Walking the Berkshires

Aebleskiver

My old friend Janet filled me in on a Danish secret; "flat as a pancake" does not apply to Aebleskiver.  She has an impressive collection of cast iron cookware, and among them is an aebleskiver pan, essential for making golden, round pancake spheres filled with jam or fruit and traditionally served as a winter dessert.  We are great fans of pancakes in our house, and Sunday breakfast often features griddle cakes. Now they vie for our affection with Aebleskiver.

My ancestry is decidedly WASP of the British Isles persuasion, and though my Great-grandmother Ottilie Hubschmidt added a strong Germanic strain, she left us no legacy of spherical pancakes.  The Danes lay claim to Aebleskiver, which takes its name from the sliced apples commonly used as filling the apple shape of the pancake.  The Dutch, no slouches themselves when it comes to pancakes, call their version "Poffertjes".  I suspect the origin of round pancakes predates the invention of the Aebleskiver pan, for when we lived in southern Africa it was hard to resist larding ourselves with Afrikaner vetkoek: dough deep fried in oil. 

Aebleskiver are lighter, not too tart or sweet, but these are certainly not the sort of food one can gobble to one's heart's content without giving a thought to long term cardiovascular health.  So don't eat them every Sunday, but by all means do treat yourself to an Aebleskiver pan and expand your pancake horizons. 

The Aebleskiver pan, dimpled with seven 3-inch wells, eliminates the full immersion grease bath and allows for filling to be added. Ours is a small version and was quite inexpensive.  If it turns out you start making Aebleskiver frequently, I would opt for a larger, high sided version which will spare you some of the radiant heat from the burner.

The technique of making Aebleskiver is unusual and ingenious.  The batter and filling lend themselves to variation.   As a non-Danish practitioner of the art of the round pancake, I use a basic buttermilk pancake recipe modified as follows:

1/2 cup all purpose whole wheat flour

1/2 cup pastry flour

3/4 tsp baking powder

3/4 tsp baking soda

3 Tbsp melted butter

2 eggs (room temp)

1 1/2 cups buttermilk (room temp)

I combine the wet and dry ingredients in a lumpy batter and grease the skillet.  A dab of butter in each well gives them a golden finish and helps prevent sticking.  I pour the batter into each well about 3/4 full and let it bubble and rise.  At this point, I reach for that indispensable kitchen utensil which no Aebleskiver chef should be without; I mean, of course, a wooden chopstick. 

Yes, to make Aebleskiver requires rotating the underside of the pancake by 90°, and while others may be able to do this with a spatula, Janet convinced me that the end of a chopstick is ideal for loosening the edges and pushing down through the uncooked mixture to the crisper side and tilting it forward until the pancake stands on edge.  The batter will slide over and start to cook, and this is the moment to add a dab of filling.  I chose homemake apple butter yesterday, but also did a few plain ones and others filled with blueberries.  Once more I used my chopstick to turn each pancake over on itself and now they assumed their luscious rounded form.

Then it was out of the pan and on to the plate, with a dusting of powdered sugar above and a pool of amber maple syrup beneath.  My recipe makes approximately 30 Aebleskiver, and there were no leftovers.  We may one day experiment with a more savory batter and a meat or vegetable filling, but for use there is no finer treat on a cold winter morning than pancake balls and bacon.

Comfort Food Writing

There is a hint of snow on the wind on a gray morning that promises nary a glimpse of pale sunlight before nightfall.  By February I will be royally sick of the dark and spiritually starved for light, but these first true days of winter are welcome, especially as we enter December and its homecomings and celebrations. 

We add layers and lay down extra fat in cold weather, and the foods I crave usually are preceded by the adjective "hearty".  Just as poring over garden catalogs helps to bridge the gap between winter and spring, great food writing is one of the anticipatory thrills of the long dark season. 

So when I read something so toothsome and exquisitely described as David Churbuck's post On Chowder, it is a find too precious to keep to myself.  Churbuck is a gifted storyteller, erudite yet down-to-earth, spinning a yarn with the precision of an awl through sailcloth.

"Another memorable sight was the appearance of the evil meat grinder, a seldom used tool which was used to grind the clams into chowder-sized pieces. The Cuisinart has condemned the meat grinder to history, but nostalgia demands that I declare clams that are ground up by hand and not whirred into a formless paste simply taste better.

