Let Soup Be Soup

Squash, Pear, and Celery Soup

It occurred to me tonight as I was sitting down to dinner that I haven't posted any recipes on this site, so I thought 'd fix that. A few days ago I made a big batch of squash soup for Amy to take to work for lunch. I have been making this same squash soup for several years now and I think about why it came about each time.

Squash soup is one of those ubiquitous fall offerings in restaurants this time of year and that is as it should be. They are an almost comical harbinger of fall, soul satisfying and bracing against the cold. Quite often they are made clumsily, too thick and sweet or spiced to high hell with cinnamon or nutmeg. They often more closely resemble baby food than a comforting, adult meal. I wanted to break away from the typical mold, but it's hard with squash soup. Even the not so great ones are pleasurable as a sort of seasonal touchstone. You don't want to rob the soup of that character. You want it to be familiar, just relieved of a little of its cliche.

Turns out this wasn't so difficult. Squash, obviously, is a fruit, but like tomatoes, arrives on American tables in vegetable garb.  So a new path quickly became clear: bring the vegetable quality a little more forward and stop treating it like pumpkin pie filling. Think of it as a savory soup with sweet qualities. To do so required only a few minor tweaks.

First, pair the squash with celery. The two make very good partners and I am a little mystified as to why  they don't appear together more often. Celery is undeniably savory, underutilized as a forward flavor, and a great vehicle for bringing the savory character of other foods out. Adding two leeks to the pot helps in the same way, though the leeks play a more supporting role.

Second, simmer the raw squash in the pot with the other ingredients. Most people roast squash prior to making their soup. Many recipes encourage this route. Roasting intensifies the sweetness and mutes vegetal notes. It also, not so incidentally, relieves the cook of the effort of peeling. But for our purposes, a simmer will keep the "vegetable" in tact.

Third, skip the pumpkin pie spices. These flavors trick the brain into reading sweet, even when sweet is not present. If you must add some sort of spice element, try fennel seed, or dill pollen, or fresh ginger instead. This soup relies on bay leaf as its principal herb, again because it is great at reinforcing the savory quality of anything it simmers with.

It would be incorrect to think that this soup is not sweet. It is. The idea is to bring the savory characteristics forward and not mask them with tooth aching sweetness. Without a bit of sweet, the soup would lack depth and the squash flavor would be flat. We rely on pears and pear cider to the job here. They provide a little natural fruit sweetness and a touch of tartness that adds additional balance. Pears pair marvelously with both squash and celery as well and all three hit their peak at the market at about the same time. They make quite the trifecta.

Finally, a generous addition of butter marries everything together and provides a little richness. It may seem like a lot, but remember the recipe makes about a gallon and a half of soup. When all is said and done, you will have a homey, comforting, but complex and mature soup worth dwelling over for a moment. This recipe calls for butternut squash because it must be dealt with raw and butternut is far easier to peel than a more flavorful amber cup or kabocha. If you decide to use another variety, just make sure to adjust quantities accordingly.

Squash, Celery, and Pear Soup

1 large butternut squash, peeled, seeded and diced
1 head of celery with its leaves, the greener the better, roughly chopped
10 ripe bosc pears, peeled, cored, and roughly chopped
2 leeks, tough green tops removed, roughly chopped
2 bay leaves
1 small branch of summer savory or thyme
3 cups pear cider
about 3 cups light mushroom stock or water
1/2# salted butter
salt

Place all of the above in a large stock pot. Use only enough mushroom stock to let the ingredients move about freely. Bring to the simmer and cook until everything is tender. Remove the savory and bay leaves.

Ladle off a bit of the cooking liquid and reserve. Transfer the soup in batches to a blender and puree. Let the blender run on high speed for about a minute. Run the soup through a chinois if you have one. Use the reserved cooking liquid to thin the soup to desired consistency if need be. Remember to let the soup be soup. It shouldn't be overly thick.

Season with salt to taste. The soup freezes and reheats remarkably well so make a lot. You will be happy to have it all winter long.

