Eating for Beginners Page 17

  As we entered the coop, it was clear that someone had been peeing in there. It was the goats' mating season, and I guess that explained the smell, which was momentarily overpowering. In a pen to my left were several Alpine does in heat, pacing around and around in the straw, waiting for their meal. A few bucks, with the aforementioned smelly, scraggly beards dangling from their chins, were across the way, staring me down inquisitively. They were, as Lucy had said, pretty disgusting, but they were funny, too, their heads bobbing up and down as they watched us stuff hay into their mangers.

  In the pen next to the does were two male Holstein calves, as black and white and fluffy as stuffed animals, with huge black eyes. Lydia had bought them from another farm to raise and sell herself, and at a few weeks old, they weighed just slightly more than I did. They were wobbly and endearing, their heads too large for their bodies, and when the younger one tried to nurse on Lucy's hand, I started to feel really guilty about all the veal I'd eaten in my life, humanely raised or not.

  As if she could tell what I was thinking, Lucy said, "The way veal has conventionally been raised, I'd never eat it. They're kept in cages, they get scours, which is diarrhea, they get anemic, which is desirable for meat color." These little guys were in a pen now, but they had plenty of room to totter around on their stiff legs and play, and they spent a lot of time outside, too. "I think it's very important for the calves to run around and sit in the sun and stuff like that," Lydia had said to me, tossing out the words with a casualness that belied her obvious love of the animals.

  "Do you feel bad about eating veal when you spend so much time raising them?" I asked Lucy as she fed one of the calves a big pill to help it get over the case of scours it had arrived with (which may have arisen from something as simple as travel or overeating, since calves have delicate digestive systems). She covered the pill with molasses and put it on the calf's tongue, then let the little animal suck on her hand as it swallowed, squeaking with delight while its pen-mate looked on.

  "Some people say, 'How can you eat that?'" she acknowledged, wiping her hand on her pants. "You know from the beginning that they're going to be meat, and you try to raise them as respectfully as you can. I try to think of it as we have a good relationship. I try to treat them well and then they give me something back at the end. But everyone in general should be eating way less meat than we do. Meat should not be cheap, and if it is, you'll pay for it in other ways."

  Then she introduced me to a slightly older Holstein, four-month-old Wink, who was about to be sent for slaughter. He was lying comfortably in what Lucy called the cow lounge, a roofed outdoor area joined to the coop and opening out to the cow pen. He was sweet, too, but not like the babies, primarily because he weighed about six hundred pounds, most of it gained from drinking four gallons of cow and goat milk every day—about a ton of milk over the course of his short life—along with his grain and hay. I had had no idea that veal calves were so big. I'd always imagined them as tiny babies like the two little ones, and it was harder to feel sentimental about an animal that gigantic, with a head wider than my body, who, as Lucy had pointed out, was being treated very well indeed.

  "He'll be veal in a week," Lucy said, patting his rump, "but don't tell him."

  Standing in the doorway between the chicken coop and the cow lounge, I wasn't much in the mood to talk to Wink or anyone else, really. It was profoundly peaceful listening to the animals rustling in the straw. Dark had fallen and my breath hung in the cold air as the goats and calves buried their heads in the mangers and began to eat. The December stars shone high in the sky above Wink's head, calm and bright.

  ***

  "Rooooooooooe-deo!" "Coooome, Bellllllle!"

  It was about five-thirty P.M., and Oliver and I were out in the cow pen in the pitch black, trying to persuade the cows to come down from the upper barnyard so we could milk them. Their names as he called them were long and sweet.

  "Loooooooouuuuu-ise! Criiiiiiiii-cket! Roooooe-deo!"

  I was wearing sweater number three under my padded jacket, along with gloves, long underwear under my jeans, two pairs of socks, and a hat pulled as far down over my ears as I could get it. There was no sound of movement from above, just a faint lowing I thought might be coming from the small warming shed at the top of the slope.