A large Alzheimer’s-inducing aluminum pot, scavenged from some civil defense bomb shelter or army camp, was set on the stove. Into it went a pound of diced salt pork – fatback to be precise – a primal meat from the 19^th century, when whalers would pack away barrels of the stuff to provide protein and hasten the arrival of scurvy during long voyages at sea. Every time I go to the grocery store looking for fat back I half expect to see it missing, discontinued because Ishmael has passed away and isn’t shopping at Stop & Shop anymore."

Treat yourself to a helping of the whole thing.

I have a predisposition toward Churbuck's tastes with my Buzzards Bay roots, which is also what initially drew me to the South African food blog Cook sister! with my years in that part of the world. The name of the blog comes from the delicious syrup-soaked fritters indigenous to both Afrikaner and Cape Malay cuisines, and the author is now an ex-pat living in London, an absence that gives her descriptions of the recipes of home an extra piquancy.  Today I found an exquisite paen to a succulent dish - slow-roast lamb - and a beloved cookbook by Nigel Slater from which the recipe is adapted.

"When the weekend is cold and rainy and you have friends coming over for lunch, what can be more satisfying than a leg of lamb, rubbed with spices and left to cook long and slow, till the meat falls off the bones at the mere touch of a fork? Served on cunningly clever chickpea mash with paprika (recipe to follow in a future post) with honey glazed cumin carrots, it simply does not get better than this."

Read the whole thing.

Sissy Willis does Yankee comfort food writing as well or better than anyone, and this one for the Perfect Apple Pie makes me want to reevaluate my relationship with lard:

"Fannie [Farmer] notes that "old-fashioned cooks use their fingers and work very quickly so that the shortening does not soften." Our sis adds to the mix with her own flaky lore:

'You can't mix it with your hands, like a meatloaf. You have to get that ridiculous mixture into a recognizable ball, without touching it with human hands. HAND HEAT is the enemy of a flaky crust.

I use two dinner knives to cut, set at cross purposes, but, if you have a pastry blender doo-hickey, it would probably be awesome.'

Close-up of the chilled ball shows butter (golden yellow) and lard (pure white) bits maintaining their separate identities within the dough, the secret to sublime flakiness. Instead of forming a spherical ball, next time we will flatten the doughball -- as our sis does -- to allow easier breaking apart for upper and lower crust and a head start in rolling, as well as quicker chilling (and thawing if dough is to be frozen for later use)."

Fruitcake at Dum Luk's is nothing like the dreaded bricks of yore.

"...the essence of fruit cake is the glacé fruit. This is a lengthy process of preserving fruit by   replacing the moisture in fruit or peel with a sugar syrup. Traditionally this is strictly cane sugar and water transfused slowly over several days to preserve the texture of the original fruit. In US manufacture the process is sped by the admixture of corn syrup, dye, and the rest of the food chemist's bag of tricks. For more on the process see here. Dorothy's recipe calls for two pounds of glacéd fruit, plus a pound and a half, each, of currants and raisins. This, with a pound of coconut and a pound or two of nuts, is divided among eleven loaves and a modest round pudding basin.

It makes for wonderful seasonal gifts ... always assuming that you are the sort who likes mostly people with a fondness for fruit cake. If they blench on opening, you have encountered one of the majority with no stomach for the crittur. Curiously there is no middle ground. No one can "take it or leave it alone" like Mr Thurber's bear. Growing up with the stuff, I belong in the minority who have a notion of what is good. At least I do when it comes to fruit cake."

As one of the cook's many fans raves; "Anybody who puts whole Brazil nuts in fruit cake can't be all bad!"

Maybe you can resist the recipes that these talented cooks and bloggers provide, but I find their writing evocative and delicious (and calorie free!).

Leftovers

The best part about the Thanksgiving meal, as far as I am concerned, is the leftovers (this is why, however, we eschew having turkey again for Christmas).  Given that blogging and blog readership tend to lighten up during the holidays, and since there are enough virtual Tupperware dishes of leftover blog topics near to hand, why not take the opportunity to make a meal of them? 

