The Local Food Report: Carafoli's Sagamore

On September 15th, 1880, 500 Italians arrived in Sagamore to start digging the Cape Cod Canal. The work was short-lived—funding ran out four months later—but the community was not. More Italian immigrants came over in the early 1900s when work started again and slowly, in Sagamore Village, an Italian community was formed.

That's John Carafoli. His grandparents were amongst those who came to Sagamore looking for work, and he's one of the few who still remembers Italian Sagamore. His mother passed away when he was eleven, and as a way of trying to hold onto her, he started hanging out in the kitchens of the neighborhood women, watching them cook and bring in squash and grapes and tomatoes from the garden and getting their techniques down. Then he'd go home and try to recreate the dishes for his father and aunt and brother—lasagnas and jams and breads and sweet pastas.

By the time he left Sagamore and went out into the world, he had a whole childhood of recipes to draw from. He started working with food—these days, he's a world-reknowned food stylist and recipe developer—and the recipes acted like a sort of bridge. They took him back to Italy to trace particular pastas and breads and back to his grandparents' city of Bologna to learn about their language and culture. The recipes kept him connected him not just with his mother, but also with his Italian heritage and the Sagamore Village of his past.


There's one Sagamore woman in particular who John talks about a lot. Her name was Mafalada Maiolini, but in the kitchen, he called her Muffy. She taught him to make brassadella, a sweet, dry coffee cake from Verona that involves a top roll and a bottom roll and lots of hole poking in between, and savor, a sweet, dark jam made with leftover fruit at the end of the harvest season. When I talked with John a few weeks ago Muffy was still alive, but she passed away last Sunday, at the age of 96. In her obituary, it says that her kitchen was a gathering place for many friends—a nice way to be remembered, I think.

In Muffy's honor, John gave me this savor recipe to share. It's his—adapted from hers—honed by observation and friendship and the practice of years.

SAVOR

This is a time-consuming jam at first glance, but most of the work is in the simmering. If you can set aside two 6-hour chunks over two days to be around, you've done the hard part. This jam is traditionally made in the fall, with any leftover fruit from the harvest. Carafoli has planted his own orchard of pears, apples, figs, apricots, and peaches, and he's hoping to make savor from his own fruit next year.

6 large ripe pears
6 large ripe apples
6 large ripe peaches
1 pound Italian prune-plums or other plums
1 pound seedless red grapes
12 ounces fresh cranberries
12 pitted prunes
12 ounces pitted dried apricots
12 ounces dark raisins
zest of 2 oranges, removed in strips and minced
1 bottle red wine or saba
1 quart red grape juice
1 quart cranberry juice
1 cup cooked peeled chestnuts

Peel and core pears and apples; peel and pit peaches and plums. Cut into coarse 1-inch dice, and place in a nonreactive (like stainless steel) heavy-bottomed 8-quart pot. Add grapes, cranberries, prunes, apricots, raisins, and orange zest. Add wine or saba, grape juice, and cranberry juice and mix well.

Place pot over high heat and bring to a boil. Immediately reduce heat to its lowest possible setting, and simmer, uncovered, for 6 hours. Remove from heat and allow to sit, loosely covered, at room temperature overnight. (Sugar and acid in mixture will keep it from spoiling.)

The next day, uncover the pot and again bring to a boil. Reduce heat to lowest possible setting, and simmer for 6 more hours. Toward the end of cooking, stir frequently to prevent scorching.

Remove pot from heat; mixture will be very dark and thick. Place chestnuts in a food processor and process to make a mealy puree. Stir into cooked mixture. While mixture is still hot, pour into sterile jars and seal according to manufacturers' directions. Savor may also be covered and refrigerated for up to 4 months, or frozen in a tightly sealed container for up to 6 months.

Yield: 11 pints

A party

It is Alex's birthday today.

We celebrated yesterday, with our friends Tracy and Swede and our two nieces and a whole lot of apples and pears. Tracy had just bought a new cider press, and a friend had an orchard full of fruit. We picked up the drops and filled a few baskets from the trees, and then brought the fruit back to crank and crush and press and strain.

