Homemade maple ice cream

Can you see happiness in a pair of hands?

I think so. Especially when they're clutching a pint of homemade maple ice cream, churned from just whole milk, cream, and maple syrup.

I don't know why we haven't talked about this ice cream before. I certainly would never withhold dessert on purpose. I think it's just that it's so routine, so everyday, that I would no more make a fuss over it than I would over my morning bowl of granola. It is my go-to ice cream, and it is so simple that we don't buy ice cream anymore. Really. If you own any sort of mechanized homemade ice cream maker, whipping this recipe up is literally easier than going to the store.

To be fair, it's really more of a formula than a recipe. I learned it from Heidi, over here, who in turn picked it up from a woman named Patricia Wells. You take 2 cups of heavy cream, 1 cup of whole milk, and 1/2 cup of sweetener. (In my experience, honey, maple syrup, and brown or white sugar all work.) If you want to get fancy you can infuse the milk with ginger—ginger ice cream, we've found, makes an excellent accompaniment to pumpkin pie—or add a bit of lemon extract or a pinch of nutmeg. But we usually keep it simple: for apple pie, plain maple; for a berry crisp, honey and a spoonful of vanilla.

Over time, you'll find your own favorites, too. I'd love to hear what you come up with!

HOMEMADE MAPLE ICE CREAM

Maple is the simplest flavor, because you don't need any extracts, and you also don't need to melt the sweetener with the milk.

(If you use honey or sugar, you will need to heat them with the milk until they dissolve, and then chill the mixture until it gets back down to fridge temp. Another thing to keep in mind is that maple and honey both impart their own particular flavor to the ice cream, which is compatible with some extracts and spices but not with others. Sugar tastes more neutral.)

With maple, you can just grab the cream, milk, and maple straight from the fridge (if your maple isn't refrigerated, you should put 1/2 cup in to chill before you begin), pour them into the ice cream maker, and sit down for dinner. When you're done, the ice cream will be too.

2 cups heavy cream

1 cup whole milk

1/2 cup maple syrup

Mix all three ingredients in a bowl until thoroughly combined. Pour this mixture into the bowl of an ice cream machine and churn until thoroughly frozen. Eat some now, but also know that the ice cream will improve in flavor and texture over the course of a few days in the freezer. The maple flavor generally becomes more pronounced, and the ice cream firms up.

The concept is this

Is anyone up for a lasagna today? I'm thinking a summer-in-the-winter, put-up pesto and tomato sauce and homemade bechamel type of gig. Takers? Yes? Ok.

There's only one hitch. I made this about a month ago, and although I can still remember the fabulous August brightness of the tomatoes and the way the pesto made me feel like maybe, just maybe it might be time for a pond swim that afternoon, I did not exactly write down the recipe. Not that I had a recipe to begin with, which is why I think this might be okay. The thing about lasagna is, you really don't need a recipe. You need to understand the concept, and the concept is this:

Find a box of noodles, the thick, flat kind with crinkly edges made for lasagna (or make some yourself). Get out a 9" by 13" casserole dish, and butter it up. Go down to your freezer, or open your pantry, and pull out a pint of that fantastic tomato sauce you made back when you couldn't even imagine the meaning of the words Wintery Mix. While you're at it, grab a half cup or so of the pesto you made with your neighbor's extra basil. Now root around in the fridge and hope for some milk, and butter, and mozzarella, and grab a few spoonfuls of flour and make a bechamel sauce. (Preferably this one, but if you have your own favorite, you just need a similar amount.)

At this point you could also get out some frozen spinach or pick some fresh from the greenhouse, and cook it down with a little bit of olive oil and garlic. Or maybe you have a freezer full of sundried tomatoes. Or, you could be into sauteed mushrooms. Whatever you're feeling here, go with it.


Finally, heat up a pot of water, add a pinch of salt, and boil those noodles. Now comes the hard part: drain the noodles, put them back in the pot, and drizzle some olive oil over them. The noodles will be hot, painfully hot, but if you're like me, you won't have any dishgloves so you'll go ahead and burn your hands, because you need to work quickly before they all stick together in a glob.

Spread a tiny blob of bechamel across the bottom of the casserole dish. Put a layer of noodles on top. Then a layer of tomato sauce, then more noodles, then maybe a few dollops of pesto and whatever vegetables you've got. Then another layer of noodles, and a smooth one of bechamel, and so on and so on. Until you've got a big, layered sandwich of tomatoes and noodles and pesto and vegetables and creamy, delightful sauce. Then, when you get to the top, layer on some slices of mozzarella and maybe even a bit of grated Parmesan.

And there you go. You've got yourself an oven-ready Winter-Into-Summer Lasagna. Happy Monday, everyone, and happy almost-March. Only 22 days until spring!

Tang and pizazz

It was seven degrees here this morning when we woke up. Seven degrees! I would complain, but when I called my mother, she told me her thermometer read seven below. She tends to stop by here, so I have a feeling I'd better keep mum. Anyhow, the good news is that it's now up to a balmy 16.3, and I have tested the waters and found that with two pairs of sweatpants, a turtleneck, and a sweater on, it is warm enough to make soup.

Those specimens up there are a major component of the soup I'm making today, which is the same soup we've been eating now for about a week straight. It's a potato-leek-celeriac soup that I found in an old Bon Appetit cookbook—Entertaining with Style, circa 1996—and it's amazing.

(Celeriac, in case you're not familiar with it, is the knobby, gnarly root that grows under a certain variety of celery. Unlike most celery varieties, it's grown mainly for what's underground, but you can also use the leaves and stalks as you normally would. My friend Tracy grew a bunch in her greenhouse, and we are addicted.)

If I had to pick one word to describe this soup, I would tell you that it is velvety. The celeriac gives it a creaminess that is somehow different—somehow more subtle and more refreshing than the heavy, overdone richness that you find in most potato-leek soup recipes—and that, I think, is what makes it so wonderful. It has comfort food written all over it, but it also has tang and pizazz. I like that.

I also like that it cooks for a while, which means there's a stove burner on, which warms the house up. I have a recipe for Oatmeal Sandwich bread marked, which bakes at 400 degrees, and I'm thinking of making that too. But I'm starting with soup.

POTATO-CELERIAC-LEEK SOUP

The original recipe for this soup actually called for twice as much celeriac as potato, but even as a celeriac lover, I thought that was too much. I swapped the ratios, so that the celeriac to potatoes was 1 to 2, and I thought that was perfect. Also, the original recipe called for olive oil, not butter, but I ended up adding the butter for creaminess later on, so the next time around I never bothered with the olive oil at all. In a soup like this, I think you need the creaminess that butter adds. And for toppings, the original recipe recommended parsley and orange zest and red onions, but we stuck with just the red onions, and I thought they were more than enough. Soup this good doesn't need dressing up. Oh! and it serves 3.

