The United States of Arugula (30 page)

A native of Rochester, New York, Katzen was something of a reluctant
counterculturist. She had originally enrolled at Cornell University in Ithaca, but her matriculation there coincided with the most tumultuous period in the school’s history. The student body shut down the campus twice for long stretches—in 1969, in the cause of the Vietnam Moratorium, a massive antiwar protest, and in 1970, in protest against the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the subsequent murder by National Guardsmen of four student protesters at Kent State University. “I just kind of wanted to go to school,” she says. “Everyone was like, ‘Nixon invaded Cambodia, so we shouldn’t go to school!’ I was thinking, ‘I don’t completely see the connection.’ I’d been studying to be a painter at Cornell, so I left and went to the San Francisco Art Institute to finish my degree.”

The move to the Bay Area proved crucial, for Katzen, who’d always enjoyed puttering around in the kitchen, took a job working at a now forgotten San Francisco vegetarian restaurant called the Shandygaff to help pay her tuition. Having served brief stints as a kitchen worker in soul-crushingly pious macrobiotic restaurants in Ithaca that were, in her estimation, “monochromatic, everything a certain shade of beige, from the chairs to the tables to the dishes to the food, which I called ‘remorse cuisine,’” Katzen was stunned by the chirpy California sunniness of her new place of employment. “It was
colorful!”
she says. “Healthy, movie stars and tennis players, California lifestyle. Avocados. A lot of ferns hanging. And the food was excellent, really the first time I’d seen a bridge between macrobiotic and gourmet.”

The Shandygaff took advantage of its proximity to excellent produce by making simple yet flavorful concoctions that Katzen had until then never heard of, such as pesto sauce and fruit smoothies. More important, the restaurant’s cooks, while true to the hippie propensity for dabbling in ethnic cuisines, managed not to botch their preparations through overseasoning or stoner sloppiness. At the Shandygaff, Katzen learned how to make baba ghanoush, the Middle Eastern eggplant puree, and spanakopita, the Greek spinach pie, for the first time, as well as a lot of Indian-inspired dishes, such as a vegetable curry “with bright yellow sauce and turmeric, with bright red
peppers poking out,” that she would more or less re-create ingredient for ingredient at Moosewood.

The Moosewood opportunity came about while Katzen, twenty-two years old and just out of the Art Institute, was back east, visiting her brother, a Cornell graduate, and some of his buddies in Ithaca. In the hippie spirit, this group of friends was renovating a space in an old school building with an eye toward opening a progressive restaurant. But no one in this group had any restaurant experience or a sense of what the menu should include. Aware of Katzen’s tour of duty at the Shandygaff, they drafted her as a sort of culinary director, and the Moosewood opened on January 3, 1973, with a single main course of moussaka, offered with a filling of either ground lamb or mushrooms. (The strictly vegetarian policy didn’t go into effect until a year later.)

Katzen’s cuisine was a homey amalgam of the Shandygaff’s pepped-up California vegetarian fare (as reinterpreted with East Coast ingredients), her own evocations of the Jewish food she grew up with (a noodle kugel was among the Moosewood’s most popular offerings), and the ethnic dishes that she had learned about in Bay Area counterculture circles (attending a party after her folk-dancing class in Berkeley, she ate something “with eggplant and a white sauce and a tomato sauce that tasted wonderful”—the moussaka that became Moosewood’s opening-night dish). The Moosewood’s food was not nearly as polished as what Greens would later offer, being much more “crunchy,” to use a favorite word of Katzen’s, and occasionally guilty of super-caloric, multi-ingredient overkill. Its broccoli-mushroom noodle casserole, for example, called for three eggs, one cup of sour cream, one cup of grated cheddar, two tablespoons of butter, and three cups (!) of cottage cheese.

“I wasn’t thinking about fat or calories or anything,” says Katzen, who, like Lappé and Madison, was initially naïve about the ability of vegetables themselves to deliver adequate dietary allotments of protein. (She would later drastically modify and simplify her cooking.) Katzen was also playing up the butter and cream, she says, to win over the Julia Child–loving moms of the crunchy kids, “thinking they would want to know what to cook for their sons and daughters who were vegetarians.”

Like Chez Panisse, the Moosewood Restaurant was an almost immediate local hit despite its staff’s inexperience and borderline incompetence. As a national institution, in fact, the Moosewood caught on earlier than Chez Panisse, its very name becoming a byword in the late seventies for a Birkenstock-and-backpack way of life. “I liken it to birds eating berries and then scattering the seeds,” says Katzen. “Because of the nomadic nature of the counterculture, the way people hitchhiked across the country, there was a fluidity between places like Ithaca, Ann Arbor, Cambridge, Berkeley, Madison, Seattle, maybe a little bit in Austin. The word got out.”

