Enjoy a meal down on the farm

By Tim Stark

updated 10:43 a.m. ET Feb. 20, 2008

From a distance, the graceful swath of white slicing through a field of vegetables looks like some kind of open-air installation dreamed up by Christo. In the space where stalks of harvested sweet corn were recently mowed down, a single white-linen-covered table, long enough for 160 diners, parallels rows of Sun Gold cherry tomatoes, zinnias with sorbet-colored petals, and baby heads of burgundy and green oakleaf lettuce. In a makeshift kitchen at the edge of the field, chef/butcher Justin Severino is flaming ripe San Marzano tomatoes that only yesterday were growing on vines a few yards from our table. Nearby, two young farmers, Teresa Kurtak and Mike Irvine, are still picking vegetables for the next day's market in Santa Cruz — snipping bright-yellow zucchini and yanking purple kohlrabi out of the ground, shaking off clods of dirt. Over toward the Soquel River, free-range laying hens cluck contentedly, as though in imitation of the spirited guests, who, warmed up by an earthy, spice-scented Estate Merlot from up the road at Hunter Hill Vineyard, begin taking their places at the endless white ribbon of a table.

The Everett Family Farm, in Soquel, California, is humming. Severino's first course is a watermelon soup made with the charred San Marzanos and prosciutto, which he had hanging in his shop for nearly a year — the ribbons of cured pig thigh dancing a sweet and salty tango with the sun-flavored juices of the tomatoes. Being a butcher, he's layered the crostini with rabbit and aged pork, air-cured beef and tea-soaked prunes, beef salami and apricot mostarda. When the soup comes out, Kurtak and Irvine join vintners, chefs, bakers, farmers, and adventurous diners as we all sit down to this spectacular California-style déjeuner sur l'herbe. Our second course is an over-the-top cornucopia of bounty from the field as well as from nearby Monterey Bay: sablefish and sardine escabeche with carrots, leeks, and torpedo onions, to which Severino will add his own house-cured specialty, tesa, a too-fatty-to-roll-up pancetta. A crusty hunk of bread from the Big Sur Bakery sops up all the excess.

"I can't believe how many of our vegetables he's using," Kurtak says proudly as apple trees loaded with crisp yellow pippins cast their long shadows. Even the soft evening sunlight, autumnally pinkish as it glows on the forested hillside rising up beyond the Soquel River, seems to have a mouthwatering quality about it.

The artful white-linen dinner tables Jim Denevan sets up in beach caves, vineyards, and farmers' fields are not so much tables as they are bridges designed to connect small artisanal food producers with the consumers who live next door to them. Denevan and his group, Outstanding in the Field, started conducting farm-based dinners in the Santa Cruz area in 1999 and have since traveled across the country four times and up into Alaska, mostly in a 1953 Flxible bus that tends to break down in out-of-the-way places like the Yukon. Breathtakingly endless as the Outstanding in the Field tables appear to be, they are rarely long enough to hold all the diners willing to ante up $150 to $200 for a farm-feast seat. But that's just the beginning: All over North America, nomadic dinner parties are popping up — thrown by groups like Outstanding in the Field, Plate and Pitchfork, and Dinners at the Farm — and farms themselves are realizing that the best argument for sustainable agriculture is a luscious feast served under the stars. And so last fall, I decided to travel the country, from Maine to California to Tennessee, to check out three that sounded especially interesting.

Gentl & Hyers / Condé Nast Traveler Amid rows of crops at the Everett Family Farm in Soquel, California, 160 guests dine on watermelon soup with charred tomatoes and proscuitto before moving on to a mesquite-grilled confit of pork served over kohlrabi sauerkarut.

The culinary revolution that began at the end of the last millennium is now turning the spotlight on the farmer — the whiz-bang peasant, the Jeffersonian yeoman, the querulous and cunning plowman who foraged for mushrooms, hand weeded the onion patch, and contrived by means of salt, smoke, yeast, and vinegar to store up a winter's supply of nutritious victuals from the edible roots, flesh, and grapes flourishing outside the door.

I can report from personal experience that the truck patch farmer is enjoying a renaissance. Fourteen years ago, when I began toting my Pennsylvania-grown vegetables to New York City, maître d's would block my passage as I tried to sneak through the dining room during peak hours. Restaurants had not yet discovered how a reputation for seasonal purity might be clinched by having a filthy farmer waltz fifty pounds of just-picked tomatoes between crowded tables and into the kitchen. These days, I sell at a farmers' market, where the chefs are surprisingly lenient when I forget to set aside their heirloom tomatoes. If I were a purveyor (one who buys from farmers and resells to chefs), they'd skin me alive, cut off my ears, and throw them in the soup. They'd run a purveyor's ear soup special until somebody delivered those heirloom tomatoes. But since I'm one of those endangered curmudgeons, they say, "It's OK, farmer. We know you work hard." So it was a rare treat for me this past harvest, as my load of tomatoes dwindled, to take the farmer's equivalent of a busman's holiday, to sit out under the stars and enjoy the fruits of someone else's labor, to dine alfresco while chef and staff toiled in the field.

Gentl & Hyers / Condé Nast Traveler At Blackberry Farm, visitors can wake up with the roosters in one of the three guest rooms in the brnd-new farmhouse.