3 tablespoons butter

1 leek, washed and thinly sliced (white and light green parts only)

salt

1 and 1/2 cups chicken or vegetable stock, preferably homemade

1/2 pound celeriac, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch pieces

1 pound potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch pieces

1 cup whole milk

freshly cracked pepper

1/2 red onion (optional)

Heat up the butter in a medium, heavy-bottomed pot. Add the leek and sauté for 5-8 minutes, or until it starts to get tender. Season with about 1 teaspoon salt (unless you are using a salty broth, in which case you should wait and season later on). Add the stock, celeriac, and potatoes and bring to a boil. Turn the heat down, cover, and simmer for about 45 minutes, or until the vegetables are soft.

Use an immersion blender or food processor to puree the soup. Add enough milk to thin the soup to your liking, taste the soup, and add salt and pepper as needed. Simmer for another few minutes to let the flavor deepen, then serve hot. We like it with a generous handful of finely chopped red onions on top.

On-the-spot sold

A year ago, I was eating a breakfast that looked like this:

Of course, I was also on my honeymoon, and in Paris. Today, I am at my dining room table with a mug of cold tea. Life is rough.

Except that actually, it's not. Buttery croissants and flaky baguette are all well and good, but really, if we're being honest, they're not what I need right now. After the turkey, and the creamed onions, and the grapenut pudding, what I really want is some whole grains, a few leafy greens, and a long walk.

That's where Ancient Grains comes in. I first had Ancient Grains at the Scottish Bakehouse on Martha's Vineyard with my friend Ali. It was early, and it was cold, and I'd just flown over for the day to do some interviews. Ali told me that what you're supposed to order at the Scottish Bakehouse is the egg sandwich, but I had already told the girl in line I wanted the hot spelt and quinoa, and so I got a steaming mug of whole grains, cranberries, pecans, and milk instead.

It was, hands down, one of the best mistakes I've ever made.

There was something about the combination—the way the spelt was big and nutty, the way the cranberries were at once sweet and tart, the way the quinoa swam around in the hot, sweet milk—that made warm cereal magical. There were undertones of cinnamon and hints of maple, and I was instantly, on-the-spot sold.

It took some fiddling, and some trial and error, but just in time for the cold weather and the annual interholiday health-food kick, I've finally figured out how to make Ancient Grains at home.

ANCIENT GRAINS

I'm not sure how close this is to the version I had at the Scottish Bakehouse, but it's easy to prepare and I think that taste-wise it comes pretty close. The key is to pre-cook big batches of spelt and quinoa—I keep bags of the cooked grains in the freezer, so that they're ready to go when I roll out of bed. This recipe makes two bowls.

1 cup cooked spelt
1 cup cooked quinoa
milk or cream to taste
1 tablespoon maple syrup, or more to taste
1/4 cup fresh cranberries, halved
1/4 cup crushed pecans

Combine the spelt and quinoa in a small pot. Add milk or cream to taste—depending on how thick you like your breakfast cereal—and the maple syrup, and stir well. Warm over medium heat until just steaming—you don't want to overheat the milk. Pour the cereal into bowls, top with cranberries and pecans, and serve at once.

Note: I haven't been able to find quinoa locally (or pecans, for that matter!), but I don't think any other grain complements the spelt as well. If you have local suggestions, let us know!

The Local Food Report: elemental, fundamental

Raw—or un-pasteurized—milk is contentious. Milk is elemental, fundamental, and the feelings surrounding it are, too. People talk about believing or not believing in raw milk the way they talk about religious faith, gods.

The history of the debate isn't all that long. Until Louis Pasteur discovered pasteurization in 1864, all milk was raw. His aim was to stop wine and beer from going sour, but before long, Franz von Soxhlet was applying the process to milk.

The idea took in the U.S. in the late 1800s. Huge numbers of Americans were leaving the countryside for the city, and the milk they demanded was either trucked into the city from the countryside—meaning it was transported further and at higher temperatures than ever before—or produced in crowded, unsanitary city lots. Swill milk—milk from cows fed a diet of spent grains from city breweries—was common and dangerous. At the time, the vile, blue-hued liquid was reported by the New York Times to have killed some 8,000 infants a year, and by the end of the century, people were fed up. Milk was a public health threat.

Some people pushed for farm reform and certified milk; others said pasteurization was the only absolute answer. In 1920 the city of Milwaukee took the argument to the Wisconsin Supreme Court: farmers contended that mandatory pasteurization would hurt their business and wasn't a valid answer to public health problems; the court said it was the only responsible answer. By the 1940s, similar regulations across the country made pasteurized milk the norm.

In Massachusetts, raw milk has never been completely outlawed. It can't be sold retail, but it is legal to buy straight from the farm. Farm reform groups and public health officials are still arguing over the regulations, and in recent years, as demand for raw milk has grown, the debate has grown heated.

Advocates of drinking raw milk say that it's healthier, that it has more beneficial enzymes, nutrients, and bacteria, and even that it can cure allergies and auto-immune disorders. The FDA says that it shouldn't be consumed "by any one, at any time, for any purpose," because of its potential to harbor dangerous pathogens like Salmonella, E. Coli, and Listeria. Science and statistics has been manipulated at times on both sides, and it's difficult to boil the issue down to any simple truth.

On the Cape, whether because of alleged health benefits or the popularity of the farm to table movement, demand for raw milk has grown over the past five years. The three closest raw milk dairies are on the Vineyard, in Dartmouth, and in Foxboro, so consumers—myself included—have formed coops to take turns driving to pick up the milk for other families at the farms.

Recently, the state has proposed a series of changes to the regulations governing the sale of raw milk, one of which would make these buying clubs explicitly illegal. The new language is in letter A of section 27.08 of the Department of Agriculture's Standards and Sanitation Requirements for Grade A Raw Milk (click on over here and scroll to the bottom to download the full copy), and the exact wording, to give you an excerpt, reads like this:

"No person shall sell, distribute, provide, or offer for consumption to the public any raw milk elsewhere on a dairy farm where that raw milk was produced."

I called Massachusetts Agricultural Commissioner Scott Soares to ask why the state is changing the regulations, and he said it's not. According to his department, the coops are already illegal, and the proposed language addition is a clarification, not a change.

"It sounds like it was very necessary based on the amount of response we've gotten around raw milk buying clubs and coops that in fact have always been an illegal activity here in Massachusetts," Soares said in a phone conversation last week. "We're hearing now that many folks are in fact engaged in these kinds of activities that are and have always been illegal."