Katzen discovered the power of this informal countercultural network after putting together the original version of
The Moosewood Cookbook
, an un-bylined, spiral-bound booklet of her recipes that was sold exclusively at an independent bookstore in Ithaca called McBooks.
*
To her surprise, she started getting letters from people in university towns like Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Madison, Wisconsin, who had seen their friends’ copies of the book and wanted their own. By the time she’d mailed off some 5,000 copies, it was evident to Katzen that, she says, “This really was a
book.”
Spurning offers from major New York publishers, she signed a deal with the Berkeley-based Ten Speed Press, which in 1977 turned out the version of
The Moosewood Cookbook
familiar to crunchy families from Martha’s Vineyard to Mendocino, its recipes rendered entirely in Katzen’s twinkly hand and adorned with her pen-and-ink illustrations of chubby cherubs and asparagus spears in repose. By 1981, the book had sold more than 250,000 copies, and Katzen had a hit sequel on the way,
The Enchanted Broccoli Forest
.
†

ANOTHER COUNTERCUISINE NOMAD
,
Odessa Piper, was self-conscious enough about her wanderlust to rechristen herself in homage to Homer’s famous voyager, Odysseus. Born Karen Piper in the coastal town of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, she got swept up in political and personal romance, quit high school, “fell in love with a Dartmouth boy who protested against the ROTC a little too vigorously,” joined a commune with said Dartmouth boy, and changed her name. The commune, located on a farm in Canaan, New Hampshire, and populated mostly by other Dartmouth students booted from campus for their protest activities, turned out to be a passing fancy for the teenage girl—“I wanted to gentrify, to have indoor plumbing and hot showers,” she says—but it gave Piper a crash course in farming, which proved useful when she found her bliss in Wisconsin, America’s dairy land.

Piper’s wanderings away from the East Coast took her initially to Chicago, where her sister was in college and where she fell under the sway of an older woman named JoAnna Guthrie. Guthrie was a cultured, worldly, proper lady who, despite her past as TV weathercaster and former gal Friday for the millionaire Winthrop Rockefeller, was embraced as a role model by young countercultural types. This was because of her relatively late-in-life embrace of theosophy, a murky, mystical belief system that championed the “ancient wisdom” of Tibetan Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Hindus, and Cabalists. Guthrie lectured frequently for Chicago university audiences, and as sideshow-ish as some of these public appearances were—she considered herself a clairvoyant and performed “readings” of her followers—she used her quirky outlook for good.

“She was telling us not to tear down society. She saw an opportunity to point out the achievements of Old World cultures and find in them the seeds of a new culture that could be cultivated,” says Piper. “Specifically, she was looking at agriculture and cooking.” Possessed of a noble sense of community and an Alice Waters–ish urgency to reestablish the connection between rural and urban peoples, Guthrie purchased a farm in Wisconsin’s
Kickapoo River Valley and a building in Madison, Wisconsin, in the late sixties. In the building, she opened a restaurant called the Ovens of Brittany in 1972. The farm—staffed, like the restaurant, with Guthrie’s young followers—supplied the Ovens of Brittany with organically raised produce. “We were doing farm-to-table when it was just a gleam in Berkeley’s eye,” Piper says. “It was lettuces from the farm and freshly made, unlicensed, probably highly illegal chèvre from local goats.”

Like Chez Panisse, the Ovens of Brittany skewed more French country than crunchy, with
poulet Parisienne
and liver pâtés with cornichons and exquisitely arranged salads of local ingredients. “We were not the granola-lentil tribe,” says Piper, who recalls the staff consulting the works of Beard and Child as they felt their way toward a vernacular French-Wisconsin hybrid. Some of Guthrie’s policies bordered on the daft and New Agey—female workers recall her forbidding them to part their hair because such an action somehow upset the “energy flow” of the kitchen—but this didn’t stop the Ovens of Brittany from being ecstatically embraced by the city of Madison. The restaurant thrived to the point where it eventually became a minichain, with nine locations throughout the state, but, just a few years after its initial success, Guthrie’s mystical dynamism deteriorated into erratic, delusional behavior. “She kind of went away, and things got hard at the restaurant, so I decided to move on,” says Piper. (Guthrie was eventually diagnosed as a schizophrenic and wound up living in an Ohio nursing home, where she died in 2000.)

