OFF CARTE

THERE’S POETRY GROWING IN OUR GARDEN
On food, wine, and working with the endless poetry of nature

BY Off Carte

—Our column exploring consumption of another kind. Celebrating food in season and the stories that nourish our souls. For we are all consuming together.

‘Sitting in Alice’s garden, I was thinking of the harvest that’s now behind me… Her reference is always music for the light, fragile, but still powerful expression of Ploussard, Savagnin, and the Jura in general. It’s not about the importance of one instrument but the balance between many that creates the beauty of music, she says.’

—Anders Frederik Steen

We have a garden now! And I love how poetic that feels. How it lends a whole new meaning to working with nature and using what you have in the kitchen.

Sometimes it is about using less rather than more, too. It is all about quality and freshness. Like with butter and wine—those seemingly small ingredients can make such a big difference to a meal. And sure, you can use a bottom shelf wine to cook with, but a good quality bottle will make your sauce so much richer and more complex. French cooks understand this, sometimes using a whole bottle of really great Bordeaux to flavour a dish. Because, at the end of the day, you only get out what you put in.

Totally. That reminds me of when we tried some wine that a friend had made, in two different versions. Both were the same rose, but one contained Sulfur for preservation and the other one did not. The first tasted like many conventional wines do—clean, crisp, and consistent. While the second was wild and alive, a much better wine in our opinion. You could taste the poetry of nature, as Anders Frederik Steen would say.

Steen started as a sommelier in his native Copenhagen—first at Noma, then opening Relæ and Manfreds—before beginning his journey as a winemaker in southern France in 2013. Last year we came across his book ‘Poetry Is Growing in Our Garden’ and have enjoyed thumbing through the pages of wine notes and diarised processes from the winemaker’s cellar.

Since starting to make wine, the book synopsis explains, ‘Anders has filled notebooks: ruminations on what it means to understand (and misunderstand) wine, taste and pair it, leave the restaurant industry behind, where the balance lies between manual skill and abstract philosophy in a winemaker’s practice, and the technical minutiae of someone deep into his craft.’

Making mistakes and perfecting the craft are half the beauty of making food and wine, I find. It’s so nice, having just moved back to the country, after both spending some time growing up there. I’m really excited to be so surrounded by nature again and to have the opportunity to introduce this into our kitchen more. Last week, our friends dropped over some squash and zucchini flowers, fresh from their veggie patch. And, as we plan out what we want to plant in our first real backyard, I find myself drawn to the idea of an edible garden. Like nurturing our citrus trees and planting some chamomile flowers to dry up for tea.

I pulled some bulbs from the garden last week, hoping they might be onions. They weren’t. But I love those kinds of possibilities. And the Southern Highlands is great for truffles and wild morels, too, so I’m excited to go hunting for those during season. I remember watching a Rick Stein episode, where he interviews an Italian man whose dog started bringing back these pungent space diamonds from the forest. He had no idea what they were at first, but now takes his dog hunting for those precious truffles every year and lavishes a very simple pasta with their inky tendrils of earth incarnate.

It is magic, discovering these expressions of pure poetry, especially by accident. Nature is amazing. One of my favourite quotes in ‘Poetry is Growing in Our Garden’ is all about embracing the “mistakes” in wine. ‘I find mistakes more interesting than perfect, clear, correct wines,’ Steen writes. ‘It’s an interesting subject. I like to think that mistakes are part of the road I need to travel, from drinking a wine to incorporating it, and then to falling in love with it. A mistake in a wine is like a pause in a sentence; is it a mistake or is it just what makes the sentence interesting and beautiful?’

I think that’s very true of food as well—sometimes it’s the imperfections that help us to explore new flavours and ways of doing things. Nature has so much to teach us in this way too. One year’s harvest might be more plentiful than the next, but with less bounty might also come a juicier fruit. So we have to learn to trust the process. I have never been great at tending to different plants’ needs, but I am so eager to learn now that we have the opportunity.

I remember reading about how Gabrielle Chanel ordered some camellia plants more than a century ago and how the seedlings from two of those mother plants are still being used by the House today. And I thought it would be so special to have mother plants that we could pass down to future generations one day.

For sure! It was really special planting the herb garden with our son recently, too. And teaching him how to water and care for those plants. It feels nice to get him involved early on, so that he can get his hands in the dirt and understand where food comes from. Like the parsley we used in a big batch of pesto or the rosemary we sprinkled over baked potatoes.

We also made a bouquet garni together for a slow cooked Sunday lunch. Bouquet garni is a French aromatic bouquet of bay leaves, thyme, and parsley, which I tied together with a stalk of rosemary and tossed in to flavour the dish. Little touches like this make such a difference in terms of flavour and feel.

Yes! The feel of the meal—I love this idea. Cooking can be such a meditative practice, especially when it is grounded in beautiful traditions. In either honouring ancestral traditions or laying them down for future generations. With bouquet garni, for example, French cooks apparently started using those aromatic bundles to add subtle flavour as early as the 1600s. That represents a beautiful sense of tradition and one whose simple poetry now finds its home in so many kitchens across the globe.

I feel a similar kind of reverence around less wide-ranging but even more deeply personal traditions—in family recipes. Like my grandmother’s butter cake, a golden loaf topped with passionfruit icing and the traditional marker of all our birthdays growing up. Technically, Mary made this cake by feel, so there is no real recipe. She has generously “given” it to me over the years but, comparing those scribbled notes, there are always variations between each version. She didn’t measure out the milk, but always just knew when it was enough. So I have to rely on feel as well, when baking this cake for our son’s birthdays now. It is never quite the same as Mary’s butter cake, but the sentiment makes up for any inconsistencies in taste or texture.

It is such a cool thing, for recipes like that to be passed down through the generations. I can’t wait to share recipes with our children that they can then pass on to their children in turn.

…

fin.