CertainSeason

Rockwell Kent - The Exquisite Line

hough in no way am I a COLLECTOR collector of Rockwell Kent, I have, for a very long time, picked up a piece or two of his work along the way, rummaging through junk shops and the occasional estate sale. I have most all of his original books and a few of the classics he illustrated...Moby Dick, Canterbury Tales, Leaves of Grass.... I have a few nice prints, a litho, all signed...and the plate at the right (and whoever stole the collection of six Vernon Kiln Moby Dick plates from me -- may you rot in hell!)...and I have continued to enjoy them as much now as the day I found them.

I have always wanted to visit SUNY Plattsburgh where he left a large portion of his artistic estate (other than the bulf of paintings which went to The Hermitage in St. Petersburgh...long story.) And yesterday we did. As a holiday gift to Mark and Patty, Bill and I hosted them to a daytrip up to Plattsburgh for lunch and a visit to the Rockwell Kent Gallery at SUNY Plattsburgh. (and then back home for dinner) .We drove up through the snowy Adirondack peaks to the frozen shores of Lake Champlain and had lunch at a nice little sandwich place there and then found the gallery.

It was worth the wait and the two hour drive. His work is as stunning as ever and even more so in person. 

 

[left: "Godspeed" 1931 woodcut  / upper left "T" illumination R. Kent / right: Rockwell Kent "Our America"  series charger Vernon Kilns (from the Young-Foote Collection)]

It was the fulfillment of a lifelong wish to see this collection and it did not disappoint. And it was made all the more sweet by the company with which it was shared. Now to plan a trip to The Hermitage...

 

My Winter Project

Ever since we moved in I've said that my "snowy day-winter project" would be to unpack the boxes and boxes and boxes of books that we moved from Brooklyn to here. My excuse the first winter, of course, was there were more important things to do. But I was running out of excuses...and we are clearly not running out of snow! (iIf my Gentler Reader will kindly scroll down to compare and contrast the depth of the snow against the Adirondack chairs sitting around the fire pit by way of comparison.)

So I have finally unsealed the door to the "nursery" as it is called...the little room off of the office with the little square window. It has been, literally, stuffed to the rafters with boxes of books since we moved in. As I have attempted to locate one or another book as the need arose, the boxes would get cut into, opened, rifled through and moved around. Which makes for an nice, unholy mess.

Honestly, there's just not enough space to get enough perspective on how horrible this mess really is. The photo just doesn't do it justice. It doesn't help that I am a terrible procrastinator when it comes to things like filing (there are two kinds of people in the world...filers and pilers...I am the latter.)

So organizing began with sorting through the pile of mail and papers and references and saved newspaper sections and magazines and you name it piled on the table that I would need to work on if I was really going to get organized. That took the first day.

Now I have waded into the deep and murky nether regions of the nursery...and have, as of this writing, emptied six whole boxes of books (which translates into six shelves.

Like they said in Jaws..."we're going to need a bigger boat". (Or more bookshelves.)

Honestly, I don't know what's deeper...the snow outside or the books and piles in my office.

A Very Busy Two Weeks or so...

For some strange reason, my computer and my camera have decided they can see one another again and I have pictures to go with a post. Not as many as I would like...say, for example, shots from CNN's "Decision Desk" for the midterm depression...er...I mean election coverage.

I put up about a dozen pints of jalapeno jelly and then took off for the city on the train...the Hudson River in all it's autumnal raiment. Had dinner with Bev and Robert (who worked the election with me) and Ken Monday night at Cafe Loup, which was lovely as always. Spent two nights in a chic little hotel right at Lincoln Center and headed back home on the 

train Wednesday morning (reading Angela Miller's Hay Fever all the way -- she's the proprietrix of Consider Bardwell Farm here. I recommend the book. It was fun to read about Granville and Pawlet and Roy Egg and the West Pawlet Fish and Game Club.) Which reminds me...I need to submit my invoice so I can get paid (CNN is notoriously slow in payment...I probably won't get paid till January!)

Got home and hit the ground running with two days to pull the second First Friday at the Pember together. Had a nice break from the Post-Star which ran a front page of the Arts section story on Tuesday about one of the artists we featured. The wooden bowls (over on the left there) were a big hit...turned by our neighbor Tony Mesaric, using local woods.

Had another 80+ people turn up (in a village of 2,000+ people, that's not bad), which was what we had hoped for. Battenkill Creamery (by the way, they were just named "Best Milk in the State of New York") served ice cream sundaes and a delightful time was had by all. 

