To Eat: A Country Life

By Joe Eck, Wayne Winterrowd, Bobbi Angell and Beatrice Tosti di Valminuta

A memorable book about the path food travels from garden to table

A celebration of life together, a tribute to an utterly unique garden, a wonderfully idiosyncratic guide for cooks and gardeners interested in exploring the possibilities of farm-to-table living—To Eat is all of these things and more.
In 1974, Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd moved from Boston to southern Vermont, where they became the proprietors of a twenty-eight-acre patch of wilderness. The land was forested, overgrown, and wild, complete with a stream. Today, North Hill's seven carefully cultivated acres—open to visitors during the warmer months—are an internationally renowned garden.
In the intervening years, both the garden and the gardening books (A Year at North Hill, Living Seasonally, Our Life in Gardens) Eck and Winterrowd created together have been acclaimed in many forms, including in the pages of The New York Times. They were at work on To Eat—which also includes recipes from the renowned chef and restaurateur Beatrice Tosti di Valminuta and beautiful illustrations from their long-time collaborator Bobbi Angell—when Winterrowd passed away, in 2010.
Informative, funny, and moving, the delights within—a runaway bull; a recipe for crisp, fatty chicarrones; a personal history of the Egyptian onion; a hymn to the magic of lettuce—are sure to make To Eat a book readers return to again and again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jun 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9781466836990

Joe Eck

Joe Eck, along with Wayne Winterrowd, is the co-author of The Year at North Hill: Four Seasons in a Vermont Garden and Living Seasonally: The Kitchen and the Table at North Hill. They are co-founders of the garden design firm North Hill, and live in Vermont.

Book preview

THE JOURNEY

In the very early days of our life together and our gardening experience, it seems that much good came to us from the houses we rented. We left our rural life in Pepperell, Massachusetts, in 1972 to spend a glorious year in Copenhagen on Fulbright appointments to the University of Copenhagen and at the Folk University. Though the city was rich in cultural experiences—the Danish Royal Opera and Ballet, the fine old architecture, fascinating museums, historic castles, excellent restaurants—our life there offered little to us as gardeners. The apartment we succeeded in renting (with great difficulty, as we were transient) was spacious and well lit, on the third floor of a rather anonymous modern building with no land, though there was a splendid view from our living room window of the Spanish embassy, with a great flowering chestnut tree in front and a pretty formal reception garden behind. We made up for our lack, as we had before on Beacon Street in Boston, with cut flowers.

Through the incredibly mandarin but somehow startlingly efficient social system of Copenhagen (My cousin knows someone who is related to someone in the Bureau of … I’ll make a call), we quickly secured a quite illegitimate license to shop the wholesale flower market early in the morning, and we would return with sheaves of improbable blossoms for vases—proteras and gladioli, camellias and forced branches of quince—and often with potted flowering plants—Cinerarias, Cyclamen, forced bulbs and Kalanchoes—which gave us about as much pleasure as the flowers in vases and then were for the dustbin.

Doing without, in most human passions, can lead to a powerful urge to recover what is missing. So when we returned to Boston a year later, though we savored our renewed love for that old city, we immediately secured a plot in its famous Victory Gardens in the Fenway, bordering the aptly named Muddy River. We were urban dwellers still, but we had a scrap of ground we could cultivate on fine spring mornings and radishes we could harvest hardly a month after. We had sunlight, too, which we had not seen for all our autumn and winter in Copenhagen, and the crunch of a really fresh bean, which we had missed since leaving Pepperell two years before.

Everyone we knew in the Victory Gardens was more or less mad with desire. Our neighbors were an assorted lot—a furniture salesman, a stylish young couple in real estate, two elderly spinsters of reduced means, a leather-clad man who drove a motorcycle, an aristocratic lady of German origin—but we all shared one common passion: the need to dig in the dirt and raise something. But we left the Fenway after two years and moved to a rented house in Whitingham, Vermont, while we waited to find a house of our own.