The specific wording in the current regulations that spells out the current legal status of coops is tricky to find. I emailed Soares about this, and he replied that the regulations that make the clubs illegal are spread through a combination of statute, regulation, and policy, and therefore are not all clearly articulated in the regulations. "Therein lies the confusion that the changes to the regulations are trying to clarify," he replied.

Whatever the interpretation of the current law, it's clear based on the contention over its reading that some sort of language change is necessary. But raw milk advocates like Winton Pitcoff, head of the Raw Milk Network at NOFA, wonder why the state should work to constrict consumer access when there hasn't been an illness attributed to raw milk in the state of Massachusetts in over a decade. "I don't think there's any valid public health reason to differentiate between an individual picking up the milk at the farm and asking another individual to pick up the milk for them," Pitcoff said in a phone conversation this week.

Soares says that his department doesn't regulate public health issue, and that for him, it's a marketing issue. "Our primary concern with this is protecting the milk market itself," he said. "Although we're certainly concerned, as anyone would be, with the public becoming ill, our primary charge is protection of the milk market in Massachusetts. With the status of the dairy industry here in Massachusetts, we can't afford to have people stop drinking milk for fear or perception of it being an unhealthy or unsafe product."

Of course, raw milk farmers say that if the addition goes through, they could lose so much of their consumer base that they'll have to shut down their farms down. And for their part, consumers say they simply want the right to choose. Ellen Whalen, who belongs to a raw milk coop in Orleans, puts it like this: "Obviously, if one doesn't believe in raw milk they have the right to choose not to drink it, just like I have the right to drink it. However, the addition to the regulations could mean I won't be able to obtain it, because I won't be able to drive over an hour every week to the farm."

If you have strong feelings on either side of the issue, there will be a chance to voice your concerns this coming Monday, May 1oth. The state is holding a public hearing on the proposed regulations at 10am in Conference Room A on the second floor of 100 Cambridge Street. To find out more, click on over here. Enjoy the weekend, and maybe I'll see you there.

Seven days to excellence

In precisely six days, my family will arrive for the holidays. And exactly five minutes after they arrive, my father will start poking around our fridge looking for a glass of eggnog.

I realized this yesterday on my way home from Woods Hole, at the same time I realized that the eggnog takes four or five days to make and at least six or seven days, in my father's words, to become excellent. I pulled off the highway so fast I think the cashier at the Eastham Spirits shop thought I was about to hold the place up.

The thing is, eggnog in my family is not optional. There could be Christmas without presents, there have been plenty of Christmases without snow, and I'm willing to bet we could even give up getting a tree for a year and still feel pretty holly-jolly-festive all month long. But it wouldn't even be December without a batch of Colonel Miles Cary's eggnog in the fridge, and it certainly wouldn't be festive at all. The eggnog goes back waaay too far for that.

My father is the one who usually makes it, but the recipe actually comes from my mother's side, from her great-grandfather Miles. He lived in Richmond, Virginia, where being a Cary was a big thing, and where having a secret family eggnog recipe was an even bigger thing. (Do not skip that article, and especially do not skim over the part where the New York Times blames Boxing Day headaches and cross dyspeptic feelings on turkey and plum pudding.) At any rate, according to my grandmother, when she first met my grandfather, the recipe was kept in a safe deposit box at the bank.

Since then, my grandmother's copied it down, and my mother and father, and more recently my sister and I have our own print-outs, too. There are stories that come along with the recipe, starting with the year my grandparents kept the eggnog pot in their garage and, when my grandfather went out to stir it up one day, discovered a dead mouse floating on top. This did not end, like a sane person might imagine, with my grandfather throwing the batch out. No, he looked around, fished it out, and, praying the alcohol was strong enough to kill anything ugly, brought it inside to finish up. Another year my grandfather held a Christmas party for his congregation in Younstown, Ohio, where he was the minister for the local Episcopal church. My grandmother, making sure to do the rounds that Mrs. Reverend Hunsdon Carys ought to, peeked into my grandfather's study and found the visiting English sexton, Sparky, passed out in the chair with a newspaper over his face. Both my mother and my aunt Elizabeth admit to having had a little too much eggnog at a certain holiday party when they were twelve or maybe even only ten, and to have learned from an older cousin that it was very helpful, instead of lying down, to keep one foot on the ground when getting tucked into bed. And after my grandfather had passed away, one year at my parents' house in Maine, my grandmother and my father made a four-dozen-egg batch of the Colonel's eggnog and drank several glasses before realizing they'd forgotten to put in any of the twelve cups of milk.

You see now why without the eggnog it just couldn't be a real, honest-to-goodness holiday. I have a feeling that if the pot weren't already chilling by now, my father wouldn't bother to come until at least next Tuesday. There are seven days to excellence, which means that until you start, eggnog worth bothering for is always a week away. Thank goodness for Silverbrook Farm eggs and Sunday night milk pick-ups and a steady supply of Jim Beam.

The only hitch—and it's a very big one, unfortunately—is that I've been sworn to secrecy. I can no more give out Colonel Miles Cary's 19th century eggnog recipe than I could pull out a gun and shoot the squirrels that steal our birdseed, or become a Wall Street banker, or make February first be the official start of spring. I ran the idea by my grandmother last year (Hi, Biee! Don't panic!), and she just about took my copy of the recipe back to be inked out, shredded, and burned in an undisclosed fireplace.

So all I'm going to say is this. Not that it means anything, but I am very fond of the eggnog recipe in the 1975 Joy of Cooking. I am also fond of multiplying it so that instead of using one egg, you use thirty-six, and so that instead of using 1 tablespoon of sugar and 1/4 cup of whole milk and 1/4 cup of bourbon whiskey, you use 2 and 1/4 cups and 9 cups and 9 cups. So, not for any particular reason, but just in case you think you might be fond of it, too, I figured I'd type it out, and here it is.

Happy ten-days-before-Christmas, everyone.

CHRISTMAS EGGNOG

adapted from the Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker, 1975 edition

The best part about this recipe is the quote the authors offer at the beginning. "Too much of anything is bad, but too much whiskey is just enough." Well said, Mr. Mark Twain, and like a true Tennessee man. The worst part about this recipe is that it leaves out the most important part that everyone should know about making eggnog in general, which is that it gets better as you wait, preferably over a span of days.

1 egg, separated
1 tablespoon granulated sugar
1/4 cup whole milk
1/4 cup bourbon whiskey

In a small bowl, beat the egg yolk with an electric mixer until it becomes pale and light. Slowly beat in the sugar and the milk, and then, in a slow but steady trickle, add in the whiskey, beating all the while. (Don't do this too quickly or it will ruin the consistency of the eggs, sort of like how adding olive oil to an egg yolk too quickly when making mayo upsets the whole batch.) In a separate bowl, whip the egg white until it's stiff, and fold that into the other ingredients gently. Chill the eggnog for at least a few hours before serving, and preferably more like four days.

