Alice, Let's Eat, page 4
4
To Market, To Market
Jeffrey Jowell, a friend of ours who teaches law at the University of London, likes to go to the Friday morning market at Barnstaple to chat about poultry and eggs. “You say a bit of peat on the floor of the coop?” he will ask a farmer’s wife, staring at her with the sort of intent look that law professors must dream of finding on the faces of their students during a lecture. “How very interesting!” I have never missed an opportunity to go to the Barnstaple market with Jeffrey, although it also happens to be true that I have never missed an opportunity to go to any market with anyone at any time. I love weekly markets, even when they do not offer the added attraction of a law professor discussing chicken feed with a vendor of brown eggs. Wandering through the Friday morning market at Barnstaple—poking at fresh tomatoes or bargaining for what is purported to be an antique clipboard or munching on some Farmhouse Cheddar to keep up my strength between stalls—I occasionally pause to wonder why all of the other tourists are at Buckingham Palace or the Tower of London. Alice is also enthusiastic about the Barnstaple market, although the suspicion lingers that when she seems to be completely absorbed in selecting peaches she is actually glancing over now and then to make certain that I make no overt attempt to corner the North Devon scone market.
A Friday morning at Barnstaple is definitely enhanced by the opportunity to hear Jeffrey say, “Yes, laying very well at the moment, thanks,” to an egg vendor, inspecting the color of her shells rather closely as he speaks. When the university is not in session, Jeffrey and his family live near Exford, a Somerset village about an hour’s drive from Barnstaple. During their first summer there, we were informed by letter that Jeffrey, whose interest in husbandry had previously escaped our notice, had finished second in the other-than-white egg division of the Exford and District Flower and Produce Show. Jeffrey did not take the victory lightly, even though, we later learned, the other-than-white egg division of the Exford and District Flower and Produce Show had only three entries. According to the reports we got from England, Jeffrey talked a lot about chickens and he talked a lot to chickens. “Good night, ladies,” he would say each evening when he shut his hens into their coop, safe from marauding foxes. “Sleep well, my lovelies.” Jeffrey’s wife, Francie, even reported that on visits to neighbors in Somerset Jeffrey had taken to cracking eggs he found in the pantry and sneering at their yolks. I wasn’t certain whether Francie was joking until we arrived in England for a visit, about a year after Jeffrey had acquired his flock, and noticed on the desk in his study, in the sort of frame some people might use for a picture of their wife and children, a five-by-seven-inch color portrait of Rudolph, his rooster.
We attended the second Exford and District Flower and Produce Show that Jeffrey entered, and I was with him when he learned, to his great dismay, that he had fallen to third place in the other-than-white egg division.
“Look on the bright side,” I said, trying to cheer him up. “There were four entries this year, so in a way you did just as well as you did last time—second from last.”
Francie offered some token condolences, but she does not like to encourage what she occasionally calls Jeffrey’s “obsession.” I can’t blame her. It was presumably her picture, after all, that was on Jeffrey’s desk before Rudolph came along. Also, it must be embarrassing for Francie to be sitting quietly at a neighbor’s dinner table when suddenly her husband snatches an egg from the pantry, cracks it into the dish the hostess was planning to use for the custard, and begins a lecture on causes of yolk paleness. Francie has been known to make light of Jeffrey’s career in poultry management. She was among those on a panel of Jeffrey’s family and friends—a panel on which Alice and I also had the privilege of serving—that, after some informal calculations, priced out the cost of Jeffrey’s home-grown, economical eggs at “one pound fifty per egg, plus a hundred points of cholesterol.” She has neither confirmed nor denied rumors that she may have been privy to a conspiracy—a conspiracy that Alice and I had the privilege of devising and successfully carrying out—by which some London supermarket eggs were secretly substituted for the freshly gathered eggs that Jeffrey was about to serve his guests as examples of what fresh farm eggs should taste like. (Jeffrey later denied that he had been completely fooled; he has not denied that the next time we arrived in Exford from London all of the eggs in his pantry had been marked with his tiny initial.) At some point, Francie began referring to Jeffrey as Chicken George.