Here's a tasty morsel sent my way by Bill West, a meme that asks me to open the latest book I am reading to page 161 and transcribe the 6th sentence.  Well, Bill, I'm deep in Christopher Hibbert's Redcoats and Rebels: The American Revolution Through British Eyes, and page 161 contains a quotation from British Lieutenant Martin Hunter, a participant in the Battle of Germantown.  Line six (by my reckoning the sixth full sentence) reads; "I think I never saw people enjoy a charge of grape before, but we really all felt pleased to see the enemy make such an appearance and to hear the grape rattle about the commander-in-chief's ears, after he had accused us of having run away from a scouting party."  Anyone of my readers who wishes to take up this meme yourself and pass it along to others is welcome to do so.

The ecology blog carnival Oekologie #11 was at 10,000 Birds back on November 15th, where readers will find a grand assortment of the best in Eco-blogging on display.  Likewise I highly recommend spending some time at the 6th edition of Beautiful Africa, celebrating the many ways that this continent and its highly diverse ecology and cultures represent more than just a sad litany of degradation, corruption, war and famine.  If you haven't already had the opportunity to sample the 1st edition of Cabinet of Curiosities, why not "drop in one evening for a mess of potage, our specialty, just aubergine and carnation petals, with a six-shilling bottle of Mule du Pape, a feast fit for a King?"  And if you would like to host one of the upcoming CofC editions, contact me with your preferred month and we'll hook you up.

The much anticipated 2007 Cliopatra Awards for the Best in History Blogging are now accepting nominations in a handful of categories through the end of this month with voting to begin in December.  If you have a favorite history blog writer, a great new history blog, superb blog post, series of posts, group blog or individual blog with an historical focus that you would like to nominate for this honor, you may do so here.   

Finally, I enjoyed one of the best pecan pies I have ever eaten over Thanksgiving.  I was the cook, but the recipe came from the November 21st Culinary Corner segment of north country public radio WAMC's Roundtable Program.  The secret is the rum.  In case you can't find the recipe in the WAMC archives, I offer it here in full:

November 21, 2007

Jasper Alexander of Hattie's Restaurant in Saratoga returns to tell Joe how to bake the perfect pecan pie.

Pecan Pie

Filling

• 1 cup brown sugar
• 2/3 cup light corn syrup
• 2 tablespoons dark rum
• ½ stick butter
• 3 large eggs lightly beaten
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• ¼ teaspoon salt
• 2 cups broken pecans
• ½ cup pecan halves

Crust

• 1 ½ cups flour
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 6 Tablespoons cold butter cut into small cubes
• 1 ½ Tablespoons vegetable shortening
• 3 teaspoons cold water

To make the crust:

1. Combine flour, sugar and salt in a food processor

2. Add butter & shortening in small pieces and pulse until it resembles course cornmeal

3. Slowly add cold water until the flour just begins to clump. (you will need to add less water than you think)

4. Stop the food processor and take some of the flour and squeeze it in your hand. If the flour stays together, you have enough water.

5. Turn the dough on to a floured work surface and kneed together. Careful not to over kneed.

6. Wrap dough in plastic and refrigerate for 1-2 hours
7. Roll out dough...

To make the filling:

1. Combine brown sugar, corn syrup, rum, salt, vanilla and butter in a non reactive sauce pot. Slowly bring all ingredients to a simmer, whisking frequently, making sure the sugar is dissolved with out reducing the mixture.

2. Remove sugar mixture from the heat and allow to cool for about 10 minutes.

3. Combine chopped nuts and Eggs

4. Pour into the pie shell and top with pecan halves.

5. Place in oven at 350 degrees for approximately 35-45 minutes or until the center of the pie no longer wiggles and the nuts and crust are a golden brown.

I guarantee that there will not be leftovers (at least not in my house).  Bon Appétit!

Crying in your Beer

Sarpy Sam sounds the alarm.  Forget about oil at $100/barrel; we face a critical crisis over the cost of beer.

"A serious shortage of hops, which are used to flavor beer, and an almost astronomical rise in the cost of malted barley, from which sugars and proteins are extracted to create alcohol and to give beer its body, have combined to strike the industry in the kneecaps. 'A ton of malted barley is over $1,000 now,' said Jürgen Knöller, brewmaster at Bayern Brewery in Missoula. 'Six months ago, a ton of barley was $460.'

The giant leap in malted barley prices is due, in large part, to several years of poor harvests, devastating droughts in barley-producing areas such as Australia, and to the fact that despite Montana being one of the best barley-growing regions in North America, barley is a commodity.

