for comfort.
This, of course, is one of those times.
It's moments like this --when what is unreal becomes real, when what is unfathomable becomes probable, when white becomes black and terror becomes the new freedom and everything that we know to be safe is anything but--that unplugging from our daily, mindless routine becomes a necessity, and a lifeline to normalcy and peace. And as someone with a profound attachment to the concept of food as elemental nourishment for heart and soul, I usually find myself taking solace in the kitchen. In the three Vermont cabins I've cooked in over the seven years we've been renting, more difficult times have inexplicably resulted in old-fashioned, labor-intensive dishes that I would have never produced in the confines of my own well-appointed home kitchen: in 2004, my sheer panic at the memory of Katherine Harris and hanging chads and four more years of war and state-sanctioned stupidity, resulted in handmade sage tagliatelle rolled out on the cabin's dining room table with an empty, floured wine bottle, cut with a butter knife, and draped over the back of a chair to dry. Last year, when a bunch of book projects I was working on were put on hold unceremoniously, I made twice-cooked, sesame-glazed, crispy Asian quail, which took in the neighborhood of 3 hours to prepare.
This is what abject worry does to me.
So, driving to Vermont this year with an elderly dog in the back seat who, for the first time in seven years, didn't recognize her lake anymore; with the looming presidency of a self-proclaimed maverick with more houses than he can keep track of, and a smug running-mate whose foreign experience is grounded in the fact that she can see Russia from her state; and with nine out of twelve houses for sale on one street in our favorite Vermont town, my fear bubbled to the surface, and I began to ponder the meals I would make for us, given the tiny space in our rental kitchen. My partner, as ever, was concerned.
It can be attributed to a culinary sort of divine intervention that I uncharacteristically packed only two cookbooks, each focusing on the glory of unpretentious, unfuddy, non-vertical, simple meals: The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters (which I talked about this time last year, upon its publication), and David Tanis' new A Platter of Figs.
That Tanis works for Waters six months out of the year at Chez Panisse is not ironic; neither is the natural overlap of miraculous recipes in the two books, and the forced respect that they demand from the reader. But where The Art of Simple Food is a culinary treatise (I will never cook, or think about, a basic roasted chicken the same way ever again), A Platter of Figs is a work of art, a gastronomic still-life, and a window into the soul of a kind man who found his peace in mortar and pestle instead of food processor, in the prudent pinch of a good salt instead of the BAM of too many faddish and distracting seasonings, in the drizzling of balsamic on fresh berries instead of the tall, vertically-plated, highly-manipulated, overly-processed dreck that passes for food amidst our sugar-crazed masses. Faced with the clatter and din and shouting of politics and pundits and sadness and Sarah Palin and fear and the realization that anyone--Democrat or Republican--with half a brain and something of a heart should realize that we are all at this moment gaping over a precipice, I needed one thing, and this was it.
I needed David Tanis.
Away for only a week this year, I read Tanis' book cover-to-cover, like a novel/life preserver: I swooned at the mere suggestion of duck breasts massaged with what amounts to a dry brine (produced in minutes, in a mortar and pestle), then tied together and roasted simply for a ham-like result that is virtually foolproof; a gently fried egg slipped into bowl of chicken stock becomes a masterpiece here; chicken breasts, grilled with only the addition of two other elemental ingredients, are a paean to delicious simplicity. In A Platter of Figs, the mundane is not elevated to spectacular; what we consider mundane is by its nature, spectacular.
So I cooked and cooked, very simply, and read some more. I felt a little bit better. Sometime during the week, there were dishes from the book: the swoon-worthy duck, the baked figs, the lapin a la moutarde. But there were also dishes that Tanis' book simply inspired me to: grilled chicken and pan-fried celeraic and potato cakes, figs stuffed with local goat cheese, drizzled with lavender honey, and run under the broiler, sour cherry crostada. There were David's stories of brisket, of his love of rabbit, of how "tender green beans--briefly cooked, dressed with oil, and gently piled on a platter--are beautiful in a way that stacked, squeezed, decorated, gussied-up creations will never be" and his thoughts on how platters passed around a table sing of abundance and generosity, regardless of what's on them.
But still, I balked at the price of food in this small town food coop where we shop; we shriveled at the cost of a small piece of handmade cheese, created by people like Tanis who live and breathe what they do, who are here on earth to feed people, and give them pleasure. I worried about the very concept of bounty, and how we would be eating next year, even as Tanis (and Waters, and Judy Rodgers, and Deborah Madison and so many others like them) insists that bounty is not, in fact, synonymous with dinner buffet-style quantity as we Americans have come to know and expect it, even in the face of another Depression.
At week's end we drove home through small town after small town in Vermont, past houses for sale both stately and small, and long-standing businesses boarded up or abandoned. I thought about Tanis, and abundance and generosity, and the simplicity of platters of figs, and bowls of fruit, and I realized what his utterly remarkable book had taught me: even as we shoulder on through this season of ill-will and arrogance, of flagrant lies and bail-outs for the undeserving, it bears keeping in mind that so long as there is kindness, there is the gift of sharing a meal however small or simple--of sharing sustenance.
With that, and this book, as bounty, we'll never go hungry.