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/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight ------------\

 I HEART HUCKABEES - OPENING IN SELECT CITIES OCTOBER 1

 From David O. Russell, writer and director of THREE KINGS
 and FLIRTING WITH DISASTER comes an existential comedy
 starring Dustin Hoffman, Isabelle Hupert, Jude Law, Jason
 Schwartzman, Lily Tomlin, Mark Wahlberg and Naomi Watts.
 Watch the trailer now at:

 http://www.foxsearchlight.com/huckabees/index_nyt.html

\----------------------------------------------------------/


A Peach . . . No, a Honey of a Farmers' Market

September 29, 2004
 By R. W. APPLE Jr. 



 

MADISON, Wis. 

ON Saturday, Sept. 30, 1972, 11 produce vendors set up shop
in a street near Wisconsin's majestic white granite
capitol. Customers quickly exhausted their meager stocks. A
week later 85 fruit and vegetable sellers turned up, their
stalls filling much of Capitol Square, to be mobbed by
several thousand eager consumers. 

Such were the modest beginnings of the Dane County Farmers'
Market, now recognized as the largest in the nation by the
North American Farmers' Direct Marketing Association, and
still growing. This year, as the harvest in this fertile
state neared a climax on Sept. 18, more than 20,000 people
made their way from stall to colorful stall, from tomatoes
to bison to apples to cheese, in an almost uninterrupted
river of humanity. Counterclockwise along the sidewalks
beneath the imposing dome they walked, towing wagons,
pushing baby carriages and lugging bulging canvas or paper
bags. 

This is a farmers' market for farmers, run by the farmers
themselves. 

Everything sold must be grown in Wisconsin, and the sellers
must actually have participated in the production of the
goods. On this glorious late-summer day, with the sky a
soaring canopy of robin's-egg blue, more than 300 farmers
from 30-odd counties came to town, many of them driving
through the night to get here by 6 a.m. (By comparison the
Union Square Greenmarket in New York has only about 70
farmers in peak season, but it is part of a network of 47
such markets in 33 locations in the city.) 

The last of summer's bounty was mingled on the stands with
fall fruits and the first tender root crops of winter. The
growers said it had been a wet summer, bad for tomatoes,
but you couldn't tell from those offered by Thomas M.
Eugster of Old Stage Vegetable Gardens in Brooklyn, Wis.,
south of Madison. The tiny yellow Sungolds and the scarlet
Goliaths, big as softballs, could not possibly have been
sweeter. 

"Look at them," said a shopper to his wife. "With those
gigantic T's you could make a BLT without any B or L." 

I walked around with my wife, Betsey, accompanied part of
the time by Odessa Piper, the chef and proprietor of
L'Etoile, a prize-winning restaurant on the square. A
Midwestern Alice Waters, she introduced us to some of the
farmers whose produce she uses in her kitchen, like Anne
Topham of Fantôme Farm in Ridgeway, who makes a delectably
creamy fresh French-style goat cheese; the Weston family,
who grow more than 100 antique apple varieties on 16 acres
near New Berlin, including hard-to-find English delights
like Cox's Orange Pippin and Pitmaston Pineapple, as well
as Esopus Spitzenberg, Thomas Jefferson's favorite; and
Chuck and Jenny Anderson of Artesian Trout Farm, whose
fish, raised in pure, icy water, have a much firmer texture
than those reared in warmer water, which tends to make the
trout sluggish and flabby. 

Much of the produce was organic, and nearly all the
vendors, Wisconsin being Wisconsin, were friendly, obliging
people, a pleasure to talk with. 

On one stand onions were carefully labeled with their
varietal names, like Burgermeister and Stuttgarter. On
another, a photographer's Kodachrome dream, were piles of
peppers hot and sweet, round and elongated, red, yellow,
green and orange. At a third Ms. Piper lovingly rolled a
spectacular purple cauliflower in her hand and pointed out
a head of broccoli romanesco whose mass of pale-green
spirals resembled coral. "Broccoli on acid," she called it.


Terry Romeo of Oxford had three enormous, fleshy,
multilobed mushrooms on his table, each the size of a
serving platter. He finds them growing on oak tree roots
every two or three years, he said, always in the first
three weeks of September. "We call them cauliflower
mushrooms," he said, "$20 each." Ms. Piper bought one. 

Great tubs of cosmos and sunflowers stood behind the fruits
and vegetables, and at the dozen or so stands run by Hmong
families, members of mountain tribes who settled in
Wisconsin (and neighboring Minnesota) after the Vietnam
War, fruits and vegetables were so scrubbed, carefully
trimmed and artistically displayed, they might have been
taken for flowers. 

The Hmong farmers displayed bitter melons, pea sprouts,
squash leaves, holy basil, little Thai eggplants and
gnarled purple eggplants shaped like a witch's hand. One
Hmong woman showed me some sword-shaped leaves and asked me
what they were; she said a friend had given the seeds to
her mother without identifying them. 

Thanks to years covering Southeast Asian wars, I was able
to identify them as convolvulus, or water spinach, a
vegetable much appreciated in the region. 

We started the day, not long after dawn, at the cafe that
occupies the ground floor of Ms. Piper's restaurant. She
bustled in a few minutes after 7, uncharacteristically
late, shirtsleeves rolled, light-brown hair pulled back by
a scarf serving as a headband. With my coffee I was eating
one of the house's flaky, delectable breakfast rolls,
flavored with vanilla, coriander, allspice, clove and
plenty of cinnamon. Ms. Piper told us she called them spice
girls rather than spice swirls because she often puts a
song by the British pop group of that name on the stereo to
fire herself up in the morning. 

"I have to work hard to keep my concepts from getting too
cluttered," she said, "especially this time of the year,
when there is so much good produce." 