Seventy Nine Jars

The haul.

Canned tomatoes are a staple in our home and we share this culinary habit with our friends and neighbors Fred and Ulla. For the past several years we have collaborated for an afternoon on putting up a year's worth. This summer we began to ration the last of 2012's jars in both homes so we decided to up the quantity. We bought and canned 3 bushels. This yielded 80 quart jars, one of which broke during processing. It might not look like much but it took the better part of a late afternoon and evening.

For those of you who have never canned your own tomatoes, here's how it goes. Roma tomatoes must be blanched, chilled, peeled, and packed into scalded jars with a hot liquid, capped, and then processed in a water bath to seal the jars and kill off any active bacteria which could cause food borne illness in storage.

The peeling is the most tedious part. Three bushels is about 1200 tomatoes. Fred, Ulla and I tackled the blanching and peeling while Amy, leading the charge, juiced an additional bushel of beefsteaks and prepared and packed the jars. We had two turkey fryers going outside to handle the blanching and processing. Truth be told, processing takes the longest. Between the two cookers we could process 15 jars at a time, 35 minutes to a batch, plus time to come to temp and time to cool. Luckily, once the jars are packed there is lots of down time. So we had dinner and drinks, conversed comfortably as neighbors do, and waited, occasionally responding to a timer by lazily rising to take jars out of the water or put fresh in. The sun went down and Ulla began to fade. Soon she was gone and we decided the dirty dishes could wait til morning. Not too long after that, Amy ran out of gas and Fred and I brought out the whisky to ride out the remainder. It was a good day, a day that makes the bond between our two households one of great depth.

Fred was telling me that he went into a mild panic as he sat on an airplane on his way home form Denmark thinking about the many things massing on his very busy horizon, one of which was tomatoes. He worriedly thought to himself, "I have no plans for tomatoes" and in Fred's world this is not okay. He would spend an entire winter cooking greens, pasta, pizza, braised meat, BBQ sauce and salsa, with no tomatoes in the pantry. An entire year without something in his pantry he always has but never takes for granted. Sure you could just buy them, but that is not where the bar has been set. And Fred is not one to lower his bar. Nor are Amy and I.

So on a very busy Labor Day weekend we canned tomatoes in lieu of the beach or a hike or dinner out.  But it does not feel like a sacrifice because these are the activities that the make the hill the hill. Fred and I spoke for some time about how much we love it here once the whisky was flowing. We talked about how 122nd Avenue which rolls over the crest of the hill and in front of our homes seems to split the weather coming off the lake like a knife: look north and you might see churning grey clouds in the distance ready to unleash a summer storm, and to the south, across the road, a billow of high white clouds on bright blue skies blushed pink with the setting sun. We talked about how these tomatoes are an irreplaceable piece of our existence here. We looked forward to watching the pigs chow down on the peels and pulp that collected as we prepped.

Canned tomatoes of good quality can be bought but they are very expensive. We can get very good tomatoes locally if we haven't grown our own, and taking control over the canning process can yield even better results. This year, I finally talked everyone into investing a bit more time and money into packing the tomatoes in juice. I thought this would have a few benefits. Normally, home canned tomatoes are packed in water, which is poured off before use. I thought after all this effort it would be nice if the entire contents of the jar were useable. Also, when you pack in water the pH becomes a concern. If the pH is too low, safety demands the jars must be processed for much longer (lowering their quality) or pressure canned, which is interminably slow (we only have one pressure canner and it only fits a few jars). Adding acidic tomato juice - verified this year by a pH meter, an expensive but very worthy investment for anyone who cans, cures, or ferments - can eliminate the need for long or higher temperature processing. It can also eliminate the need for lemon juice or citric acid which can alter the flavor, color, and texture of canned tomatoes. It is vitally important to know that acidity of the tomatoes and their medium in the jar is below 4.6 to ensure safe storage. Under no circumstances should you consider shorter processing times or eliminating additional acidification without confirming a safe pH. The most compelling argument for packing in juice in my mind, though, is flavor. When you pack in water, some of the tomato flavor and color will be lost to it. Tomato juice will enhance, not degrade the flavor of the fruit in the jar.

