Pennsylvania
Essential Ingredients
From Greg Atkinson
Start with the best ingredients and you can’t go wrong. But what are the best ingredients and why are they the best? More often than not, the best ingredients are the ones that are grown nearby, harvested at their peak, and eaten within a reasonable distance from their source. Certainly that’s true here in the Northwest. We’re very fortunate. Our region is home to some of the most compelling native ingredients found anywhere in the world, and the local climate supports a wide variety of things from far away. The harvest season is long, and the yields are abundant.
The best ingredients may also be defined by a kind of alchemy that comes with familiarity. As we eat and cook with the plants and animals that thrive all around us, our own experience with these ingredients adds to their inherent value. Stopping at the same farm stand for raspberries or fresh corn first as a young couple, then with kids in the car, lends a ritual significance to the ordinary rhythm of the seasons. Visiting the same mushroom patch year after year, or fishing from the same special spot on a mountain stream, gives each year’s harvest a kind of poignancy, and each summer’s catch a kind of relevance that would never come to the one-time forager or the casual diner. Ingredients become essential when they link us to the rest of our lives.
The first time I tasted a local oyster, it made me long for the oysters of my childhood, the apalachicola oysters of the Gulf coast where I came to know the taste of the sea. I could hardly appreciate the local oyster for what it was, because I was so keenly aware of what it wasn’t. Now, after two decades of tasting Northwest oysters, I appreciate them more. Each one reminds me of a place, a time, a particular occasion. How much more local oysters mean to me now than they did when I brought that first quivering mollusk to my mouth!
Who could have known where it would lead? Dorée Webb, the woman who gave me one of my first Washington oysters, owned Westcott Bay Sea Farms with her husband then, and she wanted me to try her oysters so that I would serve them in the restaurant where I had just come to work. I presented those oysters to our patrons in myriad ways, simply chilled on the half shell, steamed open and drizzled with butter sauce, grilled open, baked with savory toppings, puréed into velvety bisques for a succession of Valentine’s Days, and for one special New Year’s Eve, stewed whole with saffron, cream, and flakes of 18 karat gold. Who could have guessed that Dorée would visit me again in the same kitchen seven years later when she knew, but I didn’t, that she was dying and that in just a few days, she would give up food altogether to die in her home by the oyster beds?
How could I have known the first time I pondered a seed catalogue with a farmer one dark January afternoon to talk about what he might grow and what I might cook the following summer that we were developing a relationship that would help nurture us both for a decade or more? Who could guess that we would sing soulful songs together in his garden, toasting our new babies with red wine and sharing his wife’s sourdough bread? Who could know how I would come to miss him when the season for seed catalogues came around and I had moved away?
Even the barely edible wild roses that captured my senses the first time I saw them growing beside the freeways are so thoroughly tied now to my understanding of the changing seasons that I can read the months of the year by the condition of the rose bushes along my favorite trails. They contribute next to nothing in the way of my actual food, those roses. But the rose-petal jellies and rose-scented teas I occasionally enjoy, and often think about, keep me grounded on the great wheel of time, even as the years spin uncontrollably by.
Berries, mushrooms, leafy greens, sacks of potatoes, and the bounty of the sea are more than just food, they are vital links to the elements that formed them and to the people who grew and gathered them. A cornmeal-crusted trout sizzling in bacon fat connects a happy camper to the lake and the water that tastes like the stones from which it sprang. A beet pulled shaking with dirt from the garden is a bridge to the very earth that bore it. The foods that thrive here in the Northwest are more than items on a list of ingredients, they are points of departure, they are almost, but not quite, the raison d’être for the recipes they inspire. But of course producing something good to eat is the real purpose of any recipe. And linking a collection of recipes to the people and the places that inspired them is reason enough, I hope, for any collection like this one.
I have never been able to accept that old analogy of man as machine and food as fuel. In the great scheme of things, I imagine that we are not machines at all, but we are something between animals and angels, and food is the golden chain that keeps us connected to both worlds. To the degree that we devour it unthinkingly, we are like the former, and to the degree that we celebrate it with understanding and gratitude, we are like the latter.
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See also Greg’s Steamed Pacific Oysters With Sweet Organic Wine Butter Recipe
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Greg Atkinson is author of West Coast Cooking
OrganicToBe.org | OrganicToGo.com
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, and Williams-Sonoma: Cooking For Baby, and lives in Sausalito, California.
