Enjoy a meal down on the farm

If Nathaniel Hawthorne were alive today, I bet he could write a delicious allegory about our present-day relationship to the food we eat. Our forebears did a bang-up job of clearing forests, laying railroad track, and streamlining the productivity of those sprawling fields of grain so we would never have to toil like they did. (Washing their clothes in the river, to boot. And shelling those tedious peas.) Today, American farmers collectively produce five times as much food as they did in 1950. Now that most of us are free to eat whatever we please, the wilderness we find ourselves peering into with puritanical dread is the complex system by which our food slouches from some far-off and faceless farm to our table. With increasing skepticism, we gaze upon labels like "gourmet," "all natural," "organic," and even "artisanal." The "gourmet" market has become so flooded with "artisanally" hand-collected "diver scallops" that half the population of Maine must be saddled with the bends.

"Eat local" has become the mantra for food purists, spawning new categories of peculiarly American diets: the hundred-mile diet, the slow-foods diet, the locavore diet. Buy your food from a producer you know, the argument goes, and not only do you revitalize a community of farmers, butchers, foragers, and cheesemakers; not only do you avoid those industrial foodstuffs known to contribute to obesity, diabetes, and heart disease; not only do you save the carbon emissions that would have been required to transport the same item thousands of miles; but you will find that the peach or tomato tastes better. This last reason was the idea behind Chez Panisse, the restaurant Alice Waters opened in Berkeley in 1971. Waters wanted to serve food that tasted as good as what she had eaten in France. In the ensuing atmosphere of make-it-up-as-we-go-along, the artists, poets, and philosophers who got Chez Panisse off the ground forged a local-food-producing community and sparked the most enduring movement to come out of Berkeley.

If you doubt the permanence of the Chez Panisse–inspired food revolution, you need only go to the other coast and take a look at the restaurant David Rockefeller spent $30 million to launch in a pre-existing Norman-style stone barn on the 3,000-acre Rockefeller estate, just north of New York City in Pocantico Hills, New York. When you pull into the driveway at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, the farm-to-table restaurant orchestrated by former Chez Panisse understudy Dan Barber, the first thing you notice is that chickens are frolicking on some of the most valuable real estate in the country. This delightful incongruence conjured up for me an upbeat sequel to "Fiddler on the Roof," one in which Tevye moves to America, strikes it rich, and follows through on his vow from "If I Were a Rich Man": "I'd fill my yard with chicks and turkeys and geese and ducks / For the town to see and hear."

Dinner at Blue Hill at Stone Barns is a museum-quality ensemble of ingredients from next door's Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture. Though my meal was not served outdoors, it might as well have been, so pristine were the just-picked vegetables, which the waitstaff lovingly showed off at the table as though they were rare vintages about to be uncorked. A pinkish-orange Beauregard sweet potato was nearly the size of a football. Celtuce, which tastes like a celery-lettuce cross, gave off the musk of just-out-of-the-field greens. You can't get any fresher than that.

Back at Everett Farm in California, I had talked to Severino, the chef who prepared the family-style feast. "There are two ways to put together a menu," he said. "You can imitate some recipe — throw in truffles, foie gras — or you can limit your choices to what is available. For me, this second method leads to greater creativity. I had ten excellent Hunter Hill wines to pair with and all of those beautiful vegetables. The farmers had some watermelons they didn't know what to do with, which is how I came up with the soup."

Back when Severino was sous-chef at David Kinch's Michelin two-star restaurant Manresa, he started butchering pigs on the side. The process of breaking down a three-hundred-pound carcass and rendering every piece into lip-smacking fare-roasts, pork chops, salami, bacon, testa fredda — had a meditative effect on Severino, especially when compared with the frenetic high-wire act of turning out a hundred perfect meals a night. Before long, his porcine products were so popular he quit his day job. His secret? Pastured, happy, free-roaming hogs raised at Jim Dunlop's TLC Ranch — and technique. Severino's grandfather had butchered pigs back before the band saw made it possible to cut through a hog like it was a loaf of bread. His only tools are a cleaver, a knife, and a handsaw. Breaking down a hog takes five times longer without a band saw, but he gets to use so much more of the pig: the jowls for guanciale, which was layered onto crostini; and the skin and fat, ground up and stuffed into casings to make cotechino, which was braised in wine and combined with Early Girl tomatoes, roasted peppers, and grilled head lettuce for a rich and comforting third course.