And last night...we went to the rodeo...YEE HAW! [Pretty horse...prettier cowboy]

 

 

Black Apostle To Yankeeland

Went to the meeting with the representatives from Senator Gillebrand and several other representatives from elected officials offices about appropriations for the Pember Museum & Library this morning. This is the project that Patty, the Pember executive director, and I have been working on, and it went very well. The mayor was there; all the elected officials showed up. Anyone walking in the front door of the Pember cannot fail to be impressed with this jewel, and has to be struck with the fact that this is nothing less than a National Treasure. That's my project now...to see if we can't get it declared a "National Treasure." Stay tuned. [A postscript: the United States has no such designation. Japan has a "Living National Treasure." But in the U.S. it's an "Historic Site" like our house. No National Treasures.]

 And in the middle of setting up for the meeting, I came across a book about the namesake of our house, Lemuel Haynes. It's title (which I used above) is Black Apostle To Yankeeland: Egalitarian Catchcolt Who Overlived his Caste. Written in 1972. More on that in a moment.

Haynes was a preacher of some note back in the early days of the American colonies. In fact, he was one of the many people who answered the call to arms of Paul Revere. He was an indentured servant from the age of 5 months (!!) until his adulthood, when he proved himself to be a scholar, and was educated as a preacher. One of the early claims to fame of Lemuel Haynes is that he is "the first person of Negroid blood to be ordained as a clergyman in the Congregational Church" according to this book. We have also heard that he was the first African American pastor to any white congregation in the United States, as well.

The book begins with a Title Glossary, in which terms such as "black," "apostle," Yankeeland" and "egalitarian" are defined for the reader. The most interesting word, to me, in the title is "catchcolt" which the author defines as "a colloquial Yankee expression describing a young horse of accidental breeding by an unidentified stallion with a straying mare; a child born out of wedlock." The body of the text of the book goes on to describe Haynes' "lineage" in this manner: "The boy was conceived in a clandestine tryst of a blueblooded girl and a black bondsman in West Hartford, Connecticut. The father's name is lost to history in miscegenation opprobrium. The mother's name, although known, is to this day adamantly policed by scions to shroud the blot [sic] on the family escutcheon. Thus born nameless, the child was called in a moment of anger by the woman who bore him a "Haynes," with the intention of dishonoring the family under whose roof the delivery happened. Friends gave him the first name of "Lemuel" to signify any unknown king of Massa."

Wow. Where to begin, right? There's a whole lot to think about in those sentences. The book claims a copyright date of 1972...but that sure doesn't read like 1972 English to my ears..."miscegenation opprobrium"..."caste"...and "the family escutcheon". Indeed. And the "catchcolt" term is entirely new to me. And I find it particularly interesting applied to Haynes as the offspring of a caucasian mother and African-American...or "Negroid"...father, as the book would put it.

I am just beginning to delve into the book, but a passage on page 25 was of particular interest to me and Bill:

 

Indeed, this is the house Bill and I bought. We had been under the impression that the house was built in 1793, not 1767. So this was a surprise. The reference to "Mrs C.W. Halderman, Jr, of Philadelphia" bore out what we already knew...we bought the house from her son.
 

Decorating Trees and Fermenting Cabbage

Not that closing hampered this in any way, but now we're really getting down to it here. Boxes are slowly disappearing (though not fast enough for me) and we went out and cut down our own Christmas tree...a tree that in Brooklyn would have been $60-$70...here? $15, please.

We had planned to buy a live one and then plant it but that would have required us to have dug the hole already, pre-snowstorm, and, well, that just didn't happen.  I think we'll just have to put that on the gardening and landscaping list for next spring.

Got Brewster to the vet for his next innoculation for tick-borne diseases, and got him licensed here in town. $5.50 for a fixed dog.

And so to sauerkraut. Let me just say, here and now, if you don't have Sandor Ellix Katz's book Wild Fermentation, click on that link there and get it. It's a brilliant book with loads of fun recipes and ideas, all built around the ideas of fermentation, i.e. breads, beers, vinegars, wine, kimchi, miso, yogurt and sauerkraut. It is the kind of book that gets dog-earred, spilled on and stained because you use it so much. Get two. Heck, get three...it's a great gift for any foodie.