As always, the proof is in the pudding. It will be a few weeks before we will crack open this year's tomatoes and see what's what. If this step yields good results, maybe next year we will add a little alcohol to the juice. Some tomato flavors are soluble only in alcohol, which explains why a little red wine in a tomato sauce does so much. So perhaps starting in the jar could have a profound positive effect on their flavor.

At. St. Anthony, we are laying the foundation for the best possible canned tomato, starting on the farm. We are discussing varieties that grow well in the north, prepping the soil they grow in with the ash from our wood ovens to simulate the "shadow of Vesuvius" where the San Marzano, the king of canned tomatoes grows, trellising, handling. It is sometimes hard to imagine a fruit so badly treated in modern cooking. Tomatoes are truly seasonal, but are still too ubiquitous throughout the year. They are often refrigerated which means death to their flavor. Proper ripeness is crucial, but often overlooked. Acidity is not just necessary to the safety of canned tomatoes, but also its culinary value. Bright, sharp acidity is the cornerstone of great sauces and braises and the backdrop that showcases the best a tomato has to offer flavor wise.

The lessons we have learned from year to year canning on our back porches will certainly help us get there at St. Anthony. More importantly, these cooking proclivities borne naturally form our love of the hill will light the path toward our discovery of the cuisine of this place on earth. This is our guiding principle, our mission: to cook from our hearts and our home. I will know that we've strayed from our vision if the food in the restaurant would seem out of place in our home. In some important ways, the hill will be looming over St. Anthony with a watchful eye. One could do worse.

A Prayer For Pumpernickel

Onions cooked on wood coals and The Bunny Kitty.

Amy is in Madison, WI right now visiting her sister and niece. She ate at Forequarter and I am very jealous (Madison easily has the best collection of restaurants of any city of it's size in the country -- it is about the same size and proximity from Chicago as Grand Rapids, but the disparity between the two scenes is...for another post). My jealousy, however, has been tempered by the fire burning behind me, though that tempering has in turn been tempered by melancholy: usually when there is a fire burning in our yard, she is here.

I am of the opinion that every restaurant kitchen could be made better by the inclusion of a wood burning something. Oven, grill, hearth. I say could be because there is ample evidence that bad cooking cannot be improved upon by live fire. Good cooking, however, can. I have gotten into more than one argument with an equipment engineer friend who extolls the virtues of gas and gas assist pizza ovens. He thinks that because the smoke only comes into play by perfuming the dining room that a serious cook, one who cares first and foremost about the results a given piece of equipment produces, would not choose a wood burning stone oven over gas. My opinion, is that he clearly has not spent enough time working with one.

I, however, have. First of all, I am not entirely convinced that gas fired stone ovens perform at the same level as solid fuel ovens. Gas ovens cannot be used efficiently for retained heat baking, which for me is one of the main reasons to own one. And regardless of what you're cooking, recovery time, convection, and chamber humidity are crucial to achieving excellent results. Smoke, as he points out, is only incidental. He is right about this, if you consider the aroma of wood smoke in a dining room as incidental (it is not). The smoke produced by a wood fired oven is icing, not cake. The foods cooked in a wood fired oven are not decidedly smoky, nor are they intended to be. It is continuous, uninterrupted intense heat that is responsible for the high quality of well made pizza crust, deeply caramelized meats, and candy sweet root vegetables. Can this heat be reproduced by a gas fired oven? Sometimes. Is it more than just incidental that the best you can hope for from a gas fired oven is that it might sometimes approximate the qualities of a wood oven? Absolutely.

