In the Kitchen with Paula Wolfert’s Mother

The kids finally went back to school a little while ago, after Hurricane Irene, and my mother, blew through town. Even though we have no children of our own, it’s still been a very exciting time around here, heady with delight, anticipation, and worry; there are several first-timers who live on our street, and when I asked them if they were excited, they all emphatically shook their heads yes, but their eyes said Not so much. 

As if on cue, the temperature dropped that first day of school from a hot and steamy 88 over the weekend to a chilly, damp 60; we raked for the first time  after some of our neighbors came by to (mercifully) cut down the rest of our storm-fallen trees, and haul away the wood. Late in the afternoon, we harvested about three cups of Italian flat beans, a gorgeous butternut squash, a few tiny acorn squashes, and cleaned off our dried garlic. We had the presence of mind the other day to buy fifteen pounds of tomato seconds for $6 — the kind that have small dings in them and thus turn people off with their lack of empirical perfection; then, our neighbor, Melissa, who has recently started keeping chickens, brought us around fifteen pounds of peach seconds. So we had an evening’s worth of slicing and storing to do, before we made dinner.

And all I could think of, the entire time, was Did I remember to feed Paula Wolfert‘s mother?

It was a fast, quiet summer; I’ve been working, head-down, finishing my book, so we didn’t spend much time traveling the way we always do. And even though it was a warm summer filled with great, fresh meals,  I’ve been focusing more on cooler-weather recipes and “storing” ingredients — things that you have to care for, that will give back to you over the long haul: did I remember to mound the potatoes? Did I remember to feed the sourdough? Can I use the preserved lemons yet? Should I plan to can the peaches and tomatoes, or can I just freeze them? And then, of course, there was the issue of Paula’s mother. Because where the long haul is concerned, Paula’s mother is just going to keep on giving and giving, as mothers are usually wont to do.

Back in July, Susan and I were invited to take part in the unthinkable; to be clear, this was unthinkable good, as opposed to unthinkable bad. This was the unthinkable that, in murky light, might be construed as the direct result of lunatic sycophancy, or what happens when you trip over yourself, deaf, blind, and stupid, because you love someone’s work so much that you read it over, and over, and over again. It speaks to you, calls out your name, and, like an imbecilic child in desperate, platonic love with her teacher, nothing else exists for you on the same plane. That is what certain authors and books do to me— Wallace Stegner and Maira Kalman, Alice Waters and Mary Karr, Elizabeth David and Leo Tolstoy, M.F.K. Fisher and Jeanette Walls, Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver: like if I were in a room with them, I would turn into a blithering idiot. (I have been, in a few cases, and I did. Tolstoy was not among them.)

I feel this way about Canal House Cooking; most of you who read Poor Man’s Feast know that. I can’t help it. In a vast sea of gastro-literary mediocrity, here is this extraordinary book series, published a few times a year, written and produced by Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton out of their fairly elemental working loft along the D & R Canal, and it’s so remarkable and seductive in its furtive simplicity that, when I think a new edition might be on its way, I spend my days racing out to the mailbox, like Steve Martin waiting for the phonebooks to arrive in The Jerk.  When it shows up, I close the door and squirrel myself away for days, reading it from cover to cover, over and over again. Every once in a while, Susan tosses me a piece of raw meat, like a zookeeper.

Even before I knew them, Christopher and Melissa had become friends just by way of their voices, their kitchen, and their food, which is authentic and not at all fussy, even though it sometimes can be celebratory (which is vastly different from fussy). It’s cold lobster with mayonnaise, and chicken thighs with bacon and olives, and cassoulet, and creamed onions, and berry cobbler. It’s five o’clock, and time-for-a-small-cocktail, wherever you are. And it’s the kind of homey food that actually makes you feel better, existentially, when all around you is fancy food designed to give you an inferiority complex. Just yesterday, I spent hours going through a stack of very important cheffy restaurant cookbooks written by very important cheffy people; the books were all very nice and pretty and heavy and enormously impressive but —call me crazy — I don’t so much need to know how to make a leaping dolphin out of spun sugar, in the same way that I don’t need to know how to make trout foam. If you do need to make trout foam or a spun sugar dolphin, you won’t find recipes for it in Canal House, so move on.

Anyway, back in July, Melissa and Christopher hosted a Small Holding Festival at the bucolic Linden Hill Gardens in Ottsville, Pennsylvania; off we went to see the animals, to watch the Bobolink Dairy folks make ricotta, to watch hunky Ian Knauer carve an immense piece of pork the size of a Volkswagon. There were all the expected goings on: the Old Timey string band playing on a platform hovering above the festival; there were the animals, including a gorgeous Swiss Brown cow so calm and sweet that every time she blinked, her luxurious black lashes fluttered and fanned like one of those ancient peacock feather  sunshades cooling Anne Baxter in The Ten Commandments. There were the attendees — the general public, and then, the not-so-general-public: Colman Andrews and his wife; Dorothy Kalins and her husband, filmmaker Roger Sherman; Aaron Wehner, the publisher of Ten Speed Press. There was Sunset food editor extraordinare, Margo True, and a few members of her staff, signing copies of their remarkable book, The One Block Feast, which, if you read it cover to cover, will walk you through the vagaries of doing everything from raising your own chickens to making your own wine and beer, harvesting your own salt, raising your own bees, making your own cheese, growing your own vegetables, canning your own vegetables, and so forth. But what separates the book from the very few others like it is that the folks who put this book together broke themselves down into teams: Team Chicken and Team Vinegar, to name just two. (You can see the remarkable results of their efforts by going here.) And in honor of the book, Margo and her staff brought along Paula Wolfert’s mother— dragged her, I believe, all the way from California, and then divvied her up into tiny canning jars — so that those of us who were invited to stay for a late lunch could actually take a little bit of Paula’s mother home with us. We did, and she’s here sitting in my kitchen, in a special crock, as I write this.