 Now...sauerkraut. I have to admit, it was an acquired taste for me. I'm a "Chicago Dog" kind of guy, specifically Portillo's (seriously...there's nothing that comes close, starting with the ever-so-rare poppyseed buns, then the nuclear relish, irridescent green, and the pickle and the celery salt...) 

A Chicago dog is a well-rounded meal in and of itself...protein, vegetables and a starch. But there is no sauerkraut involved. And I am willing to admit it is an acquired taste, despite the "horse and carriage" association that sauerkraut and sausage has in more Teutonic circles. But over time, and in the estimable company of friends whose two names have come to be combined into one...ala Patandbarb...and the more-than-able guidance of Sandor Ellix Katz in the presence of the aforementioned book, I have developed a newfound appreciation for fermented cabbage. Like homemade pasta it takes on a whole new dimension when you make it yourself.

And there are health benefits. Including, recent research has determined, cancer-preventing properties in cabbage and others in the Brassicaceae family like broccoli, collards and bok choi, just to name a few. As it happens, scientists in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry have determined that fermented cabbage is actually healthier than raw or cooked cabbage, because the fermentation process breaks down the glucosinolates in cabbage (which, I believe, are the culprits in farts as well) into isothiocyanates which have been proven to fight cancer. I'm telling you...buy Wild Fermentation...the book is rich with this sort of information.

I wrote and posted a photo earlier, about the obtaining of a proper crock for these
pickling purposes. Right here ------------------------------------------------------------>

 It's a beautiful thing. Turns out it's a pretty big thing, too. Bigger than required to make five pounds of sauerkraut. So I'm going to make ten. 

Sandor mentions in his first recipe that if you mix green cabbage with red (which is clearly purple) cabbage you get pink sauerkraut! Need I say that this immediately became my plan o'action?

One of the beauties of fermentation is how simple it is, and sauerkraut seems to be the epitome of that. Two ingredients: cabbage and salt. And not as much salt as one might imagine, really. Ten pounds of cabbage is rendered into (I-don't-know-how-much) sauerkraut with no more than six tablespoons of salt! A half cup. 

Oh...and patience. It requires a large portion of patience. You have to wait it out. Despite the simplicity of the initiating components, the fermentation process ends up involving a succession of different microbial species taking their turns at the cabbage...Sandor compares it to "the life of the forest," which is a lovely image...one following the other. 

I love this because there is so much "bacteria-phobia" these days...I honestly think anti-bacteria soaps (and just try to buy soap that isn't these days...it's like trying to find food without high fructose corn syrup in it) and this idea that we need to live in some idealized, perfectly sanitary environment is one of the chief causes of childhood food allergies, particularly peanut allergies...[another inverse correlation, by the way, is between children who grow up around all those dirty farm animals and allergies...the closer kids are to farm animals the less likely they are to have allergies)...

Anyway...thinly sliced cabbage gets combined ever so felicitously with salt and then we enlist the services of gravity, to weigh down the cabbage and keep it under the brine liquid that is drawn from the cabbage by the salt.

That's it. It's that simple. You need to go and press it down a few times over the first few days, to help the cabbage tamp down and force the water out of it. But now the bacteria does its work. Coliform starts the fermentation, but as it works, it creates a more acid environment and soon a new bacteria, more suited to that acidity comes forward and the Coliform subsides and Leuconostoc builds, succeeded in due course by Lactobacillus (yes...the same as in yogurt and cheese and which has anti-inflammatory properties...please note that these are all usually rather feared bacteria that are being turned into something good and useful to the body) and it all starts to sound pretty Mr. Wizard...

 But all you need to do once you've shredded, salted and weighted it all down is...wait.

It's a beautiful thing.   

Oh...and get some canning jars ready. There's going to be ten pounds of sauerkraut in about a week to ten days.

Pink sauerkraut.

Where I Live...

I thought it was time to explain the title of this blog and where it came from:  

Chapter Two

Where I Lived, and What I Lived for

AT A CERTAIN SEASON of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house. I have thus surveyed the country on every side within a dozen miles of where I live. In imagination I have bought all the farms in succession, for all were to be bought, and I knew their price. I walked over each farmer's premises, tasted his wild apples, discoursed on husbandry with him, took his farm at his price, at any price, mortgaging it to him in my mind; even put a higher price on it — took everything but a deed of it — took his word for his deed, for I dearly love to talk — cultivated it, and him too to some extent, I trust, and withdrew when I had enjoyed it long enough, leaving him to carry it on. This experience entitled me to be regarded as a sort of real-estate broker by my friends. Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly. What is a house but a sedes, a seat? — better if a country seat. I discovered many a site for a house not likely to be soon improved, which some might have thought too far from the village, but to my eyes the village was too far from it. Well, there I might live, I said; and there I did live, for an hour, a summer and a winter life; saw how I could let the years run off, buffet the winter through, and see the spring come in. The future inhabitants of this region, wherever they may place their houses, may be sure that they have been anticipated. An afternoon sufficed to lay out the land into orchard, wood-lot, and pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or pines should be left to stand before the door, and whence each blasted tree could be seen to the best advantage; and then I let it lie, fallow, perchance, for a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