  "Rooooooooe-deeeeeeeoooooooo!" Oliver called again, stretching the word even longer than before, while I stamped my feet on the hard, uneven ground to keep off the cold. He had just come back from his delivery route and changed into an insulated coverall that covered his wiry body from neck to ankle, tucked his shaggy brown hair under a hat, turned up his collar around his beard, and headed out into the evening with me.

  "They hate change," he said. "They can probably see you here."

  How that was possible when I couldn't see them or anything else was unclear to me, but then, what did I know about cows? The only light came from the stars and what spilled from the tiny leaded windows of the milking barn, but maybe they had night vision.

  "Rooooooooooooooe-deo!" Oliver yelled one more time, and finally, after we stood silently for a few more minutes with the cold biting at our cheeks, the cows began to traipse toward us, moving through the dark in lurches and stumbles as their hooves clattered over the frozen, snow-dusted mud ruts. They passed by me one by one, narrowly missing my feet.

  We had already set up the cow-milking area in the barn by putting sawdust on the floor in front of a wooden stanchion, essentially two vertical pieces of wood that could be hooked together at the top to keep the cow's neck in place so she didn't move while being milked. Behind us in two pens were all the milk goats, about fifty of them, which we had brought in earlier from the alleyway, a long roofed area along the side of the coop. When we opened the side door of the barn, the goats, much as the sheep had, poured through in a tremendous stream, running into the main area of the barn and then into the pens, where they made a mad dash for the grain and fresh water I had put out for them. Now they were fairly quiet behind us—the only sounds were of hooves shuffling and grain being crunched—as Oliver led Louise inside.

  He had put some grain in a feeder on the far side of the stanchion; now he guided Louise's head to the feeder, and closed the stanchion around her neck. He cleaned her teats one by one in a soap solution, then strapped a leather belt around her middle, hung a metal milk pan that looked like a big tea kettle from it, and attached the milk pan's nozzles to her udder. As she chewed her grain, he flipped a switch to start the suction pump also attached to the milk pan, and in a moment we heard the zinging sound of milk hitting the metal pan. After a few minutes he felt her udder to see how soft it had become, then gave it a little massage.

  "It's to simulate the calf butting up against it to get the milk to come out," he explained.

  When Louise was done, he turned off the pump and detached the nozzles from her udder. Getting a plastic bucket, he milked out Louise by hand, stripping the last bits of milk from her with strong pulls. Then he unhooked her from the stanchion and led her out into the night, returning with Belle and setting her up the same way with the grain and the leather strap and the milk pan. While kneeling to attach the pan, he stopped for a moment and laid his head against her warm, furry side.

  "Soft," he said, with the delighted look of a child. Then he added, very seriously, "You have to pay a lot of attention to cows."

  It was no wonder the animals from this farm tasted so good.

  While Belle was on the milking machine, Oliver mentioned that he was thinking of taking a part-time butchering job that he'd do after morning chores, "which would be great because then I'd get up early." Considering that he was already getting up at five-thirty to feed the animals and do the morning milking, this struck me as the talk of a total madman, but I held my tongue.

  "I'd milk before going in," he said, "because Lucy already has another job milking at another farm."

  I was officially the laziest person on earth.

  ***

  The g
oats, by contrast, were the opposite of lazy, as I discovered when Oliver asked me to bring two of them into the small milking room while he finished up the cows.

  "Just open the pen and grab two," he said. "They push a little, so watch out."

  Apparently by "push a little" he meant "butt frenetically against you in barely controllable numbers." I learned this the hard way when I unhooked the gate of one of the pens and tried to release just two goats. I barely had it open a few inches when they all rushed toward me and began to shove and jostle and press their funny little faces into my stomach, trying to get out. I ended up using my body first to block them and then, after two escaped around my sides and made a sprint for the milking room, to push the rest back into the pen, literally throwing myself against them. Laughing at both the spectacle and the sheer pleasure of being surrounded by so much instinctive energy, I got a kind of contact high.

  In the milking room, the two escapees had clambered up onto two small platforms, each with a small stanchion at the head, and were waiting patiently to be strapped in and given grain in their feeders. Oliver came in and set them up, attached the milk pan to the first one's teats, then went back to Belle, who was ready to be unhooked in the other room.