Now if you make a big batch (multiplying quantities as I mentioned above), keep it in the fridge and use an electric mixer to beat it once a day. (There will be foam on the top; this is normal, but you have to beat it back into the liquid.) Keep this up, scraping any foam with a spatula down off the sides of the pot (lobster pots work very well as far as quantity goes), and in four or five days take the first sip. Also, if you're going homemade this year, eggnog in Mason jars makes a top-shelf gift.

Holding all the hurry

There is no point in trying to pretend. As of today, it is officially six days until we hand over our house keys, pack up the car, and drive to Maine to get ready for the wedding. Things are starting to get just the teensiest bit crazy around here.

This weekend, for instance, Friday I spent 45 minutes on the phone with my mother's very dear friend, going over all the final details for the flowers before finishing up my last column and arriving at the restaurant seven minutes late. Saturday a friend's mom and I did the practice hair run (big! and curly!) and I walked around doing the recycling at work like some sort of Jessica Simpson shake-those-curls-loose barbie doll, and Sunday Alex and I got the yard all squared away for freezing temperatures. It's been feeling sort of like a perpetual Christmas Eve, a long, drawn-out one, where for weeks and weeks on end you hurry around waiting for the big day, slowly ticking off the time in your head.


Luckily, in the midst of all the chaos, cabbage season decided to show up. There is no vegetable like cabbage to keep you grounded, I think, and savoy cabbage works some particular magic. There's something about the way it ruffles—the way it's all composure and elegance on the outside, even though everything is tightly wound and scrunched up underneath. We've been braising it, recently, cooking it down with butter and onions and thyme and sherry until it collapses into a soft, tender heap, and it's been just the thing. We're sort of the same way by the end of the day, actually, come to think of it, Alex and the cabbage and I, all wilting just a little bit into our dinner plates.

Slowly, though, with the help of a bit of pork and herb butter and a hunk of bread, by the end of the meal, we perk back up. The cabbage lulls us into a soft, contented sort of haze, and we sit on the couch making lists about packing and to-do's and thank-you notes and RSVPs. It's nothing fancy or exciting, but I think the braised cabbage has been keeping us sane.

I'll be back on Thursday to tell you about a very special someone and how he taught me to fillet fish, but after that, I won't be around for a while. We'll be in Maine for a week, and then in Boston for a few hours, and then, if I pinch myself hard enough, in Paris for three days and Italy for two (!) whole (!) weeks. We'll be back November 28th, and I promise to be here on Monday, November 30th, with a whole new set of stories to tell.

Until then, I hope you'll enjoy this cabbage. It is very good, I promise, at holding all the hurry at bay.

BRAISED SAVOY CABBAGE WITH ONIONS AND THYME

I probably shouldn't admit this, but until the other day, I wasn't entirely clear on what the word braising really meant. I understood the results, and I was a big fan, but I wasn't quite sure how to get there. I went on sort of a braising kick reading online until I at least had a vague grasp on the term, but I'm hoping, one of these days, to pick up this book and learn a whole lot more. I have a feeling, based on the cabbage, that braising is my kind of thing.

3 tablespoons butter
2 onions, diced
1 tablespoon fresh thyme
1 medium size head savoy cabbage, core removed and chopped into thin ribbons
1 cup chicken stock, preferably homemade
1 cup whole milk
1 tablespoon sherry
salt and pepper to taste

Melt the butter over medium high heat in a large, heavy-bottomed soup pot. Throw in the onions and let them sweat for 10 minutes or so, stirring frequently so they don't burn. Midway through add the thyme, and once the onions are soft and translucent, add the cabbage. Continue sauteing while stirring constantly. When the cabbage and onions have lost their moisture and are very dry, after about five minutes, pour in the chicken stock.

Continue stirring constantly, mixing the onions and cabbage with the stock, until the stock has been reduced by at least half. (There should be only a little bit of visible juice mixed in with the cabbage at the bottom of the pot, more of a glaze than a broth.) Add the milk and the sherry, and reduce the liquid by half again. When the milk and chicken stock form a nice, thick glaze, season the cabbage with salt and pepper to taste, and you're ready to eat.

We had this alongside a thick pork chop with a little bit of blue cheese herb butter on top and a slice of bread—it is the perfect vegetable accompaniment to that sort of hearty meat cut. A rib-eye would be good too—anything with heft and a good amount of fat. If you don't eat meat, though, it doesn't matter too much. I ate the cabbage the next day for lunch with just the herb butter and a hunk of toasted bread, and it was just as good.

The Local Food Report: sort of zany

The Giant Cape Gooseberry sounds like something out of a Roald Dahl book, don't you think? Like a cross between an everlasting gobstopper and James' Giant Peach—something the Wormwoods would have made Matilda eat in great, mounded heaps.

But really, it's just those funny looking fruits you see in the yellow checked napkin up there. They're a little smaller than a golf ball, a pale golden color, and wrapped in a tomatillo-esque paper husk. They taste sort of zany, like a kiwi-strawberry-pineapple-cherry tomato cross.

If you were hunting for their number, you'd find it in the tomato book. They're a relative of the tomato and the tomatillo—a member of the Solanaceae family, not the traditional gooseberry. (If you remember the rabble rouser, that Mr. Black Currant who we talked about a month or so ago, he's the real gooseberry cousin. You have to be a bona fide Ribes to claim any real gooseberry status, and he is.)

Instead, if the Giant Cape Gooseberry had to pick a little sister, she would be a ground cherry. Aunt Molly's Ground Cherry, if you were shopping at Clare Bergh's stand in Orleans—the sweet, bite-sized kind I fell for last year. She's the crazy tomato lady, or really the amazing lady who is very passionate about tomatoes, the one who grew 150 varieties of tomato seedlings for sale this spring. The Giant Cape Gooseberry and Aunt Molly's Ground Cherry are just two more relatives for the list.


Raw, straight from the wrapper, both fruits are delicious. They sort of dance on your tongue, a little hint of strawberry popping up here, a taste of pineapple there, a burst of sweetness to wash it all down. I'd had the fruits from Clare's stand and Andy Pollock's in Provincetown, but I'd never seen them growing until I went to edit today's radio show at my producer's house last week. He heard the first few sentences of the piece, stopped the sound, and dragged me outside. There in his front yard, growing out of an old boat, were a whole mess of ground cherry plants. We ate every last ripe fruit we could find.

Since then, I've decided that eating them raw is the best way to enjoy both fruits. I was hoping to tell you about the magic of a Giant Cape Gooseberry version of cherry clafoutis today, but after tasting the big fruits cooked, all I can say is that there is absolutely no magic to be had. The clafoutis was magical—the way cream, eggs, flour, and sugar came together into a soft, almost crepe-like pudding, but we picked every single Giant Cape Gooseberry out. As Alex put it, they tasted like unripe cooked tomatoes—not exactly what you're looking for in a dessert.


