The year before we moved, I’d been writing for the weekly Princeton Packet, covering home and garden features like the Baptist church’s hundred-year anniversary potluck, as well as the beat no one wanted, the Planning and Zoning Board meetings. These civic gatherings, focused on land-use issues—water drainage, setbacks, building codes—were long, contentious, and fascinating. Residents fought to hold development at bay in an effort to save lush farmland while the real-estate lawyers, with flip charts and projections, promised increased tax revenues, new schools, and community centers. I watched as, quick as a cold snap in autumn, the bucolic landscape gave way to malls and condos for New York and Philadelphia commuters. By the time we left Princeton, the farm stands along Route 35 were gone. To find a Jersey tomato you’d have to grow your own.
As we fit the last box into the trailer, delaying our goodbyes, I offered to host Thanksgiving. My dad’s favorite holiday involved our extended family and assorted friends and, for as long as I could remember, had been held in my parents’ home. But Dad squared his shoulders and gamely said, “Sure. Why not?” When he promised to fly everyone out, I sighed in relief and excitement. I had a date and a focus to frame this adventure, a purpose and deadline by which to get my turkeys in a row; Thanksgiving would be my guide star to a new place.
Kevin and I barreled into the land of the “Jolly, ho ho ho . . . Green Giant” with a bouncy, week-old brown Labrador pup, Hershey. Through Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, acres of monotonous neon-green corn rolled by. These large tracts looked nothing like the uneven patchwork of crops on the small farms in NJ. In fact, what was growing here was not edible corn but the ingredients for sodas and food products. Where were the people? Where was the food? We pulled off the highway in search of a diner, and drove along ghostly main streets of empty storefronts, anchored by gas-station convenience stores. The only produce—apples individually wrapped in plastic, bruised bananas, and shriveled oranges—was tucked on a back corner shelf. White-bread sandwiches in clamshells and hot dogs spinning on heated rollers: all looked pretty grim.
Eventually, as we cleared Madison, the countryside began to soften to more natural shades of gold and pale green, and we wound up I-94 through central Wisconsin’s rolling fields, under wide skies and tumbling clouds. Cattle grazed on greening pastures and horses wandered near big red barns. When we finally crossed the St. Croix River into Minnesota, my heart, opened by such expanse, was humble and hopeful.
Soon as we unpacked the last box in the lower level of our Minneapolis duplex rental, we met up with a classmate of Kevin’s at Becky’s Cafeteria for what he called the “true Minnesota lunch.” On the corner of Hennepin Avenue, one of the city’s main arteries, Becky’s was a huge, dim space of velvet curtains and soft organ music. On a table near the cafeteria line, a Bible was opened to Jeremiah, chapter 31, for casual reading. Becky’s offered a “four-square” selection cucumber and sour cream salad (eighteen cents), beef loaf (seventy-two cents), potato hash (thirty-five cents), and a slab of Jell-O, plus warm, soft potato rolls just out of the oven and apple pie with a crust so rumpled and uneven, it had to have been homemade. Every seat was taken—by bearded students, business suits, blue-haired women. The meal was honest, but I had to wonder: Do people here really eat swampy broccoli, iceberg lettuce, and fried chicken for lunch everyday? Not far from our home, the Red Owl grocery stocked disappointing soft apples and wimpy carrots, aisles of frozen dinners and shelves of packaged mac and cheese. We had landed in “the nation’s breadbasket” only to find it filled with tasteless white bread.
But on a tip from our neighbor Bettye, a chatty retired teacher who had delivered a batch of fresh blueberry muffins to our front door, I ventured off one Saturday morning to find the Minneapolis Farmers’ Market. There, I was swept into a whirlwind of colors and aromas—brilliant red tomatoes, glossy eggplants, crimson crab apples, wrinkled tiny hot peppers—aromas of damp earth, wet wool, coffee, sweat, and sweet cider—jolly laughter and shouts in languages I couldn’t understand. I stopped at a mound of orange carrots with frilly green tops and handed a dollar to the grower, Eugene Kroger, for a bundle of roots that resembled his gnarled fingers. He rubbed off a little bit of dirt and gave me a carrot to taste. With a delicious crunch, and for a bittersweet moment, I tumbled back to my grandmother and those New Jersey farm stands.
Registering my delight, Kroger smiled. “These are plenty fresh, I picked them at 4:00 a.m. this morning,” he said, and bit into a carrot, too. This exchange between cook and farmer is as familiar to me as my childhood and as ancient as civilization.
So began a Saturday ritual and unlikely friendship between this rugged back-to-the-lander and me, the curious ingénue, connected through our love of sweet carrots. I’d bring him a coffee and he’d slip me an extra carton of raspberries or a melon or two. This Vietnam vet, missing a leg, did not look as though life had pummeled him into the ground. “Working the land,” he said, “I figured it out.” On Saturday mornings, I rose early and left our quiet house, drawn to the jostling, shouting, and tasting, the aromatic life that brimmed in those stalls. Each week served up a surprise as the season built to the crescendo of harvest. Gritty and colorful, chaotic and coded, the market was seductively real. Through the months, I began to get a sense of this place, its food, and the people who grew it and bought it. And I knew that here, in the market, I might find the life I wanted, guided by memories of those I loved and all that I’d left behind.
The farmers’ market was more than the source of a week’s fresh produce; it was a wellspring of inspiration, a weekly calendar of the land’s bounty. There, I also met Pakou Hang, an energetic Hmong teenager who explained how to steep fragrant lemongrass in soup, toss Thai basil in salads of chicken and beef, and roast and mash her farm’s ruddy sweet potatoes with fish sauce. As she dug into the cash box to make change, she’d translate my questions for her grandmother, who sat in a lawn chair next to the family’s van. The grandmother answered in Hmong, smiling and gesturing with her hands, chopping vegetables, stirring a pot, and warning me about her fiery leghorn peppers, named for a chicken’s ankle. As I carried home my market basket of bok choy and bitter melon, Kroger’s carrots and tiny strawberries, I could almost feel my grandmother’s hand in mine.
My mom had slipped her copy of The Joy of Cooking into one of our moving boxes and when I unpacked this unexpected gift it greeted me like an old friend. As a teenager I’d tucked it into my book bag to read like a novel when I should have been studying. All through college, when I’d felt lost or homesick, I’d turned to cookbooks to soothe and entertain.
And cookbooks, too, had introduced me to agriculture’s environmental issues back when I had been a graduate student living in a shared house, cooking with friends. Diet for a Small Planet and The Moosewood Cookbook had been our Bibles of food awakening. Fueled by nicotine and cheap wine, we’d lingered for hours at our table, an old door propped on cinder-block legs, discussing farm issues and claiming “the personal is political”—talking over Cesar Chavez and workers’ rights, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the dangers of Alar and DDT.
So, as I sat at the table my brother had built for our first Minneapolis kitchen, turning those sticky, dog-eared pages, I began to feel more at home. Beneath a cookbook’s lists of ingredients and steps to follow lie tales as rich and deep as any to be found in fiction. They are forays into families’ homes and glimpses into far-off lands redolent of garlic and rosemary, saffron and cardamom. Recipes are stories with happy endings, of being sated and cared for in a way that feels gentle. I’d even suggest that the intentions of a cookbook author are the same as those of a novelist: