Last night, I made pasta for dinner. I boiled some frilly little campanelle until it was on the too-hard side of al dente, set it and a good amount of the cooking water aside, and then sautéed a lot of garlic and a handful of halved little tomatoes in olive oil until everything went slack and aromatic. After dumping the pasta and water back into the pan it only took a quick boil for everything to come together all nice and saucy. Finished with butter and Parmesan cheese, it was a delicious, quick meal — that is, depending on how you count the time that went into making it.
The garlic was planted well over a year ago, and the tomatoes — an Italian variety called Grappoli d’Inverno, or clusters of/for winter— were started from seed on the top of my radiator back in the early spring. Picked in October, they’re almost magically still fresh. Not all of the ingredients were homegrown (unfortunately, something about dropping a bunch of my own garlic into a pot of imported olive oil hurts my brain), but the most expressive parts were. Over the past few years, this has become my ideal kind of cooking: meals that are easy to prepare, where most of the lengthy work of developing flavor is done in the garden.
It’s an approach not just to eating but to life, really, that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and working on, and one that I want to write a book about. So I’m going to pivot this newsletter a bit in the hopes of doing just that: sending out stories with actual frequency in an effort to write a book proposal in real time. (Is that a good idea, vis-a-vis the publishing industry? I have no idea!) I no longer have a garden — we sold the house in Maine, a painful but ultimately unavoidable development for everyone who lived there — but I do have a Brooklyn apartment full of more tomatoes and garlic, as well as potatoes, squash, beans, Korean radishes, sauerkraut, and more that came from my last growing season on Gurney Hill. So my promise to you is this: an essay about each of those crops, from seed to table, along with a recipe (or at least a gesture toward one), all in search of a crystalline definition of what I call the Storage Kitchen philosophy, which will be the backbone of the book. Currently, I don’t have a full-time job, and while I’m not going to do any subscriber-only stories right now, if you enjoy this kind of stuff and want to Support My Work, I’m going to turn paid subscriptions back on, and would highly appreciate anyone who wants to throw me a few bucks a month. (Some other possible newsletter subjects: a plant-centric holiday gift guide, my Pantrycore manifesto, growing dye plants, seed shopping list — even have some ASMR-y clips of garlic harvesting and processing that I might share.)
For me, this approach to cooking is 100 percent rooted in having a garden (which I no longer have…). But it can inform the way you shop for food too — and reading this newsletter and eventual book will hopefully have you searching out a fifty-pound bag of local potatoes to stash away for the winter, amongst other storage crops. Starting a one-sided fight with Thee Alice Waters probably isn’t the best way to sell a food book, but here’s the thing: her vision for American food, which has been dominant for over 50 years now, really only makes sense if you live California. For Waters, its freshness that reigns supreme. But in the temperate US, which is a whole lot of the country, there is no way to eat fresh, local foods 365 days a year. So instead, a lot of people get their plastic clamshells of mesclun greens — which would never have been a thing in the US if it weren’t for Waters— from Salinas, California, and tomatoes and berries and more from free-trade partner countries, from Mexico to Peru to Vietnam. So trying to do fresh right — that is, without relying on an international agriculture trade that’s beyond damaging in terms of labor, land use, and carbon emissions from transportation — leaves someone living in the Midwest or the northeast with lots of options during the growing season and very, very few in the winter months.
If you believe that the climate future will require living life both closer to home and on a smaller scale (and I do), then the Chez Panisse approach is out for anyone living outside of a Mediterranean climate, which comprises just 3 percent of the globe. But the wonderful thing is, the majority of agricultural history took place long before the invention of both motorized transportation and refrigeration. There exists a whole host of foods — grains, of course, but also fresh fruits and vegetables too — that were developed specifically for keeping people fed throughout the cold, dark months of the year. And much of it is capable of just sitting there, ideally in a cool, dark place, until you’re ready to eat it. It is food that, historically, is remembered as the cuisine of desperation: endless amounts of cabbage and potatoes, mashed root vegetables like rutabagas and turnips that inspired so little joy they’ve gone out of style almost completely. But the Storage Kitchen does not have to be nearly so drab, as I humbly think my dinner last night goes to show. At its best, Storage Kitchen cooking is both rich and bright, and can provide just the kind of stick-to-your-ribs comfort that you want in the wintertime. And getting there, from the garden to the plate, is beautiful, not some arduous chore.
But before getting into each of the crops, the first essay in this new interaction of On Gurney Hill will be about leaving my garden behind — and taking as much of it with me as humanly possible. More on that soon…