Lammas. Practice Austerity. Tomato.

Travel

1 Aug

Lammas is a celebration of the beginning of the season of harvest, of the fruits of the year. Yet the extreme midsummer heat strikes me with a note of warning as menacing as a snow storm or a flood. I feel like battening down the hatches. I rush around before midday managing irrigation systems and lamenting the overgrazed pig paddock where bare soil is baking in the sun. So much work and planning is entailed in true ‘sustainability’ when it comes to growing food. Our crops need to be diversified and the harvest spread over a broader season in case we lose a key crop to drought, disease, disaster.

However, this buckling down to what’s essential is potentially an opportunity for creativity. And can result in eating more diversely. Even small moves like diversifying your tomato varieties, their planting time, and their location each year gives better results. Spreading the harvest over the shoulder seasons of the year giving you bitter greens in late fall and early spring, using crops in multiple ways (eg. kale for micro greens to winter staple to spring flowering shoots) — there are countless measures we can take to shore up our food growing.

I often think of WWII food austerity in Britain because it’s a recent instance of a collective effort to get by in difficult times. What if we had to live on very little? Across the board and optimized for survival — not due to inequality and deprivation, but rather if we decided to pull together as human beings and work with the planet. What would be essential and what could we do to add value and spice? In wartime Britain it was: 4 ounces of meat per week, no white bread, powdered eggs, but lots of vegetables. However they clung to the familiar (and reliable) potato, carrots, and cabbage. In a time and culture mostly ignorant of olive oil and garlic, chile and squash, they managed to survive. But what if they’d grown polenta corn and raised pigeons for meat? Run pigs under every apple orchard? Embraced beans as a major protein source and culinary joy? Utilized heritage breeds more extensively on smaller scale farms? They didn’t have much time to prepare and even hemmed in by cultural conventions they did reasonably well. With planning and practice we might do much better.

Austerity, working from a limited palette, can be a source of creativity. We start to see what works best and how many pathways there are to get there. Diversity is not a luxury but a requirement for resiliency. Take potato varieties. We realize the potato is a key food crop but we don’t just grow masses of one kind. If I grow an early fingerling, a red ‘new potato’ that also stores well, a main crop storage variety like German Butterball, and a purple potato, and change my varieties from year to year I will spread my risk across the season —and the seasons. Purple varieties are closer to the wild origins of the potato and therefore hardier, early potatoes give me a crop before any blight could set in, stored potatoes are safely tucked away for winter, field rotation prevents soil depletion.

Utilizing heritage breeds of livestock also diversifies yields. A Dexter cow eats a fraction of what a Holstein does, has excellent beef and potentially high value milk as well. Muscovy ducks give large eggs, raise their young well, do more mowing of grass than other ducks, and have larger, dark-meat carcasses. Monocultures are a liability. Relying on Holsteins entirely, or white potatoes, carrots and one variety of cabbage is risky. It seems easier but in the long run it is not.

For all this thought of tightening the belt, Lammas is the festival of fruition! A celebration of the harvest coming in. The wheat and straw and hay are cut, drying in the sun. The fruit of the vine is moving toward ripeness. Not only grapes but here we’re waiting for tomatoes. The small cherry ones that come in flame orange, scarlet, cream-gold, and one that’s a purple-black. Later the body of the harvest arrives with rubenesque slicers, pert dense drying tomatoes, and meaty red Oxhearts— more flesh than seed, these provide a pulpy, tart sauce for winter. In Italy they will be running tomatoes through the de-seeder and cooking vats of the thin sauce known as Salsa Pronta (‘ready sauce’) which goes into all the dishes of the rest of the year.

Or they will be spreading the sauce on wooden boards to dehydrate in the sun to become conserva, a dense paste of concentrated sugars and flavors worth its weight in gold. Each evening it is scraped back into a container, each morning spread out again. Daily it grows thicker and thicker, turned by the sun into the focused essence of tomato.