The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - Drivecast No. 3

Episode Date: July 16, 2020

I've had it with trying to produce a show during the farming season so I cut out a lot of production & administrative BS by just cold-calling people to see what they have to say. Episode 3. 

I'm Jordan Marr, Podcast Farming. Hello? Hello, is that Nancy? Yes, it is. Nancy, this is that podcaster who contacted you about 10 days ago asking for a short interview about fava beans. Oh, right, okay. That's so funny.

I was just about to go down to the kitchen and shuck some fava beans for supper tonight. Oh, well, do you want me to say my name is Nancy Harmon Jenkins? You can do that if you like. Absolutely. I don't need to. I lived for many years in various countries of the Mediterranean as it happened. Most of the time we were in the Mediterranean world, and I became quite fascinated.

Most of the time we were in the Mediterranean world, and I became quite fascinated. I should go back a little bit and say I had earlier been fascinated by the Mediterranean from the books of Elizabeth David, which I read when they first came out in the United States and was fascinated by them. And so the opportunity to spend a lot of time in the Mediterranean, cooking and marketing and gardening and eating and raising a family and doing some writing. All of that led me to see that this is a, which hardly are earth shattering news, a unique place in the world, both in terms of its overall culture and in terms of its food culture. both in terms of its overall culture and in terms of its food culture and the connection between the food culture, which differs, obviously, from one part of the Mediterranean to the other, but there are certain things that hold it together

and certain things that tie it to that place and that landscape and that seascape. So that's how I came to be interested in the Mediterranean and to make it really the focal point of most of the writing that I've done. Well, that's wonderful, Nancy. I can't wait to ask you a couple of questions, but first I'll tell you a little about me just so that you have the context necessary for this conversation, just so I understand what I'm selling. And I read this article you wrote on Favas and I, you know, it challenged a few notions that I've been holding. So I'm really excited to ask you about it.

So I think you know the article I'm referring to. Maybe in a nutshell, you can summarize your pet peeves about how fava beans are prepared in North America compared to the Mediterranean. Well, yeah, I'm happy to do that. I will preface this by saying most fava beans in America are harvested when they're too mature. And most farmers don't understand fava beans, like most chefs. And so they look at these hulking great fat beans with their big fat seeds inside of them, and they say, oh, what am I to do with this? Well, the French culinary, that is the French haute cuisine tradition, is to peel the fava beans, each

individual bean. This is laborious. This wastes a lot of time in the kitchen. This is why so many home cooks don't even bother with fava beans. But it's totally unnecessary if the beans are harvested when they're small. And I think if you're referring to the article that was on Zester, a now defunct website, but once a really wonderful website, I showed three different sizes of bean, the mama bean, the father bean, and the baby bean. And it's the baby bean that we really want, the one that is about the size of my thumbnail, no bigger than that. And that doesn't need to be peeled. And in fact, if you peel it, you lose a lot of the flavor of the bean. Unfortunately, French restaurant traditions have such an impact on Western European and

North American foodways that this idea that each individual bean has to be peeled has become prevalent, so much so that in Italy, my beloved Italy, even there, some chefs are now peeling fava beans before they put them in the pot and send them out to their clients. And I think that's terrible. You know, I think Elizabeth David said somewhere, and I've never been able to find out where she said that. If you peel a fava bean, you're removing a lot of the flavor, the earthy flavor that it has. That's the kind of treasure of the fava bean. And you might as well eat peas. And having said that, I have to add that there is also a tradition in haute cuisine restaurants in France of peeling individual peas. I just learned about that.

I have a chef working for me on my farm this year, and he told me that, and I was really surprised to hear that. That sounds just awful to be working in a kitchen peeling individual peas. It does, doesn't it? As it happened, I was having a late Sunday lunch with Bill Buford yesterday, and Bill Buford, I think, is the one who revealed this disastrous fact in his most recent book called Bois in Lyon. But it was a three-star Michelin restaurant, and he was taught in the kitchen how to – he called them popping the peas. You drop them in boiling water and take them out, and then you can pop them out of their skin. I think it's one of those things that French chefs devise in order to make their kitchens seem important and worthy of the amount of money it costs to dine in them.