Ms. Piper, who started L'Etoile 28 years ago, comes
naturally to her love of natural ingredients. She left high
school in Hanover, N.H., a year early to live on a commune,
gardening, cooking and preserving food starting at the age
of 17, then moving to Wisconsin to live and work on an
organic farm. Largely self-taught, she admits to harboring
a certain suspicion of cooking schools, describing herself
unconvincingly as "an idiot savant" in the kitchen. 

Her culinary hero, she said as she pored over a list of
items to buy at the market that morning, is Michel Bras,
whose Michelin three-star restaurant outside Laguoile on
the windswept Aubrac plateau in south-central France
features spit-roasted local beef and "forgotten vegetables"
on a glass plate decorated with herbs and flowers. 

After checking the list, she slipped it onto a clipboard
and handed it to Nina Camic, a wiry, Polish-born law
professor at the University of Wisconsin who moonlights as
the restaurant's "forager" or farmers' market purchasing
agent, filling a little red wagon as she works the stalls. 

The farmers are credited twice on the restaurant's menu,
in the description of the dishes on the front and in an
honor roll of producers on the back. Other local eating
places have emulated Ms. Piper's farm-to-market-to-table
style, including Lombardino's, for generations a
straightforward red-sauce Italian restaurant, but now,
under new ownership, a showcase for local produce like
tomatoes, fennel and leeks. 

A dazzling array of vegetables appear in L'Etoile's first
courses at this time of the year, in a "sampler" of
burstingly ripe heirloom tomatoes, including red Ping-Pong,
orange Flame, Green Zebra, yellow Mattina and brownish
Black Prince, all from Rink Da Vee's Shooting Star Farm
near Mineral Point, and a salad of mostly wild funghi,
including shiitakes, trumpets, cremini, oyster mushrooms
and lobster mushrooms. 

The menu's vegetarian slot was filled by a crunchy,
deep-fried polenta fritter, given a flavor supercharge by
sweet corn from Heck's Market in Arena. 

Betsey flipped over her chicken breast with Napa cabbage,
both from JenEhr Family Farm in Sun Prairie, which puts its
poultry out to pasture. "Great skin, delicious meat," she
said. "Real chicken flavor, which is rare in the United
States." 

One of our dinner guests, Iowa-born Sam Brown, ordered a
pork chop, cut from Berkshire hogs that had been raised on
grass by Tony and Sue Renger near Loganville, then brined
for three days by L'Etoile's chef de cuisine, Tory Miller,
a protégé of the New York chef Bill Telepan. The chop was
served with potato pancakes, Gravenstein apple rings and
spicy pork jus. 

"The best pork I've ever tasted," Mr. Brown commented
happily. 

Me, I was too busy eating to talk, devouring a rib of
grass-fed, dry-aged longhorn Highland beef from Fountain
Prairie Farm in Fall River, which was edged by an
incredibly flavorful (if dietetically dubious) ring of
old-fashioned ivory-colored fat. I got through most of the
mashed potatoes with blue cheese compound butter, too. 

SO why Wisconsin? An early, well-developed environmental
movement for one thing. A liberal political environment
favoring economic cooperatives. And the soil itself,
especially in the Driftless Area of southwestern Wisconsin.
The glaciers that covered surrounding zones did not touch
this one, which is blanketed with well-drained alluvial
soil. Because it was an important lead-mining center, the
federal government prohibited agriculture in the region
until the 1840's, when it was settled by European
immigrants with farming traditions. 

New growers come into the market every year, and the 2004
rookie of the year, Ms. Piper told us, is one of her
waitresses, Kristen Kordet, who grows tomatoes, Chioggia
beets and rainbow chard with dazzlingly colored veins and
stems. 

Many stalls have been fixtures for years, however, like
those that specialize in that most typical of Wisconsin
products, cheese. Swimming upstream against the tides of
mass production, dozens of Wisconsin farmers and farm wives
produce superb artisan cheeses in the European tradition,
such as Fantôme's chèvre, Hook's sharp 10-year-old cheddar
and Bleu Mont Dairy's firm, tome-shaped wheels reminiscent
of the cheeses of Switzerland, where the family of the
proprietor, Willi Lehner, originated. 

But the king of this particular mountain is Richard deWilde
of the all-organic Harmony Valley Farms near the pretty
town of Viroqua, who loads a 20-foot truck every Friday
night and leaves for Madison at 2:30 Saturday morning,
arriving about 5:30. On a beautiful day, he might sell
$6,000 worth of vegetables or more, but cold, rainy weather
cuts that in half, he said, "and the food pantry" - a
charity - "loves us." 

A bearded, keen-eyed, third-generation farmer whose
grandfather was a buddy of J. I. Rodale, the pioneer
organic farmer and publisher, Mr. deWilde grew up in South
Dakota. He and his partner, Linda Halley, farm 90 acres
planted in more than 60 kinds of vegetables with the help
of their two sons and a number of hired hands. The farmers'
market, he said, is his "show window," which has made the
operation's name in the region and has enabled him to sell
to restaurants in Madison, Chicago and Minneapolis, and
also to run a Community Supported Agriculture plan, in
which 450 local households pay for weekly delivery of
three-quarter bushel boxes of assorted produce. 

Harmony Valley Farms has even broken into big-time
mainstream commerce. Mr. deWilde sells several cool-climate
specialties - burdock, celeriac, daikon and three kinds of
turnips - to Albert's Organics, a wholesaler in Bridgeport,
N.J., and a broader range of vegetables to 18 Whole Food
supermarkets in the Chicago area. 

"Some of my friends at the farmers' market complain about
that," he said, "but they help to keep me going. They pay
on time, and above market price." 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/29/dining/29FARM.html?ex=1097652611&ei=1&en=c6cee89cdd32bd38


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