'It's a global thing', said Tim O'Leary, owner of Kettlehouse. 'It's not just the U.S. We're a global economy now, and malt barley is a commodity whether it's used for feed or brewing. If a farmer can make more growing sunflowers and making fuel oil, that's what they're going to do and not worry about beer drinkers.'" (The Billings Gazette)

Since the craft-brewing revolution of the 1980s, brewers of small-batch, highly diverse beer styles in America have enjoyed sustained growth (while sales have been relatively flat in recent years for the mega-brews).  If the cost of the primary ingredients goes through the roof, will these brewers be able to sell enough of their product to you and me at $12.00 or $14.00 a six-pack?  Will the heavy invisible hand of the market compel a return to a few, bland, mass-produced choices at the expense of zymur-diversity?  And is it time to plow under the corn field and start planting hops?  At $22 a pound - up from $4 eight months ago - that might be a wise investment.   

You Want Farms With That?

What you need to know first is that 20,000 years ago, the Litchfield Hills were beneath close to a mile of glacial ice.  It gouged and scraped the mountainsides and left smears of soil in oblong hills running northwest to southeast.  Glacial lakes filled the marble valleys in the northwest with layers of rich soil and banks of gravel along the shore.

These are the places with northwest Connecticut's prime and other important farmland soils today: about 25% of the total land area.  Everything else is rugged or wet and while undeniably beautiful, they a hard if not impossible places to plant a farm.

This maps shows in red the intersection of our prime and other important farmland soils with land that remote sensing identified in farm and field cover.  Data from the Litchfield Hills Greenprint, a partnership of the Trust for Public Land and Housatonic Valley Association, indicate that there are about 88,000 acres of farm and field cover left in these 27 towns, and less than 12,000 of these are permanently protected.  We probably have saved fewer farms than that, because some of that protected land is on state-owned property and not used for farming.  In any case, for something as locally valued and highly prized as farmland, conservation efforts to date are not getting the job done.

The map also shows the intersection of large parcels greater than 50 acres with farmland on good farm soils.  The parcels appear in tan and are transparent so you can see the farmland cover with farmland soils beneath.  Because some government farmland preservation programs require at least 25% farmland cover and all of them prioritize the farmland soils, the Litchfield Hills Greenprint only selected those properties with 25% or greater farmland soils and farmland cover.  These are not the only farms worth keeping in agricultural production or preventing from conversion to development, but they do suggest clusters of important farming areas that we need to retain if farming is to endure as more than a relic in the Litchfield Hills.

Some of them are protected.  On the larger map, those lands of any size where the state has purchased development rights to allow farming to continue appear in pink, while the protected lands shown in green may include a few land trust easements where farming is a reserved landowner right.  That leaves about 32,000 acres in unprotected parcels greater than 50 acres with good soils and active farming on at least 25% of the property.  It works out that the average for these parcels is 100 acres and 50% farm and field cover and prime or important farmland soils. 

How many of these farms can we allow to fail or convert to housing and still retain an agricultural base in the Litchfield Hills?  Depending on how one lumps or splits, there appear to be about 6-8 farmland clusters of significant size and quality left across the communities of the Litchfield Hills.  You can see for yourself on the above map where the bigger parcels tend to concentrate and how they relate to adjacent open space. 

A closer look at one of these farming communities - my town - brings matters into sharper focus.  Here the intersection of farm and field cover with prime or important farmland soils appears in olive shading.  Lands protected through Connecticut state agricultural preservation restrictions are still in pink and other protected open space remains green.  The protected area at the eastern edge of town consists of agriculturally friendly easements held by a neighboring land trust.  The larger unprotected parcels with at least 25% farm and field cover and prime or other important farmland soils are shown in transparent tan. 

Canaan Valley and East Canaan together have over 5,000 acres in farm and field cover out of less than 13,000 acres in the entire town.  There are 3,500 acres of prime or other important farmland soils in town.  We also have substantial sand and gravel deposits as well as marble quarries, and 5.5% of the town is in mining.  There are a number of dairy farms clustered in the Blackberry River valley along Rte 44 and all but one is without permanent agricultural preservation.  These farmers depend on additional land which they lease and which perhaps is even more important to save for agricultural use than the land the farmers own.

