Bitter and Sweet

a travel journal about people, food and two things, existing at once

Oct 19, 2024

This glorious dish of roasted squash, yogurt, walnuts and spiced green sauce came from Joshua McFadden’s book Six Seasons: A New Way with Vegetables. Thank you Jo-Ann.

A few weeks ago I sat down for dinner in an apple orchard. It was a group effort - we carpooled, parked along the road, and out of the trunks of cars came folding tables, table settings, napkins, drinks, tourtière, focaccia, roasted squash, wooden cutting boards, kale salad, sautéed greens, cheese, and bouquets of dahlias, cabbage, cosmos and zinnias from a flower farm near-bye.1 The apple orchard belongs to Hutten Family Farm,2 growers of tree fruits and vegetables. Ted Hutten, his wife Debra and their daughter joined us in the orchard at the table. Ted’s mother arrived between the trees on her ride-on lawn mower and joined us too. For dessert we ate apple pie and apple cider gingerbread bundt cake3 made from Ted’s apples, and I made, once again, my friend Eshun’s Plumble Bars4 with the last of my market plums. I can’t stop with those bars. We sat amidst apple trees laden in fruit with grass under our feet. Just beyond our long table was a tree with apples hanging from only half of its branches. “It takes turns,” Ted explained. “One year it fruits on one side, the other side the next.” Two things, existing at once.

Early in the meal Simon, one of Ted’s long-time customers, offered Ted a spoonful of sautéed puntarelle, a variety of chicory from Italy that Ted grew and sold to Simon at the market the day before. Fresh from the ground, puntarelle looks like a tangled bouquet of light green limbs with tips that resemble dandelion leaves. Puntarelle is part of the chicory family. Unlike chicory, the tender stalks need soaking in cold water to soften their bitterness. Ted is hard working, funny and quick to shrug off our love for his unique, heirloom vegetables. He took a small bite then passed it on to his wife. “Too bitter,” he said, smiling. I scooped mine up with a wedge of crisp apple. Bitter and sweet. Two things, existing at once.

After we ate Ted led us down the road to where he grows his vegetables. He walked us through long rows, pulling and slicing off samples with a little pocket knife - fat carrots, white radishes with hot pink insides, tiny bunches of kalettes, chartreuse romanesco framed by fat leaves, and tangled heads of puntarelle. He told us that curiosity, customer requests, and vegetables that work best in this soil are the factors in deciding what to plant. The last rows were zinnias - pops of height and colour under the early autumn evening sky.

A few weeks later I was sitting at the bar at King,5 a restaurant in New York. I brought a book to read (the secret when dining alone) and soaked up the mid-week busyness. Two women sat down beside me full of style and energy from a day in the city. When my salad arrived - a tangle of sliced pink chicory, leaves of pink radicchio, sliced plums and marinated mission figs - they leaned in. “We love this for you,” they said, “this moment with a book and a pretty salad, all to yourself.” A bitter, crunchy, sweet and soft moment in the midst of a busy West Village restaurant. Two things, existing at once.

The next morning I walked to a bookshop not far from the hotel where Maira Kalman was launching her new book, Still Life and Remorse. (I couldn’t believe my travel luck - a Maira Kalman neighbourhood book launch, and one that promised to serve fresh scones and coffee too.) Maira Kalman is a New Yorker who captures daily life through her work as an artist and writer. This book, like much of her work, holds the tension between beauty and pain. She once told an interviewer6 that she starts her day reading the obits and ends it with a murder mystery. In between she lives her life - walking, cleaning, cooking, making art, all in celebration of the beauty and humour that surrounds her.

I bought a copy of the book, helped myself to a scone and joined the queue of fans with books pressed against their chests. The man in front of me introduced himself, saying he was a freelance editor and a fellow Maira fan. We talked about our favourite bits of Maira’s work as the line slowly moved through the travel and self-help sections. By the time we reached the fiction section, he was telling me juicy bookstore gossip. “Ann Patchett reads The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard every year,” he whispered. “And every year the author Yiyun Li reads War and Peace. Imagine.” By the time I got to the front of the line, I wondered if Maira Kalman ever read the same book, every year. Instead of asking her I blurted out her how much I loved the cake book she wrote and illustrated with food writer Barbara Scott-Goodman.7 “I make the chocolate cake every year,” I told her, answering my own question. She smiled and drew a cake stand under my inscription. “That’s a great cake,” she said. “And cake is so often the answer. I think I’ll go home and make it this afternoon.”

I brought my new book to a nearby café and found a seat outside. I sipped coffee and read it as the city honked and screeched and yelled all around me. Two things, existing at once.