Second, and more importantly, though my friend would probably be exasperated at this largely aesthetic supposition, wood changes something in the mind of a cook. Turning a burner on a gas range is done without thought. Building and tending a fire is always demanding of one's attention. A wood fire is wild and unpredictable. You cannot hope for behavioral consistency so you must always be vigilant. You must always, as Irma Baumbeck famously said, "stand facing the stove." A live fire forces the cook to engage, to identify, manage, and master idiosyncrasies with each fire, even hour to hour in the same fire. Instead of worrying only about what goes into the oven, you  must tend to the oven itself. But great control and opportunity await the cook diligent enough to become skilled. This is admittedly a lot to heap on the shoulders of some nineteen year old who is only cooking because he can't settle on a major. For someone with blood of wood smoke and bones of fire brick, it is a constantly shapeshifting opportunity to shine.

Lemme s'plain: without a doubt the best thing I have ever smelled in my life was a failed loaf of bread.

I was obsessed with retained heat baking at Journeyman. When I learned what a real loaf of pumpernickel bread was about, I lost my mind. Today, pumpernickel is mostly a white flour "rye" bread made dark with the addition of dark beer or molasses or, in the worst loaves, some fake colorant. But traditionally, in the days when a German baker used a wood fired oven to bake bread, pumpernickel was loaded into an oven when it was not being refired to bake the following day. The slowly waning heat of the oven was the perfect environment to bake a dense, all rye loaf that could coast to doneness over twelve, maybe even sixteen hours of baking as the oven temperature slowly dropped. It got that dark, almost black color, by slowly baking at low temperatures, skirting the line between delicious and burned, not by the addition of other darkly colored things. This was the bread that the baker took home to his family. It was an intense sourdough that staled slowly, over the course of weeks, not days. It was nutrient dense, flavorful, and as luck would have it, a perfect mate to beer, sausage, and smoked fish.

I spent three weeks making a rye starter specifically for this bread. Four days fermenting the dough in precise stages. On a Sunday night after service, when we would be closed for the next two days and the oven would not be refired for next day's baking, I shaped ten or twelve loaves, loaded them into the softly radiating oven, and went home. When I came in the next morning, the aromas of that bread filled the entire restaurant. It was powerful, inescapable, but still warm and soft and elegant. I will never forget it. I won't try to describe it further. It is not possible. It can only be communicated through the nose. I thought I might cry for a moment. I was so sure I had tapped in to some deep culinary vein that had eagerly awaited a hero to unearth it.

But the bread wasn't good. The oven stayed too hot too long and the loaves were dried out and inedible. We had gone to great lengths when building the oven to insulate it so that it would retain heat for long bake days, and the modern materials we used to do so did their jobs well, too well for real pumpernickel. Something, I would venture to say, no one I know has actually tasted. And I knew it right away, the moment I lifted a loaf and felt its dry, steely, stubborn, unyielding texture in my fingers. I was the only one who would ever know the aroma of pumpernickel from the Journeyman oven, and even I would never know the taste. I didn't bother to try again. I knew our oven couldn't do it. For some reason, I just knew.

Natural gas does not yield such days.

In the fire pit behind me, there are onions roasting in dirty wood coals for the Harvest Dinner I am cooking a course for tomorrow. I don't remember how I came across it, but I find myself a little obsessed right now with escalivada, a Catalan dish of eggplant, onion, tomato, and bell peppers roasted in the coals of an open fire, usually served on bread with salt packed anchovy and olive oil. When I read about it I knew I had to find a home for it in my cooking. So the onions for my salad tomorrow got thrown skin on into the waning embers of a campfire. A fire I lit and enjoyed all by myself. An industrial carbon credit's worth of wood got burned to cook eight large red onions. It took the entire night from lighting, tending, burning wood down to coals, then finally cooking. I'm not sure they are done yet. But they smell good. Not as good as a loaf of failed pumpernickel, twelve hours into baking, but they are certainly making me hungry.