So instead, once you've snacked on all the fresh Giant Cape Gooseberries and Aunt Molly's Ground Cherries you can find, I recommend making a beach plum clafoutis for dessert. Technically, for a real clafoutis, you're supposed to use stone fruits anyways, pits in, so I suppose it's no surprise Giant Cape Gooseberries didn't work. (The Boston Globe is usually a very reliable source, but apparently, when it comes to matching strange fruits and baked goods, they're not entirely on point.)

At any rate, the idea behind leaving the stones in is that they are supposed to give the custard a rich, almost-almondy-flavor, and I can report after last night that it works. The beach plum clafoutis was everything I hoped the Giant Cape Gooseberry version would be, and then some. In fact, it took us through half a bad movie and two CSI episodes without Alex falling asleep, which let me tell you, is quite a feat.

Of course, this was partially because it was slow going getting those plum pits out, but I didn't mind that part. It was a good reminder, I thought, to slow down and enjoy dessert.

BEACH PLUM CLAFOUTIS

This recipe is adapted from one I found for Cherry Clafoutis in The Food of France, a Whitecap cookbook by Chris Jones, Maria Villegas, and Sarah Randell put out for Williams Sonoma. While my first version, the one with the Giant Cape Gooseberries, was an absolute flop, I could tell there was something to hold on to in the batter. Cherries are out of season here and the stone fruits at the markets, like peaches and plums, were way too big for a custard, but beach plums perfectly fit the bill.

The texture of the baked batter reminds me of a crepe—not quite sweet and perfectly smooth in a custardy, pancake-y sort of way. Be sure not to skip the sprinkling of powdered sugar over top, as it gives the tart plums the sweetness they need.

3/4 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup milk
2 teaspoons vanilla
3 eggs
1/4 cup sugar
2/3 cup all-purpose flour
2 cups beach plums, picked clean but with pits
1 tablespoon fruit liqueur (beach plum would be ideal, but as a substitute, use kirsch)
confectioners' sugar, for dusting

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Combine the heavy cream, milk, and vanilla in a small mixing bowl and whisk together well. In a separate, larger mixing bowl, whisk together the eggs to break the yolks, then add in the sugar and flour and stir until evenly combined. Pour the milk mixture into the egg mixture, and whisk until smooth. Add the beach plums and the fruit liqueur, stir once more, and pour the batter into a 9-inch pie plate. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes, or until the batter has set and the top is golden brown around the edges. Allow the custard to cool to room temperature, dust the top of with confectioners' sugar, and enjoy, taking care not to bite down on the stones of the fruit.

The Local Food Report: making goat cheese

Goat cheese is magical. Take what it does to this salad, for instance. You pile up a heap of spinach, one warm, sliced beet, and a bit of chevre. The goat cheese melts into the warm beets, coats the spinach with a thick, oozy glaze, and with a sprinkling of sea salt, a drizzle of olive oil, and a little bit of vinegar, suddenly, there's a meal on your plate.

But what's truly magical is making goat cheese. I learned how the other day.

Jen Holloman from Ocean Song Farm in Cummaquid taught me. She brought in two gallons of fresh goats' milk from the farm, poured them into a stainless steel bucket, and heated them up over the stove. When they started to steam, we began to whisk, and after a few minutes the milk was pasteurized. We turned down the heat, and made an ice bath in the sink.

From there, the work was quick. We stirred in a bit of rennet—the enzyme that separates the milk into curds and whey—and added a bacterial culture to give the cheese that distinct, chevre taste. Thick, soft curds came together into a ball, and we poured the liquid down the sink through a cheesecloth bag. (You can use whey in some recipes for biscuits and bread—but we had enough on our hands for one day.) What remained was a malleable, creamy ball of cheese—the first chevre I'd ever made.

Sadly, as I discovered when I went to eat the cheese three days later at home, we messed the process up. We didn't let the curds and whey cool for long enough after adding the rennet—usually Jen lets them sit overnight, but since I was there, we rushed things a bit—and my cheese turned into a rubbery ball. But that wasn't the important part. The important part was that I learned the basics, and now, whenever I please, I make magic on my own.

You can too. I'm might be a bit biased, but I recommend you start by listening to this week's show, which condenses an hour of step by steps into a mere four minutes—live! Once you've heard that, you can move on to the recipe below. Just don't forget the beets and spinach—the combination of the three is far and away the best part.


GOAT CHEESE

recipe & step by step thanks to Jen Holloman

2 gallons goat milk
1/8 teaspoon mesophilic culture
1/2 tablet junket rennet
1/2 cup cold water
1 heaping teaspoon of salt (table or kosher)

Pour goat milk into a VERY large saucepan. Heat to 160 degrees F, and hold it there for about 45 seconds. Cool in an ice bath—or by allowing time to pass—until it reaches 90 degrees F. Add mesophilic culture and stir until completely dissolved. Dissolve rennet in water and add to milk. Add salt, and then stir, stir, stir!

Allow this mixture to sit in a nice warm area, covered with plastic wrap, for at least 6 hours. It will separate into curds (solids) and whey (liquid)—that's good. Line a colander with a cheesecloth bag and pour the curds and whey through. Once most of the whey has drained out, put the whole shooting match in the fridge—leaving the bag full of curds in the colander with a big pot beneath to catch any remaining whey drips—and let it age for three days, or up to a week. The sour taste will mellow out of the cheese a bit, and it will form a soft, creamy ball, ready to eat. Enjoy as you would any old goat cheese.

For more on the upcoming Slow Food goat cheese making class, click here.

Chocolat chaud

There's no use crying over spilt milk.

Isn't that what they say?

But what if it's steaming hot with chocolate and
your breakfast for a day of
writing
and radio
and taxes
and teetering heaps
of paperwork.

Can you cry then over
chocolat chaud
swimming down the drain?

Better news today

I have much, much better news for you today. I tried another experiment with an unusual ingredient, but this time, it was edible. Not just edible, in fact, but dare I say, delicious. And just the thing when the weather at the beach is looking very un-summery, like this:

This time, it was oat groats I was trying to tame. If the name makes you giggle, well, it does the same thing to me. Every time I hear it I think of some old man of the forest tending goats, which is very much not the picture you should be getting. In reality, oat groats look much more like dark, wild rice.

They also (and this still seems to me almost too good to be true, so I'm sending you a imaginary drum roll as I type) taste like rice. And act like rice. And chew like rice. And do just about every other thing rice does, except have to be cooked with the lid on, and grown far away. The only real difference is they cook like oats, with plenty of water and stirring, which is just fine with me. Better, really, for those of us who like to peek.

