How to Cook a Moose (23 page)

4 T medium-dry sherry

1 cup heavy cream, scalded

1 cup lobster liquor (liquid from the shells, reserved)

2 large egg yolks

1/3 cup plus 1/2 cup grated Gruyère

Plunge lobsters headfirst into an 8-quart pot of boiling salted water. Loosely cover pot and cook lobsters over moderately high heat, 10 minutes from the time they enter the water, then transfer with tongs to sink to cool.

When lobsters are cool enough to handle, twist off claws and crack them, then remove meat and roe. Halve lobsters lengthwise with kitchen shears, beginning from tail end, then remove tail meat, reserving shells. Cut all lobster meat into 1/4-inch pieces. Discard any remaining lobster innards, then rinse and dry shells.

Heat butter in a 2-quart heavy saucepan over moderate heat until foam subsides, then cook shallots and mushrooms, stirring, until liquid that mushrooms give off is evaporated and they begin to brown, about 5 minutes. Add roe, lobster meat, paprika, mustard, salt, and pepper and reduce heat to low. Cook, shaking pan gently, 1 minute. Add 2 T sherry, 1/2 cup hot cream, 1/3 cup Gruyère, and the lobster liquor, and simmer 5 minutes.

Meanwhile, whisk together yolks and remaining 2 T sherry in a small bowl or the top of a double boiler. Slowly pour remaining 1/2 cup hot cream into yolks, whisking constantly, and, over simmering water, cook the custard, still whisking constantly, until it is slightly thickened and registers 160 degrees F on an instant-read thermometer. Add custard to lobster mixture, stirring gently.

Preheat broiler. (If you don't have a broiler, use a blowtorch.)

Arrange lobster shells, cut sides up, in a shallow baking pan and divide lobster with some of the sauce into shells. Cover with 1/2 cup grated Gruyère, divided. Broil lobsters 6 inches from heat until golden brown, 4 to 5 minutes. Serve remaining sauce on the side, with wedges of lemon. Serves 4.

Chapter Seven

Maple, Mutton, and Moose Muffles

One day, on our way from Portland to the farmhouse, we stopped at the Earle Family Farm on Brownfield Road, just across the border from Maine and just before the turnoff onto our dirt road. This farm is full of life and bursting with activity: weeding, harvesting, moving flats, tending the stand. It's a 130-acre biodynamic farm. Their hand-built greenhouse is filled with flowers and herbs. Next to it is a garden; another, larger one is in the field just above, and their sheep are pastured higher still on the slope of Dundee Mountain. The little store in the barn has a cash box stuffed with change, and it runs on the honor system. Prices are on a chalkboard next to an old hanging scale. Packaged meat and eggs and perishable produce are kept in two old fridges and a freezer. There's an enormous basket of yarn for sale, too, hand-dyed hand-spun skeins from their sheep.

We bought a pound or two each of their just-picked late-summer tomatoes and squashes and cucumbers and peppers, plus eggs from their chickens. We waved to Tom Earle, driving by on his tractor, as
we walked back to say hello to Danny, the new ram. He was markedly obese, and his balls must have weighed twenty pounds, collectively. They hung between his hind legs like giant soft durian-size bobbles, swaying and undulating and almost touching the ground.

“Damn, that boy is hung,” said Brendan.

I laughed.

The fat, fluffy ewe in the barn with him looked exhausted. Ruth, Tom's wife, told us that she'd had to separate them with chicken wire.

The Earles had no frozen lamb that year; the previous spring, Ruth told us, many of their lambs died of something mysterious, a wasting disease. This year, all the sheep were obese, also mysteriously, something to do with the rain and grass and temperature, Ruth guessed, but she didn't know for sure.

“So, no lamb—not now,” she said. “We're butchering chickens in mid-November, though. You want stewing chickens? Yeah, they said they'd do the older hens when they do the turkeys. Nice that it's at the same time. I could do it myself—I know how to do the whole thing, start to finish—but it's better to have someone else do it if you're the only one who can. It's not a job I can do by myself. You eat organ meat?”

“Sure, we do,” I said. I'd happily eat anything at all from their farm.

“Well, I'll keep that in mind when we butcher the pigs. Oh, and I'm running a pickling workshop tonight. I think I'll see what happens if I throw some lemon cucumbers in my pickling mix. Have you ever had one? Here, taste; just brush off those prickly things. Want to come to the workshop?”

I did, in fact, want very much to go, but I had a lot of work to do, and wanted to get to it. I asked if I could come another time.

Ruth sent us home with some sweet, rich mutton sausage made from their ewes that she had in her freezer, refusing to accept any money for it.

Ruth and Tom Earle seem to know how to do everything, in the nineteenth-century style of farming. They are always working, all day, somewhere on their farm. When I was young, in high school and in the years following, I attended and then worked at three different Waldorf schools in anthroposophical communities, so called because they were formed around the teachings of the early-twentieth-century Austrian mystic and clairvoyant, Rudolf Steiner. He gave his overarching philosophy the rather ambitious name of
anthroposophy
, which means “the knowledge of the nature of man.” His theories gave rise, in a practical sense, to revolutionary new forms of education, farming, and medicine.