The final dish, served as the sun disappeared, was a mesquite-grilled pork belly confit served over kohlrabi sauerkraut, a dish best eaten in the dark, the mouth sinfully agush with luscious melting fat and salt-cured brassica. Positioned at one end of the mile-long table, I kept on eating, my dazzled eyes following the wineglasses that seemed to go on forever into the night, refracting the light of myriad candles, on and on like swirling galaxies, a Milky Way of twinkling stars to commemorate an unforgettable feast.

As a farmer from eastern Pennsylvania, where the ground freezes for three months in winter, I can only drool over the Mediterranean climate with which those latter-day Etruscans are blessed on the northern California coast: dry, moderate coastal summers that yield consistent wines and support olive trees, persimmons, pomegranates, citrus fruit, artichokes. To grow an artichoke in my backyard, you have to start the plant in a greenhouse in January and put it outside in early April, after the bitter cold nights have ended, to fool it into thinking that it is enduring a mild Mediterranean winter. Artichokes will not sprout until the second summer. It's no wonder the hundred-mile diet has so many adherents in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Gentl & Hyers / Condé Nast Traveler Just-harvested vegetables for Arrows restaurant.

But my winters are nothing like those in Ogunquit, Maine, where I was headed next. Snow was piled halfway up the first-floor windows of the colonial farmhouse and restaurant Arrows when Mark Gaier and Clark Frasier first saw it twenty years ago. The two had flown in from San Francisco — where they had worked at Stars, started by Chez Panisse alum Jeremiah Tower — and were now in the market for a place of their own.

By the grace of all that drifted snow, they couldn't see the pile of work awaiting them, so they took out a one-year lease on the farmhouse, put together an admirable wine collection on a shoestring budget, maxed out their credit cards, and, as Frasier confesses, "washed our fair share of dishes." In 1988, the vegetables available to a Maine restaurant paled in comparison to what the two chefs had been accustomed to in San Francisco. Mesclun salad greens did not exist. Arugula was a ratty half-useless import. You were better off with iceberg lettuce.

Necessity is the mother of invention. They had to clear woods to keep expanding the backyard garden, which doubled in size for the first couple of years. Nearly two decades after their venture was launched, I took a late-summer walk through Arrows' grounds. Rae Avery, the gardener, was picking the last of the slender haricots verts. Striped German tomato plants were dropping their leaves and backsliding into autumn, while a healthy crop of ground cherries, those marble-sized sweet-sour cousins of the tomatillo, were plumping up inside their husks. Lavender, purple basil, lemon thyme, nasturtium, rosemary, calendula, Biergarten sage. Raspberries appeared to be too small to ripen before frost. Bitter fruit of those northern summers!

But the purple and green cabbages eagerly anticipated the first sweet kiss of frost. And inside some two dozen open cold frames, autumn-loving mustard, mizuna, kale, baby bok choy, and arugula geared up for the months ahead, when protective fabric would be pulled over them to keep the restaurant supplied. "In December," says Frasier, "people don't believe the salad grew outside, so we bring them out and show them."

Gentl & Hyers / Condé Nast Traveler At Arrows restaurant's summer garden dinner in Ogunquit, Maine, a luscious first course of grilled prawns and sweet corn succotash.

In part because of all of those flowers and herbs, Arrows transformed itself from a rockin' brasserie into a romantic destination restaurant in the mold of the transcendent Michelin-starred French or Italian inn. Huge bouquets of flowers adorn the dining room, where once a week on average a marriage is proposed. As would be expected so far north, Arrows depends on old-fashioned methods of preservation: house-cured sausages, duck pastrami, and of course prosciutto. In the brick smoker built onto the side of the restaurant, both cold and hot chambers are used to smoke salmon and trout.

But preservation works on many levels, as Coykendall reminded me at Blackberry Farm. Among the heirloom vegetables served to me at Arrows were two of my favorite lettuces — satiny Deer Tongue and sweet Berggarten, or freckled romaine. Cherokee Purple and Brandywine tomatoes. The recently revived lemon cucumber. Thin Oriental eggplant. The tangy apple tart could only have come from the gnarled apples that fell from the wild, once neglected apple trees by the garden.

But it was succotash — a truly regional dish that retains its Native American name — which blew me away. "The limas in the succotash came from the garden of a former dishwasher," our server admitted. "Not enough room in our garden." I was reminded of stories I'd heard about Chez Panisse in the early days, how lettuces were supplied by the backyard gardens of Berkeley friends. Until recently, lima beans were a mealy, unanimously despised freezer item that found its way onto the table whether or not it was wash day. Succotash was the tricolored mishmash occupying the smallest dent in the aluminum TV dinner tray. But these limas were done perfectly-crisp, the essence of beaniness, the heart and soul of succotash.

Like corn and tomatoes, limas were discovered in the New World, our world, the world we are just rediscovering.

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