I had made cider once before, at our friend Rebecca's when I was maybe about ten, and then again last year, and it's no small under-taking. It's the type of thing you almost have to make into a party, because otherwise, it would simply be too much work. Even yesterday, with Tracy picking out apples and me and Bella on the crank and Lili weighing down the pressing table and Swede handing out chocolate and wine and Alex manning the press, it took us two hours to put out about three gallons.

At least, for the apple cider it did.

Later in the afternoon, when the girls got tired and the requests for another turn at cranking turned to requests for bathroom breaks and more chocolate, we tried the pears. They were ripe, and soft, and unlike the apples, they cranked through the cutting blades in about five minutes flat. They were juicier than the apples, too, and sweeter, and the juice that came out when we pressed them was slightly thicker, but also more delicate. I liked both the ciders, but I think if in the future I get to choose—based both on pressing and on taste—from now on I'll pick pear. Alex liked a mix, and that was good too, although I think you lose the flavor of both a little bit.

Either way, for now, we have plenty of both flavors to spare. We're taking it easy today—in honor of Alex, and September, and the fact that it's a beautiful, blustery day—but pretty soon, I think we'll get energized enough at least to eat some cake. And then to wash it down with some cider—a swig of apple, then a swig of pear.

WHITE & BLACK RUM MARBLE CAKE

I can't very well give you a recipe for cider—all you need is fruit, and a press, and a good arm to turn the crank—but here's the recipe for Alex's birthday cake. It comes from one of my favorite books—The Modern Baker, by Nick Malgieri—which I like for its simplicity and creativity.

Malgieri calls this cake "both homey and festive," and I agree; it's as pretty as it is good. Just be sure to read through the whole recipe before you begin as there are a few steps—like melting the chocolate and softening the butter—that need to be taken care of first.

for the base batter:
2 and 2/3 cup all-purpose flour
1 and 2/3 cup granulated sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 sticks butter, softened
7 eggs
3 tablespoons dark rum (I used Gosling's Bermuda Black Rum)

for the chocolate batter:
2 tablespoons dark rum
2 tablespoons milk
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
6 ounces bittersweet chocolate, melted and cooled
2 cups base batter (see above)

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Grease a Bundt pan and coat it with flour or very fine, dry bread crumbs. Whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt in a large bowl. Add the butter and beat for a minute or two, until the batter forms a thick, heavy paste.

Whisk the eggs and rum together in a small bowl. Add this mixture to the butter and flour mixture in thirds, beating well and scraping down the sides of the bowl with a spatula after each addition. Use the spatula to give the batter a final mix.

In another bowl, combine the rum, milk and baking soda and whisk well. Add the chocolate and whisk well again. Add 2 cups of the base batter to the chocolate mixture and mix with the spatula until smooth and well-combined.

Spoon half of the remaining base batter into the prepared pan. Use a small spatula to smooth out the top of the batter, taking care to make sure it is very even on top. Spoon the chocolate batter in over top; and again use the spatula to smooth the top of the batter. Finally, spoon the remaining base batter over the chocolate batter. Don't worry about smoothing this top layer out; it will even as it bakes and you risk mottling the marbling underneath.

Bake for 45-55 minutes, or until a cake tester comes out clean. As the cake rises, you may be able to see some chocolate through the lighter base batter—this is fine. Serve at room temperature, plain—or with vanilla ice cream and a little pour of rum.

The Local Food Report: Gray's Grist

Thornton Simmons sometimes loses his r's. They roll into words like flavor and over the way the water on his mill pond skims down the turbine wheels, round and down. Simmons is a New Englander through and through: he claims ancestors working as millers in the Little Compton area as far back as 1621. He says the work comes naturally to him—that he has cornmeal in his blood.

Simmons is the miller at Gray's Grist Mill—a small, stone-grinding operation with a property boundary so old it was cut in half when Massachusetts ceded the area to Rhode Island in 1747. The mill pond lies mainly in Adamsville, Rhode Island, while across the street, the mill house stands firmly on Westport ground. It's been turning out cornmeal for over three hundred years.