Faster Than Coyotes

The Perseid meteor shower happened tonight. Last night too, but then only clouds and blind darkness. I love these displays but forget that you rarely actually watch a meteor. They appear and fade in a graceful flash. We imagine a long and effervescent line across the sky that we follow with awe and admiration, but really it is only a fraction of a moment in a corner of the eye. By the time you turn your head it is gone. But the awe and admiration never go away; they remain strong enough to drive you outdoors in the middle of the night when the promise of a new show is offered.

I wandered as I often have in this idle summer into the cross street in front of our house in the quiet, country darkness. By this time I am several gin and tonics deep, and have dug into the Scotch ale I planned on aging 'til winter. I am standing in the middle of 122nd Avenue and 62nd Street, the place I love more than any other, looking up at the sky, waiting for meteors. And they come. One. And then another. And then two more. And then nothing. They stop.

But I still stand there, neck craned and beer dangling from limp arms, no less impressed by the sky above me than in the meteor filled moment before. The Milky Way slashes the sky in half and the purple glow from Holland burns out the north sky, but is beautiful in its way. I keep staring at the stationary stars. I wouldn't be here if the Perseids hadn't called me out, but this sky, a sky I have had on every clear night, keeps me captivated. It always does, from the moment the sun begins to set and the late afternoon/early evening light turns otherworldly and gives way to a perfectly quiet night. A breeze always blows through the trees at night here. But even on this corner, which is so noisy all day in the summer, from Hutchins Lake, the winery up the road, the cidery next door, it is so peaceful now. Not one car. And I looked up, here, from the top of the hill, at so much open sky.

And as I stood there, stepping a few inches one way or another to find the exact center of the cross road, where the cement was at its widest, or looking up to the sky for the Perseids, I saw a small black figure a few feet away, moving cautiously from side to side. It took me a minute to realize it was Steve, our cat. When I did, I moved toward her to give her a scratch behind the ear. She waited until I was close, then nervously bolted up and moved a few feet away, closer to the house. We repeated this little dance two or three more times until she had me in the yard, where she amorphously collapsed in the dark grass and finally let me scruff her head. She scurried off into the dark and I went inside to refill my beer.

Glass heavy, I went back into the street to see the stars, falling or otherwise. Not more than a moment passed before I heard the very sorrowful cries of Ginger, the youngest cat in our house, and then saw her, and Steve again (her Momma, incidentally), sheepishly making their way toward me in the road. When they got close, I reached out with affection, which they very suddenly rebuked, and moved toward the house. I finally figured out that they were distressed by my being in the road. The road to them, I guess, is a big rock. A big rock where a remorseless beast with two white, glowing eyes lives, who is faster than coyotes, faster even than the wind. It doesn't do to linger. So they coax me back to shore a few short feet at a time, staying just out of reach.

This is the first time in all my years with pets that I have seen cats behave as you might expect a dog to: with something akin to genuine concern for your well being. Arguably I have drunkenly anthropomorphized these events. But a third foray onto the middle of the road led to another visit from my feline sirens, and I am convinced. All the creatures of this hill watch out for me. And even though the glowing eyed beast hasn't shown itself for hours, it seems wise to be at least equally vigilant.

But the glass is heavy and the stars are falling, and I think even the cats understand. Everyone I know would be in the middle of this road if they were given the chance. And there is one. And then another. And two more. And then a still moment, where only the Milky Way and her stars, who will be here tomorrow and for all the days to come, make me forget there was ever a meteor.

The New Dark Roast

We are a pendulous nation when it comes to our tastes.

As we begin to rediscover good things to eat in the wake of our recent journey away form mass made mediocrity our tastes shift, and often shift too far. In the heyday of the small American coffee house we rediscovered a taste for big, hearty, bitter dark roast coffee in (over)reaction to our disdain for the ordinary. Craft beer helped remind us that hops are not the enemy, and now you're hard pressed to tell the difference between a pale ale and an IPA as the hipster hop heads add more and more hops to the kettle to one up each other. And in the past few years we seem to be more widely appreciative of dry riesling and more apt to turn our recently educated noses up at the sugary sweet stuff.