But it must not also be related to the availability, as I understand of a lot of free stage labor, you know, it's got to be it's got to be those stages that are doing all that pee peeling. I think that practice might change pretty quick if that, you know, if that free labor was eliminated.ocuse taught, where Bocuse learned to cook in the early days. And many, many great chefs have passed through that kitchen. And so there was poor old Bill Buford popping peas day after day after day. day after day after day. I think, I really think it's a crazy thing. And, you know, when I look back on, I had a discussion with Paula Wolfert about peeling fava beans in a most recent book that she did. She referred to peeling each individual bean. This is a book about Moroccan food. And I said, gee, that's funny, Paula. When I was in Morocco, I never saw anybody peeling fava beans. Well, they do, she said. And I saw it. And I went back and looked at her first great, a great book about Moroccan food. And she never mentions peeling fava beans. So clearly something had happened between her first trip to Morocco and her second trip to Morocco. And I think it's the impact of French boat cuisine restaurants on either Moroccan food or

on Paula, or on both. Okay, so to summarize a bit, you think we're kind of making collectively two mistakes currently in North America, and we're generalizing here, but we're harvesting, we farmers are harvesting and sending the beans to mature, and meanwhile, cooks are then are peeling, are taking the time to peel the beans too mature. And meanwhile, cooks are then are peeling or taking the time to peel the beans, and you're connecting the two. Well, they're stripping them of their essence, in fact. I don't know whether I mentioned this in that article you referred to. I've written about fava beans over and over and over again since I came back to this country. But one of the things I learned in the Middle East, in Beirut, for instance, they often cook the whole bean, cutting it up the way you would string beans, for instance.

Right. Pods and all. So that must also need to happen when the beans are less mature, a little bit less. Oh, yes, of course, much less mature, because they've got a pretty tough string on them as they mature. You're probably aware of that. A little bit less. I had, obviously, like everyone, I had fava beans growing in my garden. And like my neighbors, I planted the fava beans in December, about six inches deep. And they came up in April. And by the first of May, we had the first fava beans. And there, we eat them raw when they're young, with a rather fresh pecorino cheese, not anything like Romano cheese, nothing like that at all, a Tuscan pecorino young cheese and raw fava beans. It's typically served as a

sort of antipasto in Tuscan restaurants in May. Okay, well, I need to work through a few things with you here. I need to unpack all of this a little bit so we've got two things happening like i said we've got we've got harvesting them too large and then you know sort of related peeling the beans so first of all what do you think came first harvesting them too large or that is or or or the the the repetition of the french technique of peeling um like which influenced the other sort of well Well, I can't tell you. I can tell you that fava beans were a colonial bean that was planted here, at least in New England. And because I have records of that, diaries of people planting fava beans in the late 18th century. A woman who kept a garden on the Kennebec River in Maine.

So at one point, fava beans were a normal domestic garden crop. And probably a section of that crop, just as it was with other types of beans, phasiolus beans, was left to dry on the plant and then shucked to make dried beans to keep for the winter. So it was a very useful crop because you had both a fresh crop and a dried crop. At some point, they fell out of usage completely. And if you look through 19th century cookbooks, they were called broad beans as the English still call them today. If you look through 19th century cookbooks from America, that is from North America, you find very, I don't think I've ever seen a reference to broad beans or fava beans. And then they come back in, presumably with, as a lot of Italian food products did,

which is why we call them fava beans. We don't call them fave and we don't call them broad beans why we call them fava beans. We don't call them fev, and we don't call them broad beans. We call them fava. And that's an Italian word, obviously. So clearly, they came back in with the Italians at some point. Now, the Italians don't peel their fava beans traditionally. So I'm guessing that, you know, people were, as with a lot of these kind of Mediterranean products like eggplants, for instance, they were allowed to get massive and kind of unpleasant. And I think one reason why we insist on salting eggplant before we fry it is a result of the eggplant being allowed to get way too mature

and almost bitter. So for the same reason, we let fava beans get big because, I mean, the bigger they are, the better they are, right? Yeah, we just tend to want to emphasize quantity. We're very impressed by quantity and sometimes at the expense of quality. Right. I want you to know that I am committing the crime that you speak of. I've been harvesting them quite mature. And in fact, you know, I don't come from a farming background. I've had to figure a lot of this out as I go. And I've taken cues from some of my chefs.