These days, of course, there is nothing particularly unusual about a law professor being deeply involved in poultry raising. It wouldn’t surprise me, in fact, to find that in some Midwestern university professors of agricultural science, who were once thought of by the liberal arts faculty as ranking just above phys. ed. majors, are now sought as dinner guests by the chairman of the Philosophy Department, who hopes they might share some of their erudition in the area of soil preparation or slug eradication. Academics have their own way of approaching agriculture: Jeffrey, according to my last count, owns at least fourteen books and several pamphlets on poultry keeping. He has read Starting Poultry Keeping and he has read The Small Commercial Poultry Flock (Technical Bulletin #198 issued by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food). He sometimes says that the sight of his chickens taking their first tentative steps into the sunlight—they had been kept by their previous owner in cages, and Jeffrey decided to allow them to roam the farm as what the English call “free-range hens”—reminded him of the prisoners’ chorus in Fidelio, an image I have never heard used by the farmers’ wives who sell eggs at the Barnstaple market.
Although professors may reach for an operatic image to describe a barnyard phenomenon, it must be even more common for them to discover that what they had assumed was a metaphor is simply a fact of rural life. My own experience with the agricultural sciences in Nova Scotia is limited to a little experiment I’m carrying out on levels of production in totally neglected apple trees, but I am occasionally astonished anew to find that a neighbor who mentions the need to prime the pump is talking not about tinkering with the free-market economy but about priming the pump. People in Nova Scotia do make hay, and if at all possible, they make it while the sun shines so that it will be dry when they store it in the barn. One day in Nova Scotia Alice came home with the information that one widely used method of improving apple production was to gather up all the windfalls every autumn—gather up not unearned and sudden profit but apples that had been caused by the wind to fall. (I decided against it, on the theory that it was the sort of behavior that could invalidate the results of my experiment.)
“Rudolph, you might say, rules the roost,” Jeffrey told me the first time he showed me his flock settling in for the night. Jeffrey also mentions now and then that his flock actually does have a pecking order—one that he can recite, as it happens, since he has given each chicken the name of one of his cousins. Jeffrey’s barnyard observations on the matter of pecking order are, of course, buttressed by a certain amount of scholarly research. It is from reading a book—The Chicken Book, by Page Smith and Charles Daniel—that he knows that the phenomenon of pecking order was discovered earlier in this century by a Norwegian psychologist named T. Schjelderup-Ebbe. I sent him the book. Jeffrey once mentioned the possibility of commissioning some local potter to fashion eggcups bearing the Clarence Day quotation that it uses as an epigraph—“Oh, who that ever lived and loved can look upon an egg unmoved?”
“You will most certainly not,” Francie said at the time. “This obsession has gone far enough.”
Francie, I think, might make light of Jeffrey’s poultry library except that she has, in addition to a doctorate in the history of art from Harvard, at least twenty-one books on gardening. She has V. Sackville-West’s Garden Book and she has Potatoes (Technical Bulletin #94 issued by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food). She has entered the Exford and District Flower and Produce Show in as many as eleven categories at once, including such exotic competitions as Three Turnips and Four Sticks of Rhubarb. She does not bid her vegetables good night every evening, as far as I know, but I have heard her refer to store-bought provisions as “foreign vegetables” in the same tone of voice some British politicians use these days when referring to immigrants from the Indian subcontinent. In one Exford show, she won first prizes in both Heaviest Marrow and Two Matching Vegetable Marrows—a marrow being what the English call a large squash. Jeffrey occasionally refers to her as the Marrow Queen of Exford.