But the most exciting thing of all that is they came from as close as Maine. This is much, much closer than any rice I've found, so I think that fact in and of itself deserves a big hurray. While they're not quite rice—they get a little stickier around the edges, because of the stirring I think—they're awfully close. They're good with a stir fry on top, or in soups, or even (!) in rice pudding.

This last fact I discovered late last night, after a somewhat blah Monday. I was rustling around in the kitchen, and talking with my mother on the phone, and sort of wishing I were still on last week's vacation, sitting in my parents' kitchen in Maine. I was picturing the scene in my head, my mother rummaging through her recipe box, my father studying his wine chart at the counter, the fishmonger pointing out a vintage here, shaking his head there. It all seemed very far away.

And then I remembered. There would be a rice pudding recipe on that counter, floating around, talked about, but never made.


My father had made it once, last year, the night before we'd arrived on another visit. My mother'd had a particular hankering, and we'd shown up, after dark and hungry, and just in time to demolish the leftovers. It had been a rich, creamy pudding, flecked with raisins and topped with a perfectly sumptuous meringue, and with us it had lasted mere minutes, at most.

Yesterday, that was true again. Only this time we made it with oat groats, and a little bit survived until lunch. But after that, the pan was clean, and that was only with two of us. I'd hate to imagine the damage a family of five or six could claim.

OAT GROAT PUDDING WITH MERINGUE

A quick note about puddings and custards and ice creams with egg yolks, before you dive in. When you make anything like this, it involves tempering the egg yolks and a thickener (like cornstarch or flour) with the hot milk before simply adding the egg mixture in. If the milk is too hot, the yolks will burn and separate into little chunks, rather than getting creamy and smooth. If it's too cold, the only thing that will happen is nothing much at all. It simply won't get thick until everything gets much hotter.

If the milk and eggs are boiling and still the mixture isn't getting thick, try the process again. Whisk another egg yolk or two with a good dose of cornstarch or flour, temper them again, and add them in. This will almost always do the trick, and in most cases doesn't change the flavor much. Good luck!

2 cups cooked oat groats
2 cups milk
4 eggs, separated
1/4 cup cornstarch
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
dried cranberries, optional

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Combine rice and milk in a heavy-bottomed saucepan, and heat to the scalding point. (The milk should begin to steam, but not quite boil.) In a medium mixing bowl, beat egg yolks with 1/2 cup of the sugar and the cornstarch. When the milk is hot, add a bit of it, whisking constantly, to the egg mixture to temper it. Then pour the eggs and milk back into the saucepan, and continue whisking over medium heat. After a minute or two (depending on how hot the milk is), the mixture should thicken into a custardy pudding-like state. If not, use more egg yolks and cornstarch, and try again.

Turn the heat off, stir in the vanilla and dried cranberries if desired, and in a large mixing bowl beat the egg whites and sugar into a meringue (Egg whites should be stiff and glossy. If they're not getting there, try adding a pinch of cream of tartar). Pour the pudding into a greased custard pan, and spread the meringue over top. Bake at 350 for about 20 minutes, or until meringue is golden brown. Enjoy hot.

P.S. Don't worry. I put yesterday's naughty cookies out to think about what they'd done. And then it snowed, which melted into a cold, wet puddle. I think they've learned their lesson. Next time, I have a feeling they'll be plain.

The good with the bad

I have very, very good news to report. Not only did I recently come into a large inheritance of chocolate chip cookie dough, but even better, I learned to make ice cream with it. There. Now you have it, the news of the day.

In case you can't tell from the picture, the cookie dough I've inherited came in industrial tubs, rescued from a dumpster behind an upscale grocery store in Truro. If that sounds kind of gross, well, it is and it isn't.

They do this every year—chuck out whatever's left in the store come Labor Day—and the fishmonger has learned to dumpster dive before anything starts to melt or de-refrigerate in an unsanitary way. This year, he saved an unopened box of Dove bars, not to mention the cookie dough: a whole case. Until just recently, however, they were safely tucked away in the freezer of his store. Then came cleaning day, and he willed it all to me.

Unfortunately, it seems the good always comes with the bad, and in this case it was accompanied by a trip to the dentist. I have a cavity. This really shouldn't come as a surprise, given the way I feel about sweets, but I'd never had one before. I feel sort of like I did after I got my first speeding ticket, like I wish I could just rewind a few minutes, and wipe the record clean. Not to mention avoid the trip back, for the terrific filling event. Mouths and drills should not go together in my opinion.

As I wallow in this discovery, I have decided it is best to comfort myself in the way I am familiar with. Namely, by eating chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream and drinking a cup of black coffee. Surely (?), this will bring back the glory days for my teeth.

The ice cream, I should say, didn't come without a bit of trial and error. The first recipe I tried was from Ben & Jerry's, and the base had far too much heavy cream in my opinion, and not nearly enough egg, and simply refused to freeze. It was very stubborn, that recipe. But it didn't matter too much, as all I really needed once I had the instructions for adding the cookie dough (you have to freeze it in chunks first, and then throw it in at the very last minute, according to the ice cream gurus) was a good recipe for vanilla. I learned that from Alice Waters ages ago.

Basically, you just make a nice, thick, eggy custard, let it cool down in the fridge for a bit, and then whip it into a creamy, delightful freeze. It's actually a lot like making the pastry cream for the apple tart I showed you the other day, only you go on to put the whole mess in an ice cream machine. Provided you have that, it's really no fuss at all.

So here's the recipe. I have to go upstairs and brush my teeth.

CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE DOUGH ICE CREAM

adapted from Alice Waters, the Art of Simple Food

This recipe uses a lot of eggs, but I have found that for truly excellent ice cream that is the key. Don't worry about wasting the whites: simply save them for a fritatta the next morning. If you whisk one whole egg into 6 egg whites and bake it with some veggies and cheese, no one will know the difference.

If you have unhomogenized milk, use it instead of half and half. Don't shake it up: just pour the creamy part off the top. This will result in a fat content that is almost the same as the half and half you'll find in the store.

Also, Waters calls for a vanilla bean, but I just stir in extract at the end. You can tweak this recipe to make anything—mint, etc.—that's the beauty of it. And the best part is, if you're making homemade cookie dough, you will likely have enough to make a batch of cookies, too. Which means ice cream sandwiches, in my book.

ingredients:

1 and 1/2 cups cookie dough
6 eggs
1 and 1/2 cups half and half or unhomogenized whole milk
2/3 cup sugar
a pinch of salt
vanilla extract
1 and 1/2 cups heavy cream

Cut cookie dough into chunks, pile into a bowl, cover, and put it in the the freezer to harden up.