They're very helpful. They can be very helpful in guiding me toward how, you know, they tell me how they want to receive stuff. And one chef, my first year of growing favas suggested that he's used to getting them when the, when the shells or pods are turning black, in other words, quite mature. So I've been using that as my guide ever since. And I read your article and it was kind of mind blowing because, and now I have a new question. Um, as a farmer who really wants to cater to my chef customers, I'm, you know, I'm trying to give them the whole package. I'm trying to give them good customer service. I'm trying to give them high quality and I'm trying to give them good, good value for their, for their

money. And so back to the quality quantity thing, I've been considering it a, you know, I can't send them to immature, like just by virtue of you're getting less bean and more pod, you know, I can't send them to immature, like just by virtue of you're getting less bean and more pod, you know, for, for what I'm charging. And I'm just wondering what you think about that. And if I could add one more sub question, because you seem to know so much about the Mediterranean countries, everyone talks about, everyone talks about food, good food being so cheap over there, you know? And I'm just wondering if you have also a comment on if that, if that, whether that's true and why it's true, because honestly, I don't know that food is cheaper there. I actually will tell you this. The first thing I do when I get to my town

of Cortona is go to a food shop, a fruit, what we call a fruity vendolo, a fruit and vegetable shop, where the two women who run it raise a lot of their own vegetables, and I stock up there. And every time I do that, I take all of these vegetables and fruits and so forth back home, and cheese and eggs and stuff like that. And I'm astounded at how little I've spent and what enormous quality I've obtained from it. But the other piece of that is that Europeans in general, and particularly the French and the Italians, and to a certain extent the Spanish, are much more willing to part with a segment of their disposable income for really good food than we in the Americas are. And I don't know why that is. People are always, you know, USDA, the Department of Agriculture, really likes to brag about how, what a small

percentage of our disposable income we spend on food. And I say, yeah, but look at the kind of food we're eating and compare it to the kind of food those not-so-French spend. You know, they spend, I don't know, 35% of their disposable income on food, but they get really good food out of it. And we get a lot of packaged, commercial, overly processed, made with junky wheat and junky sugar and junky fats instead. So it's a tricky question, you see, because it's true that things in season there seem to be cheaper than things in season here. Here in my farmer's market, if I don't raise my own zucchini, I can pay a dollar a piece for a zucchini flour. I can pay a dollar a piece for a zucchini flour.

And over there, I can get, for a dollar, I can probably get a dozen or even two dozen zucchini flours. But see, that really interests me because I've had chefs, customers of mine who've spent time over there comment on things like the price of things there, certain products there versus here, like fava's, for what I want to charge to make it worth my while in my economy and my reality,

it makes it quite expensive for the chef to feature the product, especially if they're throwing away the pod. So it's funny. I think if I'm going to come on board with your point of view, and I think I want to because I'm always looking, I see the logic of your argument in terms of the quality achieved when you harvest more immature.

But it's going to be baby steps because essentially I need to work. I need to like bring some chefs on board to the point of view and say, look, if I harvest them really immature, the flavor is going to be better. And maybe you can use those pods. Maybe you can actually, not just put them in water for a stock, but actually be serving them or something. Right, right, right. I think you would have been, if you had come to my farmer's market stall this week and seen the size of the beans I've harvested, you wouldn't be buying them. I can assure you they're quite, they're quite plump. Well, what's your climate like out there? Could

you plant fava beans now to harvest in the fall? Yes, I have a couple succession crops coming. And I'm so well, that'll be my first crack and usually overwintering them like the December planting you've spoken of. We don't have the Mediterranean climate here, so that's trickier, but not impossible. I've done that in Maine. And it's worked out okay for you? Yeah, it has. I mean, not every single bean came up, but I think that might be partly because the chipmunks and so forth get in there and steal them from me. But if I were to protect them from the chipmunks, I think they would come up.

The trick is to plant them deep, obviously. I but they plant i plant my garlic in december too and plant it deep and that's another but everybody around here now plants that garlic in december um when do you plant yours a little earlier usually october early november uh-huh yeah uh-huh i'm gonna try the deep and when is that oh yeah when is it harvested when do you when do you harvest your garlic uh anytime now in the next two weeks i plan to harvest yeah yeah yeah so interesting um nancy i've got two more questions if you can if you've got the time oh sure okay yeah i have all right so one of them is another um one of them is another well okay i one last thing last thing on the peeling of fava beans.

Do you have any sympathy for the chef who wants to showcase that brilliant green color underneath the skin? Or do you not have time for such considerations? I don't have any time for it myself. And I think what he's doing is valuing appearance over flavor. But if he were to do something like a presentation where half the beans were peeled and the other half left

so that they get that that sort of pale jade color, I think that might be interesting. That seems like a good compromise. An interesting presentation. Or to do it the way they do in Lebanon, where you would have some pods in there and some peeled beans and some whole beans.