We snogger her up with a little bit of red wine every now and then, and expect that she’ll reward us for the attention we pay her. She’s a red wine vinegar mother — not unlike a sourdough starter — and has been in Paula Wolfert’s kitchen for some time. We refer to her as:

Mama Wolfert

Mother Wolfert (formal)

BIG MAMA Wolfert

Spicy Mama Wolfert

Sweet Mama Wolfert

Pungent Mama Wolfert

Lip-Smackin’ Mama Wolfert,

(as in “did you remember to feed Lip-Smackin’ Mama Wolfert today, honey?”)

Lunch was one of those gorgeously relaxed summertime affairs that you only read about in the pages of magazines: a big, stone barn; three forty-foot long tables set with wild flowers in Mason jars; enormous platters of cold fried chicken; quart jars filled with water melon pickle. I had never had water melon pickle before, and I could have embarrassed myself by plunging one of the serving spoons into it and dumping the entire contents of the jar out onto my plate. Luckily, Susan took the spoon away from me before I had the chance. It was a great day, and I didn’t make a glutton of myself, so that was nice.

Last week, while I was taking a break from writing, I spent a few hours sitting on my couch surrounded by all of the Canal House books published to this point, and I read them cover to cover again; I remembered back to that gorgeous July day in the country with the cow and the homemade ricotta and all that fried chicken, and I smiled. The weather is getting cooler now — I could see my breath this morning when I took the dogs out — and in order to keep the house at a temperature that is friendly to long-term, very-much-alive endeavors like sourdough starters and vinegar mothers, I’ve had to close the windows.

But that’s okay: I want Paula’s mother to be comfortable. We like to think she is.

Poussin Marinated in Red Wine Vinegar, Herbs, and Garlic

In the 1986 North Point Press edition of Marcel Pagnol’s My Father’s Glory and My Mother’s Castle: Memories of Childhood, Alice Waters contributed a foreword and a recipe for grilled quail with wild herbs and olive toasts requiring the marinating of the tiny birds in “a little sweet wine from Provence.” The recipe always struck me as an icon of glorious simplicity, but when I first came upon it in 1988, I was living in a fifth floor walkup on East 93rd Street in Manhattan on a stupidly small income, and couldn’t afford, much less find, a little sweet wine from Provence. There was also no way for me to grill anything over hot wood embers without being evicted, so I took to broiling a lot, and beating the smoke detector into submission with a wooden spoon while standing on an upturned stockpot.

Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to have both a charcoal grill (my father-in-law’s patent pending Weber kettle) and a gas grill, hooked up to my propane line, which means that I can grill all year ’round. And while I can now happily afford sweet little wines from Provence on the odd occasion, I prefer marinating small birds — quail or poussin; I like the latter for their meatiness and because they bear less of a likeness to Ortolans — in red wine vinegar and herbs before blasting them over high heat. The residual sugar in the red wine vinegar concentrates and sweetens the skin, which then caramelizes and crisps to a gorgeous, dark honey brown; the sour edge softens a little bit, but still provides a high note to the meat. Now that we’re making our own red wine vinegar with help from Paula Wolfert’s mother, I expect to make this dish a lot more often.

Serves 2-3

2 poussin, butterflied and flattened

1/4 cup good quality red wine vinegar

1 teaspoon fresh chopped rosemary leaves

1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves, smashed once with the side of a knife, to release their oil

2 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed

a pinch of salt

black pepper, to taste

Place the butterflied poussin in a glass or ceramic baking dish — a lasagna pan is perfect — and massage all over with the vinegar, herbs, garlic,  salt, and black pepper. Cover loosely with foil and refrigerate for up to four hours. Remove from the pan, place on a small platter, and let come to room temperature.

Meanwhile, heat a clean, oil-brushed grill to medium-hot (about 425 degrees F). Place the birds, skin-side down, directly over the heat source, and cook for about 10 minutes; if there are flare-ups, remove the birds to indirect heat with long tongs, and then replace them over the heat source. Turn them over, move them to indirect heat, and cook, covered, for another 10 – 15 minutes, until cooked through. Remove them to a clean platter and loosely tent with foil; let rest for 10 minutes. Halve the birds and serve them with garlic toast and a tossed salad.

Tagged as: Alice Waters, Canal House Cooking, Christopher Hirsheimer, Jeanette Walls, Leo Tolstoy, Maira Kalman, Mary Karr, Melissa Hamilton, Paula Wolfert, poussin, red wine vinegar, Wallace Stegner