Separate eggs, saving whites for another project. Whisk yolks just enough to break them up, and set aside. Pour half and half or milk into a heavy bottomed pot along with sugar and salt. Warm over medium heat until steaming and very close to boiling, but don't let it actually begin to roll. Whisk a little of the hot milk into the egg yolks to temper them (in order to warm them up, so they won't cook immediately when they hit the pot and get chunky and not thicken properly), then whisk the egg mixture back into the milk in the pot.

Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens. This can take anywhere from 2 minutes to maybe 10, depending on how hot you let the milk get initially. Just be patient, and if it seems like nothing is happening, gently turn up the heat. When it coats the back of a spoon and has the consistency of custard, remove from heat, stir in heavy cream and a bit of vanilla to taste (maybe a teaspoon or two) and pour into a metal bowl. Chill thoroughly.

Pour the custard into an ice cream maker, leaving room for the cookie dough. (Depending on how much your machine holds, you may want to adjust the ratios of custard to dough.) When the cream is thick and stiff, add the frozen cookie dough chunks. Allow the machine to churn for just a minute or two longer, then transfer the ice cream to the freezer and let it harden a bit more before serving.

Little miss particular

Popovers are picky. They can always think of some little-miss-particular reason not to rise. The ovens too cold, no too hot! they cry. My batter isn't warm enough! you used the wrong flour! you peeked before I had time!


But when you get them right—when they can think of no complaint—oh! are they a delight. They are warm, eggy, flakey, crisp: every nice adjective there is. They pull apart and deflate in your hands. They melt butter into a salty, golden stream, and pour it down their insides. They lap up jam, absorb the sweet, and then hand themselves over, submit.

And on a chilly morning, when it's still blue out, just barely light, there are few things better to have in your hands. They leave a bit of a mess, of course, in their wake, but like any favorite child, they manage to get away with it every time.


There's a laundry list of tricks and rules frustrated bakers have come up with over the years to coerce them into rising. It's said they prefer all-purpose flour, unbleached; large eggs, not cold but warm; and their whole milk at room temperature. They like their wets and their drys mixed separately, then folded gently to combine. They like to have their oven and their pan warmed up before they get in, and they like to sit on the bottom shelf. They like their pan greased but not too oily, lest they slip and their puffed tops fall. And most of all, they like their privacy. They do not like to be peeked at constantly; they prefer you keep the door shut while they go about their business. They rise with steam, and an open door means cold, condensation, and collapse.

If you can manage to keep all this straight, they might just show you a good time.

POPOVERS

adapted from the Joy of Cooking, 1997 edition

makes 11 popovers in a standard muffin tin

2 large eggs
1 and 1/4 cup whole milk
1 tablespoon butter
1 cup all-purpose flour, unbleached
1/2 teaspoon sea salt, ground

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Grease a popover or muffin pan and set it on the stovetop to warm up. While the oven is just warming up, pour the milk into a small mixing bowl, put the butter in another, grab the eggs, and put all three in the oven to warm up. After 5 to 10 minutes (depending on how quickly your oven warms up), or when they are about room temperature (65 to 70), take them out and whisk all together in the milk bowl. In measuring cup, combine flour and salt. Fold dry ingredients into wet until just mixed (it's no big deal to have a few small lumps).

Pour batter into warm pan, filling 11 wells about 3/4 full with batter, and the remaining one with water to avoid burning the pan. Bake 15 minutes at 450, and 15 to 20 minutes longer at 350. Remove popovers from oven and slit sides immediately with a knife so they don't deflate as they cool. Enjoy hot, with butter and jam.

Under construction

Please excuse us. We're going to be under renovation for a few days. We're not going to do anything crazy—it's nothing like that. We're simply trying to do a bit of a makeover, of sorts. Mostly, the idea is to make it easier to bring you pictures. Like this:

We've been having a bit of trouble with formatting recently, and the hope is that the renovation will fix all that. So if things seem kind of wonky for a bit, don't worry: they'll soon be fixed. (To that end, if you have any special requests, now's the time to holler 'em out. Because once we're done, I'm going to be pretty sick of changes, I bet.)

Incidentally, we couldn't have decided to renovate at a better time, because as it is, my kitchen is also under construction. It's getting trim, and a baseboard, and new shelves, and all the things it never got when we ripped out the cupboards last fall. It's been kind of a work in progress for a while, and I'm going to be pretty ecstatic when it's just over and done with already.

The only downside is, it's a little tricky to get in there and cook. Hence the bowl of Kashi Heart to Heart I ate from a water glass this morning.

But I did eat it with my creamy, whole milk from Paskamansett Farms and a heap of strawberries I'd thawed from the freezer, which I though made up for the whole situation pretty nicely. And, the milk turned pink and a little bit sweet, which is one of my favorite things. So if you can find something like that to get you through the weekend and hang tight for a bit, we'll be back just as soon as we can.

In case of a brunch

We are not quite out of the woods. You may be tiring of sweets, I know, but the season has in it yet a few more days. There's still New Year's Eve and the next day, and though you might be hunkered down at home, then again, you may have a feast to plan.

And just in case it's a brunch, I'm going to offer you a recipe my mother first tried in 1992. I have no idea how she picked it up, or why, for it's pages and pages long, and involved and complicated at that.

But thankfully she did, and she makes it every year now, just once, to be eaten Christmas morning. The recipe makes a triple batch—three pans—and still, we jostle that whole week to get our share. It is dense and chewy and sweet, with just the slightest hint of lemon and a crisp covering of puffy dough. It contains more butter and sugar than is proper to discuss, and it is deliciously, sinfully good.

The cake has a few far flung ingredients—dates, and pecans, that sort of thing—as so many holiday treats do. But it's the season of excess, after all, and if you can find the basics nearby—eggs and butter and flour and milk—I see no reason to resist.

ANGIE'S COFFEE CAKE

from the Silver Palate Cookbook, by Julee Rosso, Sheila Lukins, and Michael McLaughlin, with a few annotations

Makes three 9- by 13-inch coffee cakes

1 package yeast (2 and 1/4 teaspoons)

1 cup warm milk (105 to 115 degrees F)

3 tablespoons sugar

4 cups flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 and 1/4 cup vegetable shortening (my mother uses butter)

2 whole eggs

1 egg, separated

1 pound butter, softened to room temperature

2 cups brown sugar

2 cups shelled pecans, coarsely chopped

3 cups dates, coarsely chopped

1 tablespoon cinnamon

2 and 1/4 cups confectioner's sugar

2 tablespoons warm honey

1/2 cup fresh lemon juice (2 to 3 pieces of fruit)

Dissolve yeast in milk in a small bowl. Stir in granulated sugar and let stand for 10 minutes.