Wonderful. Unpeeled. Okay. So my last question then is actually still fava related. But as far as me trying to get as much value from my crop as I can, I've been getting more and more interested in dried legumes. And I'm just wondering, like, dried fava beans are not a common ingredient in people's pantries in North America. Would you make a case for it? Like, is that

something I should try and develop a market for? Or am I just going to bang my head against the wall? I think you're going to bang your head against the wall. I think dried beans in general, I mean, I love dried beans. And I have a lot. In fact, I have some from Oregon right now that a friend sent me that I'm very excited about. I don't think there's an appreciation of dried beans whenever I, you know, it's a traditional Saturday night dish in Maine, is baked beans. And I love it. I grew up in Maine, and that's my kind of my family standing dish, so to speak. But I think it's a really hard sell. I would never, my daughter has a restaurant here, I would never suggest that she put baked beans on her menu, because I think she'd have a really hard time selling it. So until we grow up a little bit, in our case, I don't think it's worth bothering with. But what about in your own kitchen? Are

dried fava something you like to work with sometimes? Well, I do when I can get good quality ones, and that's not easy either. The other thing that happens with the dried beans is you have to peel them, because by the time they're dried, that peel on the outside is really tough. So you have to soak them and then peel them, and then you can cook them. Or you can soak them and peel them and freeze them. You know, they freeze very well. But they do have to be peeled before you consume them. And that's, I mean, in the south of Italy, they make wonderful purees of dried fava beans peeled in the wintertime. And you buy them with no peel on them,

and you take them home and you put them in water and bring them to a boil. And very soon, they sort of disintegrate into a delicious puree all by themselves. So it's very little work, but getting that kind of product here is, or introducing it to people is really, really hard, I think. Well, Nancy Harmon Jenkins, it sounds like this, this, this has almost been a Sisyphean task for you, pushing, pushing the fava boulder up the mountain, trying to change behaviors. But I want you to know that, that I'm now one of your acolytes and I will, I will go forth and try and change people's behaviors. I'm quite excited to goof around with trying to sell less mature fresh favas next year.

And I very much appreciate your time. I want everyone to know that in ruminant drive cast tradition, new tradition, this was pretty much a cold call. We did not schedule this and Nancy was gracious enough to take the call. One more thing, Nancy, I know you've written multiple books. Any one in particular you want to promote right now? Well, the one that is closest to my heart right now is my olive oil book called Virgin Territory, but it doesn't have a lot about fava beans in it. Although we do eat beans at the end for the harvest,

to celebrate the olive harvest. We always have a plate of beans with olive oil poured over it. But probably for information about fava beans, I would think that the Essential Mediterranean would have more in there about beans and legumes in Mediterranean cultures in general. And is that one of your books, Nancy? Yeah. Wonderful.

Nancy Harmon Jenkins, thank you so much for being such a good sport about this random call from a Canadian farmer. Thank you. It was my pleasure. Hello. Is that David? hello is that david yeah speaking jordan david how's the buckwheat crop looking it was stellar yeah it was a great crop it's it's mowed down now but no we uh david i don't i don't care how your buckwheat crop is i'm just i'm just i'm just trying to butter you up do you know what i'm doing right now well you don't care how your buckwheat crop is. I'm just trying to butter you up. Do you know what I'm doing right now? Well, you don't need to butter me up.

What do you want? You're being recorded. So no cussing. No cussing if you're concerned about your public image. All right. Do you want to talk for five minutes about what it's like farming right now? I have five minutes. We're in the middle of our garlic harvest okay um but yeah if it's just five minutes it's fine let's

keep it let's keep let's just dive right in david okay of plenty wild farms yeah in squamish british columbia uh pemberton pemberton i'm sorry david we just we obviously we don't know each other well enough or else i'm just a callous friend. Yeah, or you just haven't done your research. I haven't done my research. How's it going? How's it going overall? It's stressful. Yeah, lots of stress. Sales are maybe 70% from last year, which is, I hear, not bad. Okay. Is that just below or just above the line to qualify for some wage subsidies?

I'm sure by the end of the season, it'll be just above the line. That's where I'm at. Honestly, seriously, though, I'm also hovering around 70%, which, you know, is not terrible. And we both know there's people way worse off. But it's like, yeah, that's my income, though. Like, I don't know that I'll have income this year. That's what I'm thinking. Yeah, exactly.

That's what that 30% was for. But, yeah, we'll just have to see what the help is like at the end of the year. So did you, you you know in anticipation of what was going to happen back three months ago did you shift your production towards fall harvest like you got more stuff more stuff with storage and less stuff for active harvesting or no no that it definitely crossed our minds but it's just not where it wouldn't have been easy for us to do. We don't really have a market for winter stuff.