It is of course very good news that we are becoming appreciative of dry riesling and dark coffee. But for some reason in America when we have a cultural shift in our tastes we have a tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We see our former proclivities as telling of our lack of taste in the days before our enlightenment. This is madness. The fact is you don't give up an appreciation for sweet riesling when you have finally found love for dry. Becoming accustomed to, or even appreciative of hoppy beers does not make malt forward beers less delicious. Smoky, medicinal Scotch does not make bourbon with honey or butterscotch notes at the front any less enjoyable.

As a nation we had tended toward too much sugar in most things. It is arguably an indication of two dimensional taste. Bitter, smoky, mushroomy, moldy (blue cheese) usually take a little more to come to terms with. Desserts in most restaurants are far too sweet. I personally have very little love for cola because it's too sweet. As we begin to consider ourselves a bit more sophisticated in what we eat, early on in this process anyway, we decide unnecessarily and pretentiously that it is time to put childish things aside. And then we start to make more bad choices. Like not drinking light roast coffee or off dry hard cider. We miss out on voluptuous ice wine, silky milk chocolate, and sticky sweet home made jam with the fortitude to stand up to dull, dry toast.

Right now the coffee on my counter is Uncommon Grounds Papua New Guinea, a medium light roast that is complex and powerfully delicious. A dark roast would have killed this coffee. In my fridge there are three different IPA's around a big bottle of malty, sweet, home made scotch ale, two cases of bone dry home made riesling in the basement and an ice wine with 18% residual sugar. To be fair, I am guilty of these same knee jerk overreactions. When I started getting a little more knowledgeable about red wines from France, I started looking at fruit forward Californians with some disdain. Maybe this is because what we have disdain for is the prevailing tide. It's hard to see a passionate sommelier watch his wine list be cherry picked for name known California boutique nonsense in lieu of something really special that doesn't suit the current mood. We would all do well to remember that delicious comes in all shapes and sizes, and sometimes, sweet is more than just sentimental and immediately gratifying.

Good taste is about being open to new flavors and new ideas from all corners of the food and drink world. It is a terrible sin to let your pretensions make your experiences more narrow. That is the opposite of eating and drinking well.

A Walk In The Woods

Photo sent to Andy for proper identification

The phone rang yesterday and Ryan Burke, the cider maker at our new neighbor, Virtue Farms, was on the line asking if I knew what this onion like thing was he just found growing wild around the barn. "There are hundreds of them," he said. I grabbed my phone and went across the street to check it out. A quick photo messaged to Andy Davis confirmed that it was a wild chive, or onion grass, as some people call it. Phone calls are rarely short with Andy. He is intensely well versed in all things wild and edible and will talk about them as long as you'll listen. But yesterday he was a little forlorn. He was sitting on the shore of the Pacific ocean, marveling at it's beauty, but still sad because he was in a part of Oregon that didn't support morels. The weather had finally gotten warm for a day or two in Michigan and we had a bit of rain, all just after Andy left for the West Coast, so he was unable to go hunting for them once the conditions finally favored their appearance.

And as I walked around the barn at Virtue with Ryan, looking at the brittle, Lot's wife like, lifeless shoots of last years wild asparagus, one defiant moment form crumbling into the earth to make way for this year's harvest, I was struck with a bit of that same melancholy. Usually at this time of year I am in a professional kitchen, exploring my way around the newest of the new, vegetable wise. In Michigan, you get through most of winter on storage crops. You get a little sick of potatoes and rutabaga a few weeks before the first thaw will hopefully find the farmer able to dig up a few of last year's jerusalem artichokes or turnips that wintered over, marking the official start to the agricultural season. Shortly after that, again if you're lucky, tender, flavorful wintered over spinach will appear briefly, and then it's time to head to the woods.