We lived there for two more years, and it was a good house, old but not much remodeled over its many years. There were some original features, beamed ceilings, a splendid fireplace, and a large glassed-in south-facing porch, the drying porch of old Vermont houses where winter laundry was hung and where we built staging and had wonderful flowering plants throughout the winter. There was a pleasant sunlit 1950s Betty Crocker kitchen, with a table in the middle where for once, never before or after, we used a tablecloth.

But, as before, in Pepperell, the real treasures of the property were ample land, woods, and a fine barn in which we could keep chickens and other poultry. From the land, which was ancient, well-tended pasture when we came, we fashioned an enormous vegetable garden, really enough to feed a family of twelve. But we were hungry, not just for vegetables but also for plenitude, and for the joys of the work itself. In some ways, that was the most productive vegetable garden we ever had, in part because of the virgin nature of the soil, and in part because our little plot in the Victory Gardens had allowed our passions to leak out in a trickle but not in the flood we wanted. We grew everything, and we froze food then (we do not now). We can vividly remember the day that eighteen heads of cauliflower came ripe all at once and had to be processed and frozen the night before an early departure for a family wedding.

Most vividly, we remember the spinach we grew. Spinach can be a cranky crop, demanding cool weather, full sun, lots of moisture, perfect drainage, and deep, rich, fertile earth, with a neutral soil reading, somewhere close on either side of 6.0. We did not know much of that then. So, with beginner’s luck, we appeared to happen on just the right combination, and our spinach was huge, with leaves dark and richly crinkled, on heads that were fully a foot across. Distant memory can become gilded, but it seems to us that we picked spinach from late May all the way to July, and we never remember any that was stunted or bolted or yellow or had aphids.

That is not the first experience that has given us the sense that the heavens smile on novice gardeners who have little but borrowed knowledge and their own intense enthusiasm. We have never grown such good spinach since, and certainly not in our present garden, the one we will have until we die. Contiguous both to our poultry house and our pig house, and not far from our cow pasture, it is unusually well endowed with well-rotted compost, both autumn and spring. An extensive underground drainage system gives us some rows that can be readied just at the proverbial point at which the frost leaves the ground and the soil is workable. That is actually perhaps a month or even six weeks before the last frost, but spinach, with several other crops, will germinate in cold soil and is resistant to light frost. So the day we plant spinach, along with broad beans, onions, and leeks, is a joyful day.

If we have been diligent the autumn before, rows have already been turned up to receive the great benefits of winter, which improves their tilth. Still in spring they must be composted and turned again, and then smoothed down with the back of a rake to receive the seed. There is pleasure in the work itself, and a challenge, for one must try to make the bed perfectly. And then the seed is put in. Broad beans are easy, for their flattened, thumb-sized seeds can be as neatly arrayed as a column of marching soldiers, and then gently pressed into the soft earth, preferably eye side down, so the first questing root will go in the right direction without having to wiggle itself around.

Other crops join the spinach and broad beans in this first working of the garden in springtime. Though it will be yet two weeks before we sow the peas, now in earliest April we can plant onions and leeks, arugula and mache, and radishes. There is pleasure in anticipating the early harvest this labor will yield. But the great pleasure is the earth in our hands, connected to it again after a long winter’s absence.

APPLES

In forty-one years of gardening, not every day gets remembered. Still, we remember quite a few: the day we planted the yew hedge, the day we laid the first stones of the wall that would surround the perennial garden, our first harvest of strawberries. One in particular stands out: the day we planted the apples. The land was new to us and apple trees had always figured large in our fantasy of rural life. And unlike soft fruits, such as strawberries and raspberries, they took years to develop and to bear and so we were eager to begin. We knew enough to want antiques, though we weren’t quite sure what that meant. And as we planned on planting but four, the varieties we chose seemed particularly significant. Of course we were planting whips, baby trees the thickness of a pencil, hard to picture a fruiting size in our lifetimes.