I have always been partial to market people. In England the difference between market people and shopkeepers is particularly pronounced. The grocers in Exford or Dunster or Taunton or Barnstaple strike me as the sort of correct English shopkeepers who find their greatest fulfillment in telling the customer who wants bread “The bread’s finished” and informing the customer who asks for bacon “We don’t do bacon, thank you very much.” The people behind the tables that are lined up every Friday morning at Barnstaple may be rather quiet by the standards of, say, the Italian fruit-and-vegetable peddlers who appear at the Haymarket in the North End of Boston every Friday and Saturday, but, compared to most English shopkeepers, they take a positively overt pleasure in selling their wares. In Barnstaple on Friday mornings, Jeffrey is not called Mr. Jowell by the vendors but “my dear” or “my love.” Informal, even intimate address is the norm at markets everywhere; I suspect that the only female customers not addressed as “honey” by vendors in the Haymarket are those wearing nuns’ habits. Once, when Alice and I were moving slowly with a Saturday jam of people in the Haymarket, a man who looked to be in his late seventies stepped forward, kissed Alice warmly on both cheeks, and said in a heavy Italian accent, “I would like to bring you home to meet my mother.”
As much as I like the atmosphere at markets, I go mainly for the food. In the United States these days, some people shop at a market on the theory that it represents their only hope of coming across fruit and vegetables that have not been bred by the agribusiness Frankensteins to have a shelf life approximately that of a mop handle. They hope, for instance, to find a tomato that does not have a bright-red skin so hard that anyone who wanted to indulge in the old-fashioned American pleasure of slinging it at a windy political stump speaker would risk being arrested for assault with intent to kill. By the time American consumers began to take serious notice of such matters, of course, ninety percent of the broilers available in grocery stores were already being produced by agribusiness corporations that had discovered the cost-effectiveness of vertical integration. The English who are always chastising themselves these days for economic stagnation and failure to adopt modern management practices fail to realize that what they have avoided is the vertical integration of the broiler industry.
A lot of vegetables sold at the Barnstaple market taste more like vegetables than shelf displays simply because they are the product of a kitchen garden rather than an assembly line. Although there are stalls at the market that sell great quantities of fruit and vegetables acquired from wholesalers, it is not unusual to come across a farmer’s wife standing behind a table that holds, say, three dozen eggs, one chicken, three bunches of carrots, some beetroot, five turnips, six baby cabbages, a bunch of rhubarb, one marrow, a jar of apple chutney, and a jar of quince jelly. Barnstaple does not have the sort of customers who demand to know whether a cucumber or a radish has been grown under conditions the Natural Food Fanatics would consider “organic,” but some of the eggs at the market carry prominent signs labeling them “free range.” In England, consciousness of free-range eggs extends from vendors at provincial markets to gourmet stores in Knightsbridge that label eggs “free range” and leave enough grit and hay sticking to them to support the claim. A preference for free-range eggs is based partly on the theory that a chicken that spends its life roaming around a barnyard instead of being crammed into the wire cages used for what are called battery or factory or deep-litter hens is a healthier fowl that is likely to produce a better egg. But in England, where concern for dumb animals is so acute that there may well be people willing to picket beekeepers for keeping their bees in crowded conditions, part of the steam of the Free Range egg movement comes from groups with names like Chicken Lib—groups that object to hens leading a “thoroughly miserable existence.” According to the brochure of an organization called Compassion in World Farming, factory farm animals “degrade the sensibilities of all who work with them,” while free-range animals “through their active self-expression … make a valuable contribution to the countryside scene.”
“Oh, you mustn’t coop them up,” an egg vendor at Barnstaple once told us. “With free-range hens the yolks are that much richer altogether.”
“My first hens had been deep-litter hens, and I set them free,” Jeffrey told her. She nodded and smiled. Jeffrey beamed. The emancipator.
The last time we were in Somerset, Jeffrey and Alice and I went to Barnstaple early one Friday morning for the market, leaving Francie home to tend her marrows. Francie asked us to be a restraining influence on Jeffrey, who had apparently gone off to a supermarket to do some marketing not long before and, seized by the zeal that foodstuffs bring out in him, had managed to spend seventy pounds on groceries—mumbling, in response to Francie’s chastisement, something about the difficulty of coping with an inflationary economy. Jeffrey said he was interested in arranging to buy two or three chicks at the market if he could find a farmer’s wife whose egg display met his standards. I didn’t even have that excuse. I was interested in acquiring whatever I could to eat. I have never been to an open market that did not have something remarkable to eat. I believe it is fair to say that the West Country of England is not internationally renowned for its food, but I have always found marvelous food at the Barnstaple market—hardcakes baked by members of the Women’s Institute, for instance, or a marrow we once came across that is known locally as spaghetti squash, or runner-bean chutney, or some liver dumplings called faggots, or a regional delicacy called, indelicately, hog’s pudding.