The past couple of years working with Andy has taught me that spring is about much more than morels, ramps, and fiddleheads. The woods teem with wild food. Even now, before the morels have even popped, Andy tells me he can get cattail shoots, violets, pokeweed, watercress (if the floodwaters recede), day lily tubers and shoots, wild chives, and, of course, the first of this year's maple syrup. As summer progresses, Andy will bring around dozens of varieties of mushroom, more greens, and edible tubers and shoots, herbs and taproots.

Last year was the first year Andy made aggressive motions toward making his hobby a career, and, unfortunately, we had a severe drought. This year, I have no restaurant. Next year, you can be sure, wild food will be as important to menu formation at St. Anthony as cultivated. It is more than just a little heart breaking to be on the bench this season. When I left Reserve, I was hoping to have more time to write and cook what inspires me with more freedom. Turns out, it was the work that inspired me. Turns  out, I'm not quite the self motivator I thought I was. I will most certainly make good use of this restlessness when I am in front of the stove again.

In the meantime, I should get Andy to take me for a walk in the woods.

Up From The Basement

It was over fifteen years ago when I first salted a leg of pork and hung it to dry. Since then there have been some successes, some failures, but either was the result of luck, groping in the dark to find the target by happenstance if favorable conditions prevailed. But recently Brandon Sturm and I, my long time sous chef, butcher, friend, have posted back to back successes in the the cellar. The last few times we have cured and dried a ham, we acted deliberately. Technique has become codified through experience.

Many things make the achievement good ham elusive: vagaries in written mentorship, the rarity of practitioners who can (or will) teach, the difficulty of appropriating suitable environments to age in. But the biggest thing standing in the way of the novice who wants to become an expert is the 18 months or so it takes to make one. You don't have any results to evaluate for a very long stretch of time, and because so much time has passed, it can be difficult to recall the procedures you went through to produce it even if you took copious notes. And then you make your corrections, and wait another 18 months for those results. It takes tremendous patience and fortitude to get good at curing ham, so it's astonishing that I've actually come to a point where I feel comfortable with the technique and feel good about what I produce. Like I am finally at the very beginning of attaining some level of skill and expertise.

I am not typically someone with a lot of stick-to-it-iveness. I have a banjo, guitar, mandolin, several harmonicas, a ukelele, and I can't play any of them. Usually, my enthusiasm doesn't outlast my incompetence. But when it comes to ham, for some reason, I have the patience of Job. I will go down to my basement and spend time with the hams hanging there, searching for any hint of how they're doing and plotting correct courses of action or inaction. Over the years I've learned to keep things simple. For one stretch I cleaned my hams with a light vinegar solution, then a brine, and finally have come to realize that a clean, dry towel is best. Also, that it is best to disturb them as little as possible.

I have also learned that my basement, where I do my aging, is a massive part of what makes these hams unique. Several people who have eaten them over the years can recognize its particular funk. The foundation is built from a mix of flagstone and cinderblock. It is a walk-out, so two walls are exposed to the elements, leading to swings in temperature and humidity throughout the season. This mimics, though less dramatically, what American country hams go through. So these hams, though they are cured using methods very similar to the curing of prosciutto, are a little wild and funky. When people ask me to describe them, I have a little trouble. They're like, well...just what they are. No, not like prosciutto, no, not country ham. They are the hams from my basement. Be nice to me and maybe I'll let you try one sometime.

As we are preparing for St. Anthony, which will have a temperature and humidity controlled aging room, I sometimes wonder if I'll produce hams. They could not possibly be as interesting as what comes up from the basement. And this is what great food is all about. Great food is something that is tied obviously, tangibly, tastily to the place it is born. It would be more than just a little disheartening to make hams without giving them the exposure to the natural environment they need to stretch their legs and become who they should be.

But maybe that's one of the things that makes a ham from the basement worth celebrating. It is truly local, made by and for the people of this place alone, the inner circle.

I'm guessing I felt directed to write this because, for the first time in years, the basement is empty. There was a long stretch where nothing went up and now they have all matured and been eaten, or are in the process of being eaten. It just doesn't feel the same down there.

Time to salt a pig leg, Sturm.