In 1976, when she was still only twenty-three, Piper opened up her own place in Madison, L’Etoile, which was, if anything, an even greater triumph than the Ovens of Brittany, its dedication to local foods inspiring the food press to posit Piper as a Midwestern analogue to Alice Waters. Whereas the Chez Panisse logo depicted a freshly dug radish with its green top and spindly root tip intact, Piper embraced the local hickory nut as her calling card. “I’m wary of sounding preachy,” she says, “but as a sort of heartfelt welcome to each diner, I sent out a little canapé of a thin wafer cracker topped with some local chèvre and a perfectly toasted hickory nut, and I called it a
‘hickory-nut shaman.’ A shaman is a teacher. It’s just the idea that this beautiful tree is teaching us all about regionality and local history. It’s very much the kind of idea that JoAnna Guthrie would have put out there.”

AS POST-HIPPIE FOODIE
enterprises popped up like chanterelle mushrooms across the country, a sort of nationwide mutual admiration society developed; the disparate members of the countercuisine intelligentsia
got
one another and fed off one another’s good vibes. As far apart as the Moosewood and the Boulder, Colorado–based Celestial Seasonings tea company were geographically, they quickly spotted each other across the crowded landscape. Celestial Seasonings was the brainchild of a long-haired kid in his early twenties, Morris (Mo) Siegel, who, since 1969, had been foraging in the Rocky Mountain foothills for wild herbs and mixing them into a blend he called Mo’s 24. By 1972, Siegel’s operation had become a real-deal enterprise, its bottom line bolstered by the boffo sales of his latest trippy blend, Red Zinger, a mix of hibiscus flowers, rose hips, and lemongrass that produced a citric, arrestingly crimson brew. The look, ethos, and taste of Celestial Seasonings teas—whose psychedelic packaging suggested a cross between Beatrix Potter and Hieronymus Bosch—-jibed perfectly with the crunchy, gnomy, “aware” tenor of the Moosewood, where Katzen had been using chamomile tea imported from Switzerland. The restaurant became the fast-growing Colorado tea company’s first East Coast account—a strategic hippie-business alliance.

For some hardcore Marxists, it was unconscionable that Siegel was so baldly entrepreneurial, that, by the late seventies, he had turned Celestial Seasonings into a $9 million a year business. But as the lines between “natural” and “gourmet” and “veggie” and “local” got blurred, the hallmark of the countercuisine wasn’t so much a commitment to revolution or healthfulness as a general sense of belonging, of being part of a new foodie paradigm that had nothing to do with Henri Soulé (whoever he was) and your uptight mom’s crown roast of lamb with paper tassels. If your menu was written out
in multicolored chalk on a blackboard (like the Moosewood’s), or if your café’s logo looked like it had been designed by the cartoonist R. Crumb or the Haight-Ashbury poster artist Rick Griffin, you were slyly acknowledging that you were “with it,” as were your customers.

For some reason, maverick young manufacturers of premium ice cream did especially well in this context. In-the-know kids thronged Steve’s Ice Cream, a modest storefront operation in Somerville, Massachusetts, that was launched in 1973 by Steve Herrell, a jovial twenty-nine-year-old ex-schoolteacher who had altered a conventional commercial-batch ice-cream machine so it would produce a dense, high-butterfat dessert with less air in it than ordinary supermarket ice cream. Herrell further upped the ante by inventing what he called “mix-ins” or “smoosh-ins,” unholy concoctions of ice cream with nuts, dried fruits, and such sugary treats as Heath Bars and Oreos crumbled in.

Warren Belasco speculates that mix-in mania, along with the subsequent emergence of rococo ice-cream flavors in the premium section of the supermarket freezer, derived from the stoner penchant for mixing any old shit together to see if it tasted good. “It was no coincidence,” he writes in his book
Appetite for Change
, “that some of today’s superpremium ice cream moguls started out as hip restaurateurs serving zonked customers attuned to strange blends of thick fresh cream, tropical fruits, and crushed candy bars.” Among Herrell’s most flagrant imitators were Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, two fur-faced Vermont Deadheads who frequently pilgrimaged to Steve’s and didn’t bother to hide their intentions, snapping photos of the Somerville shop and parking themselves outside the store’s front window, where they could study the mechanical workings of Herrell’s retrofitted icecream machine as it churned. In 1978, they opened the first Ben & Jerry’s in a converted gas station in Burlington, luring customers out in northern Vermont’s wintry weather by knocking a penny off the price of a cone for every degree below freezing it was on the thermometer.