Alice’s response to her first look at hog’s pudding had not been encouraging. “This happens to be a regional delicacy, Alice,” I said. “If we don’t at least try it, Jeffrey might be hurt. You know how sensitive he is.”
Alice fried the hog’s pudding to a crisp crust, the same way she treats country scrapple we bring back from Pennsylvania. Even she acknowledged that the results were magnificent. I like a person who can admit she was wrong, I told Alice, particularly if that person can also cook scrapple.
As Jeffrey searched for a trustworthy purveyor of chicks that Friday morning, I wandered from booth to booth with a large market basket under my arm. Jeffrey was putting a few things in a market basket himself, and Alice volunteered to make a detailed inspection of the fish and meat available in a line of shops across from the market known as Butcher’s Row. We had thought we were just picking up a few odds and ends, but when we returned to Exford and unpacked our market baskets in the Jowells’ kitchen—carefully observed by Francie, who was presumably guarding against infiltration by foreign vegetables—we found that we had three jars of honey, one jar of raspberry jam, two cabbages, a jar of pickled onions, some Cheshire and Caerphilly and Cheddar cheese, a half-dozen honey lollipops, a carton of raspberries, a carton of blackberries, a bunch of bananas, a jar of tomato relish, an astounding number of shortbread cookies, a package of clotted cream, some bread pudding, a few tomatoes, a pound of hog’s pudding, a pound of sunflower nuts, some extra-fruit strawberry jam, a lemon cheesecake, a half-dozen rock cakes, some fresh salmon, some fresh haddock, a cooked crab, six scones, a jar of runner-bean chutney, a jar of loganberry jam, one melon, a second jar of raspberry jam, three toy horses, one toy car, a jar of olive oil, a bunch of grapes, some sunflower oil, some wine vinegar, a pineapple cheesecake, even more rock cakes, three kippers, two smoked mackerels, a knitted hat, two hundred-weights of chicken feed, a few lemons, and half a faggot—another faggot and a half having been consumed in the heat of shopping.
Francie looked at Jeffrey and then at me. “Alice was the one who bought the salmon,” I said weakly.
“Well,” Jeffrey said. “We needed everything.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” Francie said. “We couldn’t have lasted another day without those sunflower nuts.”
Alice and I went back to Barnstaple with Jeffrey the following Friday so that he could pick up his chicks and I could replenish my hog’s pudding supply—perhaps picking up some more Cheddar and another jar or two of runner-bean chutney as long as I was in the neighborhood. At one of the stalls three chicks, in a pasteboard box, were waiting for Jeffrey. On the ride back to Exford, his only two concerns about them were that they might be cocks rather than pullets and that they might not be chickens of any kind. They were odd-looking little gray birds that were supposedly of the Maran variety of chicken but suggested to the untrained eye—the kind of eye Jeffrey happens to have—baby hawks, or perhaps vultures.
“Determining the sex of chicks has only been successfully done on a regular basis by the Koreans,” Jeffrey said, apparently having pulled that fact out of Natural Poultry Management or The Complete Poultry Keeper and Farmer.
“I don’t suppose you’re going to be able to find any Koreans in Exford,” I said. “Maybe in Taunton.”
“Well, they’re lovely little chicks anyway,” Jeffrey said. I gathered from his remarks that he had decided to assume that the predatory-looking creatures in the back of the car were in fact chickens.
He slowed in the traffic leaving Barnstaple, and pointed toward a car in front of us that was towing a trailer containing a calf. “That’s my next venture,” he said.
“Does Francie know about this?” Alice asked.
“Lovely thing, that,” Jeffrey continued. “Lovely. I once fell in love with a Jersey cow at the Dunster Show.”