I believe that collectively across the Litchfield Hills, there are half a dozen places like this where we need to conserve and ensure that farming remains viable on more than 1,000 acres every year until 2020.  That's 12,000 acres, or double what we have saved to date.  At the rate we are losing farmland across the State - a couple of dairy farms every month with just 150 remaining - we can afford no less.

When Push Comes to Shove, It's Not About The Doughnut.

It's a lot of hard time to face over a doughnut, even a really good one. In Farmington, Missouri, " Country Mart's doughnuts are made up and fried fresh daily in the store, they retail for 52 cents each."  Allegedly pushing away a female store clerk while stuffing one of these pastries in his sweatshirt, Scott A. Masters (41) upped the ante from a misdemeanor shoplifting charge to felony 2nd degree robbery which carries a 5-15 year penalty.  Masters has an extensive prior record, however, which means his sentence could be doubled to 10-30 years, and prosecutors want to throw the book at him.

"Speaking from jail, he told the St Louis Post-Dispatch: 'Strong-arm robbery? Over a doughnut? That's impossible. There's no way I would've pushed a woman over a doughnut.'

To make matters worse, Mr Masters said he did not even get the chance to savor the snack - he threw it away as he fled the scene."

According to the Post Dispatch:

"It was about 11 a.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 6. The store was in a lull. Gibbs, who could see the doughnut case from her station, said she saw Masters slip the doughnut into the pocket of his hooded sweatshirt.

She turned to a co-worker and said, 'I saw him take a doughnut. Let's see if he pays for it.'

They watched Masters as he strolled past the seven green checkout lanes and out a side door between the customer service desk and the pharmacy, passing under a giant 'Country Mart Thanks You' sign.

Gibbs' co-worker followed Masters into the parking lot. The co-worker, a 54-year-old woman, demanded that Masters come inside, according to the police report. He offered to give the doughnut back. She declined and grabbed his arm.

That is when Masters allegedly delivered 'a backhanded punch to the chest' and took off running, police said.

'That made her mad,' Gibbs recalled.

The woman, who was uninjured, jumped in her car and called police as she chased Masters. He was arrested minutes later."

Imagine the humiliation of having to explain to your cellmates that you got put away for 30 years because you had to have a honey dipped and ended up not getting any.  I'd imagine being the "Cream Pie Kid" or the "Munchkin Bandit" wouldn't really strike the proper tone in maximum security.  At least it wasn't a package of beef jerky.

Food Blogging

If your house is anything like mine, there are as many cookbooks in your library as there are from about any other genre.  Some of these are there as much for reading pleasure as for any assistance they might offer at the stove, and I am especially drawn to those that evoke a sense of place and the place of food within a continuum of family and society.  Regional cuisines feature prominently, and while I may never need to crack the spine of the lavishly illustrated book on Cape Malay cooking I picked up in southern Africa, it would take no time at all to travel to the place in my mind's eye should I chose to do so.  For the same reason I cannot bear to part with my copy of Lorna Sass' "Dinner with Tom Jones: Eighteenth-Century Cookery Adapted for the Modern Kitchen, even though the only recipe from it I have attempted - "A Flounder Pie, Savoury", left me a bit cold. 

No matter; I am instantly transported to "another time's forgotten space" by great food writing and it is a joy to find worthy examples in the blogs I read.  David Churbuck wrote a superb piece today, one of his occasional clamming features entitled Consider the Fried Clam that managed to hit every one of my gustatory, nostalgic, and New England heritage buttons.

"The steamer is so dubbed for the popular method of cooking them in a pot with an inch of water. The clam is thus rendered edible, and after the diner pulls the clam from its shell, skins the siphon or neck from its leathery (insert tasteless reference to prophylactics here), the clam is dunked in a cup of warm grey clam broth (derived from the steaming water), then molten butter before being dropped, Roman-grape style, into one’s open mouth. The steamer is staple fare in ye Olde New England Clam Bake, where it accompanies lobsters, ears of corn and spicy Portuguese sausage in what has to be the single best contribution to the global cuisine that Cape Cod has ever made.

If you don’t steam the soft-shelled clam, then there aren’t a lot of options available to the intrepid diner. Unlike their hard-shelled friends the quahog or oyster, M. Arenaria cannot be eaten raw on the half-shell. The shell is too fragile, the clam is too ….disorganized, and aside from assorted fish and sea gulls, few creatures would go out of their way to eat a raw steamer.