As for the corn, it's Narragansett white flint corn Simmons grinds. The handful of farmers who still grow it say it's a testy strain—two ears to a stalk, eight rows on a cob, hard and dense and slow to dry. But something about the climate, the soil, and the ancient granite stone Simmons uses to grind it down makes it worth it. You used to be able to mortgage your house on this cornmeal, Simmons likes to say.


Over the years, the mill has been powered by all sorts of things: water, a dodge truck motor, a tractor with a power belt, electricity. Maybe, if Simmons gets his way, the mill will be able to go back to water again. The trouble with property straddling two states is that it can make digging out an old mill pond awfully hard: there are two Conservation Commissions, two sets of regulations, two bodies of law to contend with. Simmons has to get it done, though—even with a deep pond, the water build-up will only ever be enough to run the mill for four hours before it needs to rest, fill up again.

The mill is one of the oldest continuous grist mills in the country. The water runs under the mill house, from a man made pond dammed from the west branch of the Westport River, running down from Tiverton. Simmons says there used to be a lot of dam wars—someone upriver hoarding water, the miller downstream with a dry, slack pond. When the water did come, it ran the turbines that turned the stone. Dried, shucked corn went down through the hopper into a feed shoot called the shoe. A stick straddling the stone called a damsel hit the shoe and knocked the corn into the eye of the stone—you need speed in the feed, as Simmons says. Once a year or so the 56-inch diameter granite stone needs to be dressed—roughed up to keep it sharp. Granite is best for cornmeal, french burr for wheat and rye.

However it's ground, Simmons has no doubt about how to eat cornmeal: jonnycakes. These thin, lacy cornmeal pancakes are the ones Rhode Islanders and people from southeastern Massachusetts have been padding with butter and a little drizzle of maple syrup for years. They're simple food, but hearty—honest in a way that makes you taste the corn, the water, the land.

They're easy—just cornmeal, water, and milk—and you fry them in a hot, black iron skillet. The batter sort of dances when it hits the pan, quivering out, flattening into a thin disk with tiny eyelets all around the edge. To get any satisfaction you need a stack—five, six, seven thin cakes with crispy edges and a swath of butter and hot maple syrup running down. Simmons says he likes to serve his with cranberries, so the other morning, I made up a batch with a side of thinly sliced pears and cranberries, sauteed until soft with butter and a little bit of cinnamon. The combination was just right—sweet maple cutting tart berries, soft pears atop crisp corn. I guess that's no surprise; it's simply what you get with four hundred years of cornmeal passed on down the line.

NARRAGANSETT JONNYCAKES

This recipe is for thin jonnycakes—if you like the thick kind, head on over here. An important note about stone-ground cornmeal: keep it in the freezer or refrigerator. Because the stone-grinding process doesn't grind out the corn kernel's germ, or nutrient packed embryo, left out the cornmeal will spoil quickly.

2 cups stone ground cornmeal
a generous pinch of salt
3/4 cup cold water
1 and 1/2 cups milk
oil for frying

Whisk together the cornmeal and salt in a medium size mixing bowl. Pour in the water and stir until the mixture is smooth. Stir in the milk, adding a bit more if needed to make a thin, pourable batter.

Warm up a griddle or cast iron skillet over medium-high heat. Spoon a tablespoon or so of oil into the pan, and let it get hot. Then, taking care to stir the batter (the cornmeal quickly settles), spoon out about two tablespoons of batter onto the pan for each cake. They should thin out and dance as they hit the pan, forming a thin disk.

Cook for several minutes, or until golden brown and lacy on the bottom side, then flip. They won't need so long on the second side—only a minute or so. Serve hot, with butter, maple syrup, and if you like, sauteed apples or pears with cranberries.

The Local Food Report: on inheriting a dream

What if, instead of having a dream, a dream had you? What if it grabbed you one day, picked you up on the street, took you by the horns, and told you what you were going to do every day for the rest of your life? Would you hop on board, or would you run?