There are yard chickens, too, next to the heirloom garden at Blackberry Farm, in Walland, Tennessee — a garden where I encounter the luminous parsley worm in all her late-summer incarnations: a tawny chrysalis hanging by a thread from the dried flower of a gone-to-seed chive; newly emerged black swallowtail butterflies fluttering among tall, languorous orange-petaled Mexican sunflowers. My favorite stage is the caterpillar herself. Painted with alternating segments of black and yellow, the parsley worm has a bright, chlorophyll-fed greenness that glows in the sunlight like the finest handcrafted Chinese lantern. I can't keep my overcurious fingers from plucking the pillow-soft body from the frond of dill to which she is attached. I raise the parsley worm until we are eye to eye. I growl and squeeze gently. And sure enough, out of the parsley worm's forehead explodes a soft, gelatinous pair of orange horns — a tiny driver's-side airbag installed by nature to burst forth at the sign of danger. Chastened and aghast, I back down as though frightened by this demonic apparition. I return the parsley worm to her feast, and the horns instantly retract.

Beside Blackberry's garden stands a lofty native persimmon tree from which orange golf balls of syrupy essence-of-persimmon drop dead-ripe to the ground — cursed with no shelf life, unless you happen to be seated nearby. My native persimmon is served on slate with a few dabs of Blackberry Farm honey next to a wedge of the farm's signature cheese, a nutty aged pecorino-like delectation made with milk from the East Friesian sheep roaming the hillsides. I savor it by candlelight, as the famous Smoky Mountain fog settles down upon those spooky hollers and a full moon creeps into the mild late-September sky. Above me, bats dive-bomb and trace rickety curlicues of flight in the illuminated night. I am blissfully embedded in my own edible landscape, snug as the bright-green and yellow parsley worm.

Gentl & Hyers / Condé Nast Traveler Pat Sandlin, the assistant gardener at Blackberry Farm, ready for a day in the fields.

Before the persimmon, I eat a ragout of Washday beans under the same moon—an epicurean collaboration between Blackberry's gardener, John Coykendall, and executive chef Peter Glander. Coykendall sits next to me throughout dinner, which is how I learn the story behind the name of the Washday bean (since it didn't require much cooking time, it was the bean that was cooked on the day Mom had to go down to the river and do the family's laundry). Glander's astonishingly straightforward ragout combines the beans with the white flowers and the tender young "snaps," or beanless pods, from the same plant: the freshness of the garden bean, the sweetness of the flower, the crisp haricot vert — like perfection of the snap.

Elevating the survival victuals of mountain folk to the level of haute cuisine is the cornerstone of Blackberry's "foothills" cooking. I for one do not object to having to settle for the kind of food that got served up when there wasn't time to fuss over dinner. Simplicity can be deceiving. The presence of the commercially unavailable Washday bean in the garden depends on Coykendall's saving seed for it. The bean flowers have to be picked early in the morning — indeed, the chef harvests them himself — because the flowers close up in the sunlight. "I give them a quick soaking," says Glander, "then I cook them in the soaking liquid. That liquid is your gold. The flavor of the bean is in it, the flavor of the soil." Only twenty-eight years old, Glander grew up on a farm in Greencastle, Indiana, where the family garden always had enough room for salad burnet, sweet corn, and beefsteak tomatoes. During the spring break of his senior year in high school, Glander went to Berkeley, California, to audition for a coveted stage at Chez Panisse. Come summer, he was shelling beans in Alice Waters's revolutionary farm-friendly kitchen.

Born and raised in nearby Knoxville, Coykendall remembers going, as a boy, with his grandfather Congressman John Jennings to visit a garden where a hog lot had once stood. The turnips they took home from that fertile garden were steamed and sliced, slathered with butter, salted, peppered — simple as that. "Those were some mighty fine turnips," he recalls. Coykendall is an encyclopedic saver of seeds, a maestro of butter beans (which is what Southerners call dried lima beans). Throughout the day, staff from Blackberry Farm's kitchen pull up at the garden in a golf cart to snip some micro-arugula, to find out where the black Spanish radishes are growing, to ask Coykendall for a butter bean recipe. When he breaks the pods of his Reverend Taylors, the falling beans remind me of snowflakes: No two white, black, and burgundy patterns are alike.

Gentl & Hyers / Condé Nast Traveler Chef Peter Glander, at Blackberry Farm, in Walland, Tennessee, works with head gardener John Coykendall to bring heirloom produce direct from the fields to the kitchen, where the result can be a dish as simple — and transcendental — as their ragout of Washday beans.

A trip through the garden with Coykendall is a lesson in diversity and preservation. Red Calico butter beans. "These velvet beans are inedible," he says, pulling an attractive black pod from a tall trellised plant. "They were used to feed the cows — made for creamier milk. Here in the garden they're just a 'look piece.' Same with this Mississippi brown cotton. Just a look piece."

Coykendall's whole garden would be a look piece but for a higher calling: the ambitious cuisine dependent upon it, one that reaches for more than Washday beans. Blackberry Farm has positioned itself as a kind of Tanglewood for epicurean adventures. Well-known vintners, cheesemakers, and chefs visit weekly to share their secrets. Just before I was there, Thomas Keller, of the universally celebrated French Laundry and Per Se restaurants, was on-site giving demonstrations. The 2008 lineup of events includes chefs as disparate as Manhattan's pork-obsessed David Chang and Chicago's molecular gastronomist Grant Achatz. Despite the deep reservoirs of quiet to be found on the farm's 4,200 acres, bulldozers and carpenters were at work, too. In a field above the garden, plans were under way to plant chestnut trees and inoculate for truffles. The crown jewel of the farm's multifaceted culinary initiative is the FarmStead, a 14,000-square-foot barn dismantled at an Amish farm in Pennsylvania and reassembled on-site. Inside it, a spacious stainless steel kitchen, a wine cellar, a demonstration kitchen, and an airy dining room were nearing completion. Next to the FarmStead, the larder was also in the final stages of construction: a kitchen for making the farm's sheep's milk cheeses, a charcuterie, a puttin' up pantry. So much depends upon a garden.

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