This all changed in the summer of 1916 in the coastal town of Ipswich, north of Boston, when 'Chubby' Woodman decided to batter some local steamers and deep fry them at his seafood restaurant."

This is stirring stuff, especially for one who craved fried clams above all summer pleasures as a boy.  Go read the whole thing.

There must be something in the (unseasonably sultry) New England air this week, but Sissy Willis does for "Chelsea Baked Beans" what Churbuck did for clams.  Sissy is losing weight while cooking with non-hydrogenated lard and dishing out toothsome, classic fare that may well elevate lowly "franks and beans" to ambrosia status.

Lard returns to the classic Boston Baked Bean Pot, Chelsea style.  Above baking in a 300° oven this morning, hour two of six.  You can't beat the old-fashioned New England look of our brown-and tan pot--purchased years ago from L.L. Bean's to replace our previous one, whose top had slipped the surly bonds of our mitted hands and gone crashing to the floor.  Both the handles and the knob on top of the lid are too small.  Today's bean pots are a definite improvement in that department.  On the other hand, there is something that doesn't like a bean pot whose handles are too easy to grasp.

So, my friends, what food blogging gets your juices flowing?  Any specific posts you would recommend that make your taste buds tingle and transport you by their fine writing and sense of time and place?  Pass them on!

Attack of the Killer Chillies

Noxious smoke from 9 pounds of burning chilies at a Thai restaurant prompted fears of a chemical attack in London, the BBC reports:

"Police closed off three roads and evacuated homes following the alert.

Specialist crews broke down the door to the Thai Cottage restaurant at 1900 BST on Monday where they discovered the source - a 9lb pot of chillies.

The restaurant had been preparing Nam Prik Pao, a red-hot Thai dip which uses extra-hot chillies which are deliberately burnt.

But the smell prompted several members of the public to call the emergency services."

You won't find the recipe for the offending dish in the Anarchist Cookbook, so the BBC thoughtfully provides one for its on-line readers.  Just don't whip up a batch without alerting the Bobbies first.

Go Figure, Then Figure It Out

Satellite data suggest there are fewer than 88,000 acres with farm and field cover across 27 towns in Northwest Connecticut.  Some of these are undoubtedly neither farms nor land in agricultural production.  The Litchfield Hills Greenprint has shown that no more than 11,400 of these acres occur on permanently protected land, or 13% of the total.  Some of this protected land is not protected for farming.

The same 27 town area has 150,000 of state designated prime or additional important farmland soils, and 20,000 of these are on permanently conserved land, though not always available for farming.  Again, that is hardly better than the percentage of farm and field cover in protected status (13.3%).

There is a statewide goal of 80,000 acres of farmland, permanently protected, and we are 50,000 acres short.  we lose 1-2 of our dairy farms across Connecticut every month and at this rate will have none left that are not protected in less than 35 years.  Litchfield County and Sherman in Fairfield County together have the highest amount of farmland acres in the state and should provide a large percentage of the protected farmland needed to meet this goal.

There are 357 parcels of land in this region greater than 50 acres with at least 25% farm and field cover and 25% or greater prime or additional important farmland soils.  This adds up to 32,000 acres, averaging about 100 acres in size and with an average of 50% farm and field and farmland soils.  These farms are clustered in six or eight areas that might have a shot at retaining their character as farm communities and provide the nucleus of a farmland viability effort to keep agriculture part of this landscape.  How many of them can we afford to lose before farming becomes not merely imperiled but extirpated in Northwest Connecticut?  What will it take to maintain farming as a vital part of our communities and forestall reaping the final farm product: subdivisions?

I believe we need to retain at least 70-75% of the largest, high quality farmland parcels (say 12,000 acres) and another 4,000 acres of farmland that these farmers rent or that are smaller parcels but part of  farmland clusters.  I believe we have a dozen years in which to achieve this rate of conservation and increased farmland viability.  That's 1,250 farmland acres, every year, kept from the auction block and real estate pages, until 2020.  Some of these farms will only be permanently protected if a portion of them gets developed.  Some will only survive if the lands they lease are conserved. We need large animal vets and meat processing capacity and new markets for new farm products and affordable land for those who want to farm and beside that it means doubling or tripling the rate at which we conserve farmland.  That will take new and expanded resources and partnerships to achieve and the will by those who support farmland preservation to make this a priority.