I recognize that I sound like I'm writing song lyrics for Selena (Dreaming of You, anyone?), but that's the sort of story I want to tell you today. I met this woman, Myrna Cook, at the Falmouth Farmer's Market a month or so ago, a few weeks before we left. I didn't have time to tell you about her then, but she's the kind of woman you can't forget. She's quiet and sweet and a little bit private, too, and eight years ago, she and her husband bought a house. Or, they thought they bought just a house. Turns out, it came with a dream.

It was an abandoned house—somewhere in Barnstable—and just a little bit ramshackle after two years of empty rooms and an overgrown lawn. People told them they were crazy to buy it, that it needed more love than two people could possibly give, but they went in anyway. There were fruit trees here and there and it was in a nice, quiet neighborhood, and at any rate, it would be a fun project to have a fixer-upper, to do some renovations as time went on. They learned that a Ukranian woman and her husband had owned it before them, and that she had passed away young and unexpectedly before he sold. Then one day, when they were ripping through the attic in the midst of a project, they found a plan.

It was an orchard plan—a plan to have a business selling and putting up fruit. They realized that there were 48 trees and not just a few, and that the storage shed out back was for keeping pears and apples to overwinter in. They uncovered other traces—a stainless steel work table, more and more varieties of apples, peaches, plums, and pears. Myrna decided that if the woman who'd planted the trees hadn't had time to live out her dream, then she would have to live it out for her.

She started by collecting fruit samples from every tree. She sent them to the UMass Extension program, and they sent her back a 30-page color report on what kind of trees she had inherited, and how to keep them alive. She bought books on horticulture and fruit growing and combed the internet for workshop dates. She even enlisted the help of Spooner Ornamental Care, a plant health care provider in Hatchville, and hired a landscaper to help with pruning and year round maintenance. Of the 48 original trees, 30 survived, and this year, for the first time, Myrna had fruit healthy enough to sell.

When I asked Myrna if the dream had somehow, along the way, become her own, she hesitated. It wasn't really her dream, she said, but she had learned to love it over time. It was a labor of love in the most immediate sense—in the sense that fruit farming means sore knees and heavy lifting and probably a flare up of carpal tunnel syndrome here and there. Fruit wants to be picked when it wants to be picked—and to inherit this sort of dream, there isn't any way around the nitty-gritty of that.

This time of year, Myrna's wrapping things up—selling the last of her hardy apples and pears, and getting the orchard ready for a cold, hard winter—making sure not too many branches and buds tumble to the ground. She's ready for a break, ready for pie-baking and apple butter and the hubbub of the holidays, ready, for a few months at least, to lay the dream down. But underneath that readiness, she's incredibly proud. She's proud that she's been able to rehab the trees, proud and amazed to have fruit shiny and sweet enough that people actually want to buy it. She can hardly believe that this dream has taken off so well in her hands.

The phrase that's stuck with me the most, though, is something she told me after we first talked, something she murmured over the wires of the phone. I asked her why she did it—why she was so open to living this woman's dream out, this woman who she'd never even met. She thought for a second.

It was like picking a message up off the street, she said. Suddenly, my whole direction changed.

One day, I hope to be as open to life as that. In the meantime, I think I'll settle to being open to cake—to cake even the second time it's baked, even after the first try went so terribly wrong.

Like Myrna's fruit, some things just need a chance—the chance to be given a second time around.

MELTING BUTTERMILK-PEAR CAKE

This cake is adapted from a recipe I found in September in Bon Appétit. I didn't mean for it to be an adaptation, really, but the first time I baked the cake I didn't read the directions all the way through before I made it. Also, I didn't have any parchment paper.

This, unsurprisingly, lead to the discoveries that a) there was a reason the ingredients for the pear compote came first, namely, that the compote was supposed to be ready when the cake was only half baked, and that b) because I had not lined the pan with parchment paper, even if the pear compote had been ready, the cake still never would have ended up intact upside-down on top of it as it was supposed to.