There were biodynamic farms attached to the communities where I lived—in Spring Valley, New York, and then Chateau de La Mhotte in the Allier district of France, and finally, Harlemville, in Upstate New York—so I couldn't help overhearing a thing or two about its basic concepts, along with discussions of the etheric and astral bodies, Ahriman and Lucifer, Findhorn, and homeopathic medicine. But all I learned, really, about biodynamic farming is that things are done organically, according to the phases of the moon, and it's deeply spiritual, arcane even—not the first adjectives I would use to describe the Earles.

Tom is slight, lanky, handsome in a rawboned way, taciturn, sweet-natured, and warmly practical. Ruth is talkative, energetic, bright-eyed, small and round and strong, with long gray hair and a soft, round face. They look, in fact, like a quintessential nineteenth-century New England farming couple. They do not exude one whiff of mysticism, but evidently intricate beliefs and practices are at least partially the reasons for the abundant, beautiful produce they grow in fields of granite-strewn, thin soil, the unbelievably delicious meats and chickens and eggs from the animals they raise and pasture.

We drove away from the farm discussing their mutton sausage—how good it was the last time we'd gotten some. In the house, we
unloaded the bags of food and put things away. We drank tequila on ice with limes while I made a quick semi-succotash of the Earles' pattypan squash and green-and-orange, knobby, lumpy, richly ripe heirloom tomatoes, chopped and sautéed in olive oil with smoked paprika, Worcestershire sauce, and the tiny bit of old dried thyme left in the glass jar. While it bubbled, I fried four of the eggs we'd just bought. They were so fresh, their yolks were orangey-gold and their whites puffed up a little in the hot oil. I slid them on top of the vegetable stew, two per plate, and we tucked in. The still-runny egg yolks melded into the savory gravy, the whites were crisply browned, and the whole thing was delicious.

The following winter, as we were heading out to take our walk one morning, Tom Earle came up the icy path across the yard to our front door, asking to tap the maple trees that line the driveway by the barn. We tagged along with him over to the barn, where his pickup truck was parked. He scrambled up into his truck bed to gather stacks of galvanized-steel buckets.

“Apparently now galvanized steel is no good for eating,” he said, “but I don't know.”

From the cab, he fetched a ball-peen hammer, a battery-powered drill, a small metal tap, and a plastic spout.

He approached the nearest maple tree. We followed him, clambering over the hard icy packed snowdrift. They're old, the trees here, with silvered, hoary bark, tall and shaggy.

He told us that this was a good time to collect sap now, cold nights and warmer days, when the sap, frozen in the roots all winter, thaws in the sun and rises hydraulically up the trunk and into the branches to feed the tree.

“They have vacuum pumps now, the modern sugarers, and even with the new machinery, they only get about seven percent more than with these old methods. And that's only ten, twenty percent of the tree's sap. Some of them are planting maple trees a few feet apart and when they get high enough, they go through and whack off the tops and take out the sap that way.”

He shook his head and laughed.

“Kind of like mountaintop removal mining,” I said, cringing a little as Dingo took a shit right by the front right wheel of Tom's truck.

Tom politely ignored Dingo and considered the lower trunk. This one already had a hole in it.

“The hole always leaves a little bruise,” he said. “You don't want to use an old hole.”

He walked around the trunk and stopped. “The sap is everywhere right now, but a good spot is usually under a branch.”

He drilled a shallow hole a foot below the biggest low branch, then gently pocked in the metal tap with the hammer.

“You can hear the sound change when it hits the sap,” he said, setting the bucket's handle into the hook in the tap so it was wedged securely just below it. A clear, thin drop welled and pinged into the bottom of the bucket. “The first drop,” he said, attaching the spout.

“I wonder who first thought to tap maple trees,” I said.

“The Indians didn't have buckets, so they hollowed out tree trunks and set them under the spouts to collect sap,” he said. “And to sugar it off, because they didn't have pots, they would drop hot rocks into the tree hollows. It's forty to one, the ratio of sap to syrup. It takes two days in a pot with a good fire going. Imagine how long it took with hot rocks.”

“I wonder if animals like maple sap,” I said.

He laughed.

“Everyone knows sugar,” he said. “I've got a terrible sweet tooth, myself, but we'll have enough maple syrup left over to sell.” He invited us to visit his sugar hut later on, an invitation we accepted, and then off we went for our walk in the sudden springlike warmth. The dirt road had melted in rivulets and ice shards. The air temperature was less than 30 degrees, but the sun warmed everything up.

By the time we got back, less than an hour later, Tom had moved off to tap another copse of maples, and the trees lining the drive each had two buckets attached to their lower trunks.