I believe we need to give the same degree of thought and analysis and develop the same regional conservation metrics for forest land and fresh water resources.  We need to figure out how we are going to reach minimum viability for conserving these significant assets while also sustaining healthy rural communities, addressing the economic challenges that contribute to the outmigration of young people and working families, and managing the change that is affecting each and every one of the communities of this special region.

That's my day job.  Tonight, I'll be talking along these lines at an open space and development forum in Sharon, CT.  If we make any headway, I'll let you know.

Hedgehogs and Haggis: Eating Locally in Ancient Albion

During my years in southern Africa, I encountered one or two bona fide delicacies in the traditional foods enjoyed by local people, but there's no getting around the fact that boiled goat offal tastes like the inside of a goat.  I did my best to be polite but just couldn't tuck in to the enormous, eviscerated frog that appeared on my plate one evening, nor crunch the tiny birds knocked from the mopani trees by barefoot boys with slingshots for my dining pleasure. 

Eating locally means eating whatever is available, and for every neolithic hunter/forager who made the fortuitous discovery that something as bizarre as a lobster was not only edible but delicious, there must have been hundreds of discoveries of other things whose main virtues were that they were near to hand and did not result in excruciating pain or death when consumed.  After generations of subsistence on such stuff, people not only grew accustomed to what outsiders might deem noisome fare but even preferred it over unfamiliar tastes and cuisines.  For a modern example of this phenomenon, see the many decades of American preference for a single, insipid style of beer prior to the craft brewing revolution of the mid-1980s.

So I am not surprised to learn that the just announced 10 oldest British recipes include such concoctions as Nettle Pudding, Roast Hedgehog and a proto-haggis featuring sheep stomach, heart and lungs.  Ancient cooks probably didn't have access to mace, nutmeg, and black pepper as called for in the haggis recipe, but I rather doubt whatever herbage was available could counter the overwhelming smell. Sheep offal is not that different from goat, after all.

Xanthe Clay, intrepid food writer for the Daily Telegraph, attempted some of these 8,000 year old recipes, with decidedly indifferent results:

"'I am not eating this,' muttered my husband as he donned gloves to gather a bouquet of nettles, while I picked the dandelions growing round a tree stump, hoping I'd got there before the dogs.

Back home, the reek from the sheep's stomach was overwhelming, not so much farmyard as farmyard floor. I put it outside, and concentrated on the nettle pudding and "smokey stew", a sort of fish chowder.

The nettles needed a good wash, although in a salad spinner rather than a running stream.

Chopped into a green mound, they looked quite appetising, and the barley flour coated them lightly.

Tying the pudding mix in a cloth took seconds and it looked very homely bobbing next to the pork and pot herbs in the pan.

The fish, meanwhile, simmered in milk with leeks and bacon, then doused liberally with cream and chives, was rich and filling, and a huge hit with the family.

It would have been nice with crusty bread, but there was little high-gluten wheat in BC-Britain so the oat and barley bread (more of a scone) in Jacqui Wood's Prehistoric Cooking (Tempus, £15.99) did the job.

The nettle pudding was a neat, moist dumpling, but rather bitter to eat, probably because of those over-mature dandelions.

I'm sure a Bronze Age Mrs Beeton wouldn't have made that mistake.

As for the sheep's stomach, frankly if that's what those cavemen were stuck with, I'm not surprised that they didn't make it over 30."

I am not surprised either.  But then, I'm not a tartaned Scot or a rural Namibian with plenty of sheep or goat offal ready for the pot.  Bring on the Patina of Elderberries!

Ingredients:

6 bunches of elderberries

tsp pepper

1 tsp anchovy essence

4 fl oz (125ml) wine

4 fl oz (125ml) passum

4 fl oz (125ml) olive oil

6 eggs

Method:

Remove the fruits from the elderberry bunches. Wash, place in a saucepan with a little water, and simmer gently until just softened. Drain and arrange in a greased shallow pan. Add the pepper, moisten with anchovy essence, then add the wine and passum and mix well. Finally add the olive oil and bring to the boil. When the mixture is boiling, break the eggs into it and stir well to bind. When set, sprinkle pepper over it and serve hot or cold. If you are unsure of any of the plants in these recipes please check before picking in the wild and eating.

Given in Roman Cookery by Jane Renfrew (English Heritage, 1985)

Hat Tips: Revise and Consent and Ralph Luker