Luckily, as you know, Fisher ate the first cake, but the second time around, I decided to go without parchment paper again and keep the pears on top. The end result was not exactly what I'd imagined on the beach the day I was paging through the magazine—but somehow, for today, it seemed right.

Pear Compote:
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves
1 pound firm but ripe Bosc pears, peeled, halved, cored, and sliced thin

Combine the sugar, water, lemon juice, and thyme in a small, heavy bottomed saucepan. Bring the mixture to a boil, stirring until the sugar is dissolved. Turn the heat down to medium, add the pears, and simmer until the fruit is tender but still intact, roughly 10 minutes. Transfer the pears from the saucepan to a cookie sheet using a slotted spoon. Continue cooking the remaining liquid for about five minutes, until it thickens into a syrup.

Buttermilk Cake:
1 heaping cup all-purpose flour
1 and 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 stick butter
1 large egg
1 large egg yolk
1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons buttermilk
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. In a medium size mixing bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt. In a large mixing bowl, cream the sugar and butter and beat in the egg and then the egg yolk. Add the vanilla to the buttermilk, and then add the wet ingredients and the dry ingredients alternately to the egg mixture until everything is just mixed.

Spoon the batter into a buttered and floured 8-inch round cake pan with at least 2-inch high sides. Bake the cake for about 35 minutes, or until the top is just set. Leaving the oven on, take the cake out. Arrange the pear slices over the top of the cake in a circular pattern (or really, whatever pattern you like), and pour the syrup evenly over the top of the whole cake. Return the cake to the oven and bake it for another 10 minutes or so, or until the edges are just golden brown. Let it cool for several hours before serving it, maybe with some buttermilk ice cream, at room temperature.

butter:
Kate's, from Maine
buttermilk:
Garelick Farms, purchased before we got our milk, which has finally—hooray!—returned
eggs, pears:
the December 6th Provincetown farmers' market
thyme:
our garden

P.S. The UMass Amherst website has a ton of information on growing fruit, in case you're interested. There's so much there, in fact, that if you're just trying to get a feel for whether or not you're up for planting an orchard, it's hard to even know where to start. This page, put together by Fedco Seeds in Maine, has a little bit more broad information. (Scroll down to where it says "Choosing a Site For Fruit Trees and Berries.")

The Local Food Report: Fromage à Trois

Well. Do I have a top-notch surprise for you today, or what? All I can say is, it's lucky Lisa Raffael is so good at baking cakes. Because if she weren't an A-list cake baker, she wouldn't have been featured in places like Bride and the Improper Bostonian and Weddings. And if she hadn't gotten all that good press, she might not have been able to afford such a nice, big, cool refrigerator, which means that Kathleen Kadlik, who shares her workspace, might never have been able to start making cheese.

If Kathleen Kadlik had never been able to start Fromage à Trois, then I wouldn't have been able to make you these gorgonzola-dolce-burata stuffed pears wrapped in flaky pie crust, which believe-you-me would have been a sorry, sorry thing. If I weren't so heart-set on my red velvet cupcakes, I'd cancel my beet order and hire Lisa to bake my wedding cake as a thank you right now. Because excuse my French people, but these gorgonzola pears are damn good. Yes siree Bob, they are.

I probably also ought to go right back to the beginning and thank Michelle, who posted a comment back in August about finding Fromage à Trois at the Falmouth Farmers' Market and about how delightfully enchanted she was. Michelle, I'm sorry it took me so long, but I swear, if you say go, I will never hesitate again.

I actually met Kathleen accidentally at the Sandwich Farmers' Market. She usually sells her cheese there, but on this particular Tuesday she'd been unable to get her milk order in time, and so she was wandering around deciding between peaches and raspberries instead. Someone, I think Lori the lobster lady, had the good sense to introduce us and we set up a date for Saturday at the Provincetown Farmers' Market the next week. I went to see her on a sunny September afternoon, and we talked about life and love and the ubiquitous Vermont Cheese Making Dream and how she'd taken a different route instead and ended up sharing a kitchen with Lisa until my very polite friend had to tap me on the shoulder and remind me that she had been waiting for me, staring at the arugula, for a solid forty-five minutes.