[Somehow I think Henry David Thoreau would have choked on the fact that the book, pictured here, a first edition, is selling in New York City for $18,000.] 

A Farmer Delivers

As promised, Elmer stopped by with two dozen eggs and two boxes of squash. The squash cost $5. All the squash; two teeming boxes of it. The Delicatas [Cucurbita pepo on the bottom of the pic] are among my personal favorite. You can eat the whole thing, skin and all. They really earn their other name, Sugar Loaf. They're also called Peanut or Bohemians and they're heirlooms that originated in New York.

The others, (on top in the pic) Carnival [also Curcurbita pepo] I wasn't so familiar with, but they seem to be a lot like acorn.

There are just so many varieties of squash! Which makes sense since it is such an old food, one of the original New World foods, along with tomatoes, beans and corn. They've been around so long, they've had time to mutate and cross-pollinate. I don't know this for sure, but I know peppers, another American food, are also quite easily cross pollinated and you have to be very careful how closely you plant different kinds or they will pollinate one another (slutty peppers!) I think squash are similar in that regard. Curcurbita maxima and curcurbita pepo are among the most common. Also cucurbita moschata. Every part of the squash plant can be eaten, too. Fruit, leaves and shoots. This past summer we fried up squash blossoms, stuffed with cheese or cream cheese. These, of course, are winter squash, so named because they keep well over winter, in a cool dark root cellar. Summer squash don't keep so well, but are as available in winter as they are in summer.

One of my favorite gardening books is Amy Goldman's The Compleat Squash: A Passionate Grower's Guide to Pumpkins, Squashes, and Gourds. It's a work of art, really. She's done the same thing for tomatoes and melons, too. Fabulous books.

Now all I need is a recipe that uses a lot of squash. Anyone?

Here's a nice recipe I have already for the Delicatas:

Use your favorite bread recipe (I use a French bread recipe)

3 T butter

2 C finely chopped Delicata squash

3 cloves garlic, finely chopped or one large, whole head of garlic, roasted

Oregano, rosemary, and tarragon to taste
Salt and pepper to taste
1 C grated parmesan cheese

Prepare your favorite bread recipe, but do not bake yet. 

If using roasted garlic prepare it; set aside.

Butter two (2) 9x13x2-inch baking pans; set aside.

To prepare the filling: In a large frying pan over medium-low heat, saute the squash pieces with the chile pepper, garlic, oregano, rosemary, tarragon, salt, and pepper until the squash is tender. Remove from heat and let cool. After the mixture has cooled, slightly crush or mash the mixture with your wood spoon. Do not thoroughly mash the mixture, but leave slightly lumpy.

After your have made the bread dough and it has rested, roll and stretch the dough into approximately a 24 x 10-inch rectangle. (In other words, a large rectangle - depending on your counter space, you may need to divide the dough in half and roll each 1/2 at a time.

Using a spatula, spread the cooled Delicata Squash Mixture over the top of the rolled dough. Starting with long edge, loosely roll up dough; pinch seams to 
  seal. NOTE: Rolling the log too tightly will result in rolls whose centers pop up above the rest of them as they bake. With a knife, lightly mark roll into 1-inch section. Use a sharp knife (I use a serrated knife and saw very gently).

Place cut side up in prepared baking pan. The unbaked rolls should not touch each other before rising and baking. Do not pack the unbaked rolls together.

Cover the pan with plastic wrap and let rise in a warm place for approximately 45 to 60 minutes or until doubled in size (after rising, rolls should be touching each other and the sides of the pan). 

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Baked 15 minutes; remove from oven and sprinkle the grated parmesan cheese over the tops of the rolls. Return to the oven and bake an additional 10 to 15 minutes or until the tops are a light golden brown. Remove from oven. These rolls are best served warm.

Yields approximately 20 (depending on the size you make them).