  I was alone with two goats that were checking me out big time, wondering if I had more grain for them. To avoid their stares, I looked around the room. There was a small sink, one tiny window, a blackboard with notes about which goats were getting milked only in the morning (the goats that were dry had blue marks painted on their rumps, and whenever one came into the milking room we let it go back outside through the door to the alley). There was also a kidding chart which showed how many had been born that spring.

  "There were fifty-three," Oliver said when he came back in. "Though I'm sure not all of them lived." (To my amazement, no one seemed to have an exact goat count.)

  He moved the milk pan over to the second goat and asked if I wanted to milk out the first one by hand.

  When in Rome, right?

  The first few pulls I made on the goat's teats, which felt rougher than I had thought they would, produced nothing. I tried to remember what Oliver had done with the cows and pulled again. Still nothing. The goat stood placidly chewing its grain, giving me a sideways look now and then.

  My fingers were pretty numb with cold by this point (I had taken off my gloves for milking) so I figured that even if the sensation of milking a goat was unpleasant, I'd never know. I grabbed on and folded my fingers in around the teat one by one, pulling down hard as I did. A stream of milk shot into the stainless steel bucket.

  "Nice!" said Oliver.

  "I guess I was being too gentle," I replied. "I had no idea goats were so tough."

  And from then on I milked with vigor. I liked the goats and their zany ways, and I liked that they were tough enough to accept a little incompetence without a fuss.

  After about two hours, Oliver had finished with the cows and we had milked about twenty goats. Lucy came to the door and said she was going to take Venus, a sly beige-and-white doe, over to the chicken coop to breed her with Spartan, a buck I had seen prancing around in a pen earlier. No way was I going to miss this.

  Grabbing Venus, Lucy led her out of the barn, across the frozen cow pen, and into the coop. We pushed her into the pen with the other does and Spartan, who had already done his job with his current penmates, and shut the gate. He chased Venus around for a minute or two and then mounted her from behind for no more than a few seconds.

  "Is that it?" I asked Lucy.

  "Yup," she said, laughing. "You can tell because he threw his head back."

  And with that we went back to the milking room, where Oliver was cleaning up. When he was done we walked out to the main room, where he had a bucket of milk for Wink.

  "Do you want to try some?" he asked, dipping a cup into the bucket and handing it to me.

  I sipped. It was slightly thicker than pasteurized, homogenized milk, and much silkier. Its flavor wasn't strong but had an earthy, alive quality I'd never tasted in milk before, and it was still slightly warm, though it was losing its heat by the second in the frigid air. Oliver poured the rest of the milk into a huge metal bowl for Wink, opened the barn door and called him over, and the calf and I drank together. When we had both swallowed the last drop, Wink ambled back to the cow lounge and the rest of us went to the house for our dinner.

  Over an improvised pasta carbonara, which I made with eggs from the farm and store-bought bacon, Lucy and Oliver told me how they had gotten into farming. Oliver was from a military family. When his father, a colonel, retired to Alaska, Oliver followed him and got a job on a fishing boat there. Later he worked for the National Marine Fisheries Service in Massachusetts, which was where he met Lucy when she was on vacation on Cape Cod. She had grown up in a family of writers and editors in Connecticut, and after graduating from Smith in 2001 had moved to Boston to work for a nonprofit group that mentored teenage girls.

  "But I never felt totally comfortable in the city," she said as we ate our pasta. She went to visit a cousin at Vermont Shepherd, a sheep farm in Putney, and everything changed in a flash. "I arrived at one A.M. in the moonlight," she recalled. "I found a pair of sandals in the barn that fit me and I had a cup of coffee that was the best coffee I ever had." She left Boston for Vermont Shepherd as soon as she could. "I was so stressed there and I never saw my roommates even though we were good friends because no one was ever at home," she said, shaking her head. "And I always just wanted to be home."