And that sort of carrying on was before I had even tasted the cheese, let alone put the pears in the oven.

At any rate, after much hemming and hawing over whether or not to get mozzarella or string cheese or ricotta or burata and a few more patient nudges from my friend, I ended up bringing home a little tissue paper wrapped bag of the burata stuffed with gorgonzola dolce to try. (I think Kathleen calls it "Blue Bell," but I can't quite remember.) I tried it on salad, and then over hot pasta, and finally, at Kathleen's recommendation, I ate it in little slivers with a balsamic drizzle and chunks of soft, fresh pear. Right about then is when the stroke of genius hit.

What if the cheese was hot and gooey and inside the pear?

In my head, there were all sorts of symbols crashing and violins crescendoing and the room I think even swayed a little bit, and then I got to work. I rolled out a piece of extra pie crust I had in the fridge. I got out my little leaf cookie cutters and a knife and I cored the pears from the bottom almost to the top, leaving the stems. I cut the burata into small, stuffable chunks, cut the pie crust in half, and turned the pears on their sides. I cranked the oven up to 350, put Aretha Franklin on, and stuffed those pears full. I swaddled them in pie crust, smoothed the wrapping so it fit like a glove, and stuck a few cookie cutter pear leaves around the top. Then I danced around the kitchen for 20 long, ecstatic minutes, waiting for the timer to ding.

And when it did—when the buzzer went off—those pears didn't last 5 minutes around me. There was only one of me, and two of them, so you'd think they might have been able to put up a fight, but as soon as I cut them open and the crust flaked off and the burata-gorgonzola river began to stream across the plate, they didn't stand a chance. In Hungry Woman vs. Pear, I won handily.

Before another week goes by, I recommend you do the same. I don't want to hear any excuses about how you missed the market or oooh Falmouth is such a drive or some nonsense about not getting your oven buzzer to work, because there isn't much time to waste. The markets are shutting down, one by one, and for the time being, they're the only place Kathleen sells. So get out your umbrella and your wool socks and your baseball cap, and with any luck, I'll see you there.

BLUE BELL PEARS, in a pastry crust

This recipe was inspired by a number of things. First of all, there's a recipe in one of my French cookbooks for pears wrapped in pastry with a brown sugar-almond stuffing where the picture shows the fruits with their stems. I did a riff on that last week with a macadamia nut-maple syrup stuffing, and I kind of got hooked on baked pears. Secondly, I have been begging my mother for a set of those tiny leaf cookie cutters like the ones they're always making elaborate pumpkin pies with in the Williams Sonoma catalog for ages, and she found me a superb knock-off set that I was itching to put to use. And of course, lastly, there is absolutely nothing better than gorgonzola dolce burata, pie crust, and a fall pear.

4 medium-size pears
4 ounces "Blue Bell" cheese (burata stuffed with gorgonzola dolce)
one batch pie crust (enough for a top and bottom)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Core the pears from the bottom up, taking care to leave the stems attached. Roll out the piecrust in a square and cut it into four equal-sized sections. Place a pear in the center of one of the piecrust sections and stuff one ounce of the cheese into the empty core. Pull the piecrust up around the pear, smoothing out any wrinkles by pressing them with your fingers against the fruit. Pinch off any extra dough at the top and set it aside. Repeat this process with the three other pears.

When all the pears are completely covered with crust, roll out the remaining pinched-off dough and cut it into small leaf-shaped pieces either with a knife or using tiny cookie cutters. Arrange two or three of these "leaves" around the stem of each pear and press them against the piecrust beneath. Place the pears upright in an un-greased casserole dish and bake for roughly 20 minutes, or until the crust is golden and the fruit is soft. Enjoy hot.

To make a meal of them, serve the pears alongside a bed of mixed greens dressed with a sweet balsamic.