Of the four we chose, one, Yellow Transparent, dates from 1870 and was imported from Russia for its superior hardiness. It has pale golden skin and bears very early, often by mid-August. And that was for us a particular recommendation since each August a young man, Jacob Lifson, the son of one of our oldest and dearest friends, spent some weeks with us in a place as removed from his real home, Los Angeles, as could be conceived. Jacob was terribly fond of apple pie, and as it happens Yellow Transparent from mid-August on bears abundant fruit out of which fine pies can be made. It has always here been called simply Jacob’s tree.

From the first, we saw this place as part of a continuum of New England life, a place that honors the old ways and continues onward with them. So the house we built is a classic center-chimney Cape with steep roofs and small-paned windows. The barn is a classic L, piled high with hay and farm tools, including a fine nineteenth-century scythe that the very modern young man who works with us insists on using to cut the meadow. An apple only a hundred and forty years old didn’t seem ideal, however much pleasure it gave to Jacob, so next to it we planted Summer Rambo—or more elegantly named Rambour Franc—known to have originated near Amiens, France. It is on the earliest list of apples grown on this continent by the first European colonists. That, plus the fact that it is disease resistant, vigorous, ripens in early September, and possesses an acid but richly fragrant flesh made it settle more appropriately into our little collection.

Our intention was to plant four trees to form the eastern boundary of our new vegetable garden. It, like the infant apples, was but a garden of the mind with no proper paths, established asparagus, strawberry beds, and a stone wall but just begun, which would take four years to complete. And now over thirty years later, the wall done, the paths settled, and the little apple seedlings grown to gnarly trees with twelve-inch-diameter trunks, I am still not sure that we take more pleasure in its present incarnation than we took in its first making.

The third tree yet to plant was simply common if ancient. Discovered in 1811 by John McIntosh on his farm near the Saint Lawrence River, it had by the late 1960s become the most commercially common apple. It is crisp and sharp, vigorous and hardy, and ripens well after Summer Rambo and Yellow Transparent. But it must be sprayed with pesticides and in any case is available in every market from farm stand to super. Were we to choose again, a dozen others, Spitzenburg, Thomas Jefferson’s favorite, or perhaps Roxbury Russet, grown since the early 1600s, or many others, would hold that place. But the tree is healthy and well formed, the taste is familiar from our childhood, and it makes an excellent sauce.

We did best, though, with the fourth tree in the quartet, for it is generally thought of as the finest of all dessert apples. Cox’s Orange Pippen ripens late for us, not before early October, but it keeps quite well and a box of them rests just out the back door most of the autumn. It is wonderful eaten out of hand, as sauce, and certainly as pies. We are hardly alone in feeling that if we could have but one apple, Cox would be it. So vigorous a tree is it that we have allowed a Rosa canina to scramble through it largely for the abundant large red hips that spangle the rose and hence the tree each fall.

This quartet of apple trees, near sticks when planted in 1978, seem ancient now and form the eastern boundary of what has become our perennial garden, the only truly formal room in the garden.

But for one. The vegetable garden, too, is a formal space of squares and rectangles, straight paths, and fixed vistas. And we grow apples there, too, but in a very different way. Many years ago our good friends Michèle and Jean-Claude La Montagne took us to a festive garden fair held each October at the Domaine de Courson, a splendid château about thirty miles outside of Paris. It was a day of extraordinary sights, great delight, and improvident purchases. But the strongest impression made on us was a hedge of free-standing espaliered apples, more than a century old. Like so many effects first seen in the gardens of others, it was one we were determined to copy. And so our own little potager is bisected by four apple espaliers freestanding and only thirty years of age, not centuries. Yet they are already a beauty in themselves and a recollection of a memorable day spent in the company of memorable friends.

BRUSSELS SPROUTS

In a lifetime of gardening there is little we haven’t grown, much of it fairly well. Gardening is our passion and our trade. We lecture on it, write about it, and generally pass for experts. Yet there seem always to be plants that everyone else grows with great ease but that fail for us. So it was for many years with spinach, a crop of which we grew splendidly on our first attempt and each year thereafter failed at utterly. Not until our friend Jack Manix told us that spinach requires a really sweet soil and prefers dry conditions to wet did we again manage to produce a respectable