We do do a winter farmer's market in Squamish, but it's still not a very busy market. So we instead, we tried to sell the same amount of product over the main season. tried to sell the same amount of product over the main season. And, and we adopted the online, a local line store, an online store to help.

Yeah. Help just keep our sales like they were last year. And, so you are, you are very much a farmer's market oriented farm and have, have done well. Yeah. You've,

you've, you know, You've done decently. We have in the past. Yeah, we've done decently. We've dabbled in a whole bunch of things over the years and we got away from CSA and restaurants and focused on really two farmers markets that we attend three times a week total three times a week as well as farm sales farm gate sales and yeah so so did did those markets are they still going like did you lose any of those markets this year completely yeah so the two markets I'm talking about, one is Squamish and then one's in Whistler. And the one in Squamish,

really, it just felt like it had the full support of the municipality. And the board of directors worked really hard, along with the new market manager, to implement kind of all the protocols they had in vancouver and we're really lucky first off that we had you know a template uh from the farmers markets in vancouver to work from and so no i'd say that market for us at least uh has been much the same as it's always been it's been a good market for us um the one in whistler

on the other hand uh was just it's just been just been hard to even get it going uh it's just a bunch of politics and anyways it's a long story i don't think five minutes would really do it justice but uh it just started last uh two sundays ago oh so super late super super late yeah yeah so we were we were kind of just running around looking to sell stuff for about a month there and we we did get in to some sunday markets in vancouver just to kind of get by and so that did help and yeah it finally started two Sundays ago but it's just it's such an interesting market because it's a resort community in a resort town and so we're really seeing exactly how much um yeah how much of what we made you know at that market uh was based on on tourism dollars and yeah without

that tourism it's it's not quite the market uh it was uh so yeah that's that's where that 30 percent is missing right now well i'm aware you need to get back to harvesting so we can leave it there thanks for the little glimpse i am sorry i am going through it too. My, my sales are, um, I don't know, in absolute terms over last year, I'm down somewhere between, I haven't, I have to do another like summary, but somewhere between 10 and 15 grand so far with a lot more income to come. Um, so a lot more potential loss to come and I'm hustling. I am seriously hustling to try and make up for me. It was a huge loss in sales to start. And now they're back, but they're not back in full force. And I am driving myself insane trying to like hustle a household program. But are putting in so many more hours as well uh just filling out all these uh yeah orders through the the online store and uh as well as just on having

child care man you know how many did you have lined up heading into the season how many days a week for child care yeah i think we had hoped on having three days a week. And then my partner, Alyssa, her parents are out doing hay and stuff for about four weeks total. So, yeah, I mean, normally it's fine. But, yeah, no, it's just been hard to do all the extra uh and also have a three-year-old tagging along yeah we've got we've got the three-year-old and the new eight-month-old and we lost our daycare so we've been it's been it's been yeah it's been interesting um and then on top of it on top of it people call you incessantly to ask you to give you their your them your opinions on farming which sucks um so got any

like in four seconds garlic harvesting tips for the masses any any uh any any like plenty wild insights uh well what we've learned is we just try to do all the steps at once so basically our our garlic harvest crew has gotten bigger every year and so now it's being pulled bundled and hung all on the same day so yeah yeah whereas before we'd kind of you know it would get out of the field and then it would sit in a pile kind of on the floor in the barn for a while. And then, you know, we'd get to it eventually. So, yeah, that's my only tip is just to just get it done. Get her done.

Get her done. Well, I am so grateful for the time. And say hi to Alyssa. And I hope it gets better. And I will talk to you soon on the dark realm. Yeah. Thanks for the call. Yeah.

Have fun. I hope it gets better for you as well. Thanks, David. Talk to you soon. Yep. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. in the country. We're no closer, we never have laundry. We'll owe nothing to this world of thieves. Live life like it was meant to be. Ah, don't fret, honey. I've got a plan to make our final escape.

All we'll need is each other a hundred dollars and maybe a roll of duct tape and we'll run right outside of the city's reaches We'll live off chestnuts, spring water and peaches We'll owe nothing to this world of thieves and live life like it was meant to be Because why would we live in a place that don't want us? A place that is trying to bleed us dry. We could be happy with life in the country.

With salt on our skin and the dirt on our hands. the dirt on our hands. I've been doing a lot of thinking, some real soul searching, and here's my final resolve. I don't need a big old house or some fancy car to keep my love going strong so we'll run right out into the wilds and braces, we'll keep close quarters with gentle faces and live next door to the birds and the bees and live life like it was meant to be

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