  When Oliver lost his Fisheries Service job, he too fled to Vermont Shepherd. He and Lucy first contacted Lydia when they were considering taking jobs at another sheep farm and wanted information about joining her co-op and the market for lamb. She offered them work and they accepted, thinking it would be good preparation for running a farm of their own someday. "Farm families seem to thrive," Lucy told me. "I want a farm family."

  How they would achieve their dream was another matter. "Getting on the land in the first place is a big hurdle," Lucy explained. "Inheriting seems to be the way to go because then you have only the taxes, though they're high, and not the mortgage. It's only going to be a more and more prevalent and pressing issue as the average age of farmers climbs—I think now it's fifty-five nationally—and those aging farmers have to consider transferring farms or selling or whatever." Leasing land was another option. As Lucy put it, "Lots of landowners want to do the 'responsible thing' with their land, but can't or won't do it themselves." In fact, just over a year after we met, she and Oliver rented land on a former dairy farm just down the road from Lovejoy Brook and turned it into a small working farm with chickens, pigs, and sheep.

  But that was later. Lucy's immediate future held animals that would need to be fed and milked the next morning at six o'clock, so we said goodnight. When I pulled back the comforter on the bed in Lydia's guest room, I found a top sheet printed with sheep, Lucy's representatives of sleep. I took one look and sank in gratefully among them.

  Pasta with Bacon, Farm-Fresh Eggs, and Cream

  6 eggs

  ⅓ cup heavy cream

  1 cup grated Parmesan cheese

  1 pound pasta (penne or spaghetti)

  ½ pound bacon

  black pepper

  1. Separate the eggs, reserving the whites for another use.

  2. Mix together the eggs, the cream, and half the Parmesan cheese.

  3. Cook the pasta in a large pot of boiling water. While it is cooking, sauté the bacon in a pan until it's crisp.

  4. When the pasta is done, drain and mix with the hot bacon and its drippings.

  5. Add the cream/egg/cheese mixture slowly, stirring so the egg coats the pasta rather than cooking in bits. When you've finished this, add the black pepper to taste and mix again.

  6. Serve with the remaining cheese.

  Serves 4 as a main dish.

  Lucy's Osso Bucco

  (adapted from The Silver Palate Cookbook)

  1 cup unbleached al
l-purpose flour

  salt and pepper

  about 6 pounds veal shanks

  ½ cup olive oil

  4 ounces (1 stick) butter

  2 medium yellow onions, coarsely chopped

  6 large garlic cloves, chopped

  ½ teaspoon dried basil (more if fresh)

  ½ teaspoon dried oregano (ditto)

  1 quart canned tomatoes

  2 cups hard cider

  parsnips, carrots, celery root, or other root vegetables, coarsely chopped

  2 cups chicken stock

  ¾ cup chopped parsley

  1. Season the flour with salt and pepper and dredge the pieces of veal shank. Heat oil and butter together in a large Dutch oven or casserole and sear the veal, browning well on all sides. Transfer it to a plate.

  2. To the Dutch oven, add onions, garlic, basil, and oregano and cook, stirring occasionally, for 10 minutes.

  3. Add tomatoes and salt and pepper to taste, and cook for 10 more minutes.

  4. Add the cider and vegetables and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer for another 15 minutes.

  5. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

  6. Return veal shanks to Dutch oven and add stock to cover. Bake, covered, for hours. Remove lid and continue baking for another 30 minutes or so, until veal is very tender.

  7. Sprinkle with chopped parsley; serve hot.

  Serves 4 with big appetites, for dinner.

  12. Farm to Cleaver

  "THERE'S COFFEE in the kitchen."

  What seemed like only five minutes after I bade the sheep goodnight, Lucy was by my bed, patting me on the shoulder and saying those magic words. They were enough to make me drag my stiff body out of bed (apparently I hadn't been using my goatherding muscles much in the city). After splashing water on my face, I made a goatlike beeline for the kitchen. Lydia was there already, with a clipboard and a list of tasks to be done that day, including bringing firewood closer to the house, ready for a storm.