Sift flour and salt together in a large bowl. Cut in vegetable shortening (or butter) until mixture looks like rolled oats. Stir in milk mixture. Beat the whole eggs and egg yolk together, setting aside the white, and stir gently but thoroughly into the dough. Cover with a towel and set aside to rise until tripled, about three hours.

(At this step, every year, my mother decides something has gone terribly wrong. She calls us over to confer; the dough looks like a huge lumpy mass, very wet and heavy and not at all like dough. We worry and worry and worry. It doesn't ever triple, but in the end it always comes out right. We think this may be because we substitute butter for lard, but either way we adore the end result.)

Grease three jelly-roll pans, 9- by 13-inches each. Divide risen dough into thirds, and roll out one piece thinly into a rectangle about three times the size of one of the pans. (At this point, my mother says, you will probably need to use a bit of extra flour in rolling out the dough, as it is so wet.) Slide a pan under the center third of the dough.

Set aside a third of the butter. Divide remaining butter into thirds and spread half of one portion over the center portion of the dough on the pan. Sprinkle 1/3 cup of the brown sugar, 1/3 cup pecans, and 1/2 cup of the chopped dates evenly over the buttered section of the dough. Sprinkle with 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon. Fold one side of the dough over the center section. Repeat addition of butter, pecans, dates, sugar, and cinnamon, and fold other side over center section. Repeat with remaining dough and ingredients, and set all three pans aside for 2 and 1/2 to 3 hours.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Mix together reserved butter, 1 cup confectioners' sugar, reserved egg white, and warmed honey. Cut three deep decorative slits in the risen coffee cakes, being careful not to cut through the bottom layer. Spread honey mixture evenly over the tops of the cakes with a pastry brush.

Set the pans on the middle rack of the oven and bake 25 to 30 minutes, or until puffed. Cool slightly. Mix together remaining confectioners' sugar and lemon juice and drizzle over the warm cakes. Enjoy at room temperature. These also freeze well, though I doubt they'll make it that far.

Rainy day latte

This morning was one of those lazy, stormy sort of starts. It's hard to rally for such a day: windy, rainy, and altogether gray. There was only one way to get out of bed, really, and that was to bribe ourselves with a latte.

I'd purchased the magnificent milk frother a few weeks before. Sleek and silver, it churned hot milk into foam, pushing tiny bubbles into a fuzzy coat. On the stove, the teakettle steamed and finally whistled, screaming coffee at the top of its lungs.

The beans were Beanstock, roasted in Eastham to a dark, rich perfection. The milk was our raw, creamy liquid from Paskamansett Farms in Dartmouth. Boiling water poured over the grinds, coffee aroma steamed hot, and the cups warmed up on the shelf over the stove. Between the Beanstock and the foam, it was a latte worth getting up for.

BEANSTOCK LATTE

Serves 2

Boil 1 cup water; pour over 2 tablespoons Beanstock espresso grinds. Heat up 3/4 cup whole milk; foam with electric frother. Pour a shot of espresso into each mug, top with milk and foam, and enjoy hot.

Top milk

Top milk is a discovery too tickling to keep to myself. As I flipped through a book of recipes the other day, I came across an entry for the phrase. Top milk? I wondered aloud. I'd never seen the term in print.

In my head, of course, it was perfectly clear: I'd used a sort of top milk the other day in place of half and half, pouring the cream as best I could from a well-settled jug of milk. A bit of the skimmed liquid fell out as well, mixing with the heavy fat into something reminiscent of the cream that is best in coffee.

With no supposition that this imagined definition could hold true, I turned to Merriam Webster for assistance:

[Main Entry: top milk

Function: noun

Date: 1891

: the upper layer of milk in a container enriched by whatever cream has risen]

The date was a decade or so before homogenization and pasteurization changed the look of the milk bottle forever. Before this new milk overshadowed the old raw, Louis Starr dedicated a whole book to the topic of proper milk feeding regimens. To my little patients—some of whom in the rapid passing of time, may soon assume parental duties—this volume is affectionately dedicated, he writes, introducing The Hygiene of the Nursery.

As this 1913 manual described, top milk is procured with a one ounce ladle, scooping the settled cream from a chilled quart bottle and putting it aside for a formula mixture. This milk when used in making a properly combined food mixture gives a proportion of fat to proteins of 2 to 1, he instructs, blending top milk with sugar, lime-water, and water. For the first 6 months of life, he says, this should do any infant well when needed.

While I prefer cake over formula, it's amazing the fun a word can make.

TOP MILK CAKE

(adapted from a recipe I found here)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9 by 13 inch Pyrex baking pan and dust lightly with flour. Sift together 1 cup whole wheat flour, 1 cup cake flour, 1 teaspoon baking soda, and 1 teaspoon salt. Cream 12 tablespoons butter and 1 and 1/2 cups granulated sugar together in a large mixing bowl. Add 3 duck eggs (I found some at the Cohasset Farmers market, but extra large chicken eggs will also do), 2 teaspoons vanilla extract, 1/2 teaspoon almond extract, and mix well. Add 1 cup top milk slowly, mixing batter well as you pour.

Milk money

Every Saturday, I dig through the jar of change that sits on my bedroom windowsill, looking for quarters.

I count out 14, $3.50 in all, and hop on my bike. I pedal over to Pheasant Run or down the bumpy dirt trail of Old Long Pond, to find a cooler stashed beneath the shade of a rhododendron or bushy wild blueberry. Into jar or box I drop the quarters, and pedal away with a half gallon of fresh, ivory milk.

The milk pick-up is part of a coop. The members join for all sorts of reasons. Some are concerned about the health affects of industrial milk, others interested in buying locally. Still others grew up on a farm and simply prefer the taste of real, un-homogenized, un-pasteurized cow's milk.

The government calls it "Raw Milk;" proponents call it "Real Milk." And I have to say, the proponents have it right on this one. There is nothing more real than milk that actually separates into skim and cream, that sours naturally into a rich, thick liquid perfect for baking, and that is absolutely untouched, straight from the cow.

Even my lactose intolerant boyfriend likes it.

I didn't join for the real aspect. I was interested in buying dairy locally, and joining the Outer Cape coop was the only option. Raw milk came with the deal. But now that I know the difference between industrialized and real, I don't think I'll ever look back.

Dairies selling raw milk in the Cape, Islands, & South Coast area include:

Lyons Brook Farm 76 Drift Road, Westport, MA (508) 636.2552
Mermaid Farm and Dairy 9 Middle Road, Chilmark, MA (508) 645.3492
Oake Knoll Ayrshires 70 North St., Foxboro, MA terri_lawton@yahoo.co
Paskamansett Farms 742 Tucker Rd, Dartmouth, MA (508) 990.7859