Sunday, Maine Maple Sunday

A couple of Sundays ago, Sunday the 27^th in other parts of the world, was Maine Maple Sunday, the Maine Department of Agriculture’s annual (it has been going on for over 25 years) event to celebrate the Sugar Maple tapping season.  Stacey and I, being fond of the sweeter side of life, decided to see what the hubbub was about.

They have been doing this for a while.

We visited a couple of different production facilities that day: Kinney’s Sugarhouse in Knox, as well as Sugar Mountain Maple Farms, a couple of miles up the road in Freedom.  The day was lovely, at a crisp 40 degrees or so; there was a band warming up and a local company selling barbeque sauce sweetened with maple syrup was grilling chicken outside at Kinney’s.  It was a great example of how nice it is when it warms up ten degrees.  The line of cars 200 yards down the single lane dirt drive attested to the popularity of the event; some sugar houses reported four to five thousand visitors.  So did the line out the door.

Being good Americans, we found the end of the line and queued up.  Inside the small building, filling most of the open room, was the sugar evaporator, gleaming and shiny just sitting there waiting for the sap.  While in line, Stacey and I debated what to buy.  Along the wall were bottles of syrup ranging widely, from glass bottles to plastic jugs, in gallons, half gallons, quarts, pints and other measurements, as well as various candies, maple syrup cotton candy, and other assorted paraphernalia.  Needless to say, an addition of a “Grade A Dark” jug to our pantry was in order. We also purchased the maple candies I remember being ubiquitous on the coast of Maine.  They were probably inland as well, but my journeys there were less frequent.  I remember the small country stores selling t-shirts and maple candies were in nearly every town, regardless of population or location.

When we were done with the sampling of the products inside, we found our way outside.  While we waited for the chicken to be done, so we would have a vehicle for our barbeque sauce samples, we milled about noticing the blue and white tubing strung from the maples like garlands.  I had never seen a commercial syrup operation before; while it makes perfect sense to me now, I guess I just thought they hauled the sap in buckets by hand, like all the smaller home operations.  In hindsight, I realize that this idea was absurd; there is no way you would want to do that.  Thinking about the amount of maple syrup sold, 310,000 gallons sold in Maine alone (and that was 2010, a down year according to New England Agricultural Statistics), and the fact that it takes at least forty gallons to make just one gallon of syrup, I see how faulty my notions were.

At the Sugar Mountain facility, the evaporator was running; there was an exquisite odor about the place that reminded us of everything that is awesome about the aroma of a bowl of Golden Grahams.  I chatted with George, the third of four generations to work his family’s sugar shack, and learned about the inner workings of the evaporator, as Stacey just stood over the vat of reducing sap and inhaled the lovely odor.  At Kinney’s we were able to sample the lovely amber nectar, while the Sugar Mountain gang were pouring a bit of syrup over some vanilla ice cream. Stacey was more than pleased with that concoction.  I, however, was dreaming about something a little more robust, like an espresso shot poured over a scoop of ice cream with some fantastic maple syrup topping the drink.

The fog smelled like Golden Grahams...

A characteristic I love about the state of Maine is even though there are commercial producers around that turn out a quality product at an affordable price, Mainers all over are doing it themselves.  It’s one of the beauties of cooking with a wood stove, one of which my family had for a time when I was a child; not only does it heat the house, making the kitchen the most comfortable of places in winter, but all you need to do is put a big pot of sap (or soup, depending on the season) on it and let it go for a couple of days and just bask in the scent and revel in the end result.  Just like our predecessors have been doing since they were taught by the Maine tribes.

It Was A Slaughter

Last November, when I came to visit my folks, I was a bumming a little.  The restaurant I was working at had just gone under. While I realize that wasn’t my fault, it is hard to detach yourself from the idea that the kitchen you run is under control from anything but your iron-fisted rule.  When the news came down that we were closing, I booked a flight to Maine.  Visiting my parents always seems to cheer me up, and seeing my grandmother and aunt would also be good for my psyche.

I didn’t really have any plans for my work in the future (and honestly still don’t), but I did have lots of ideas as to what I wanted to do.  That’s me in a nut shell, always the dreamer and never the planner.  I might not be very rational, but don’t tell anyone.  Anyway, one of the things that I wanted to do was learn more about how to process animals, pigs in particular.  I just love pork, as you might have gathered from the Puerco Pibil recipe I posted.  So, I put it out there, and lo and behold, a family friend was slaughtering her pigs that weekend.  Needless to say, I jumped at the chance.

Eliza is a woman after my own heart.  She has traveled Spain extensively, worked in kitchens, moved to Maine to raise her family, home schools her children and still orders her food from restaurant supply purveyors in bulk.  She, Mark and her two boys, called Kook and Tooty, raise pigs, ducks, chickens, and goats.  As well as growing their vegetables (sort of standard fare in Maine), they make their own cheese and sausage, and tan their hides.  For the boys, a very good education in self-sustenance.

The day started off a little late for my girlfriend, Stacey and I; we got to Liza’s farm shortly after they killed the goat.  I apologize, for not remembering the name of the goat.  The headliners of the slaughter had names: Lardass, Trotters and Headcheese (all weighing in at roughly 275 pounds), awesome names for pigs, as it gives them an identity, but also acknowledges their purpose in life.  Having a name for an animal, to me, is a big deal, as it forges an identity in the human mind, and gives an image for said mind to honor.  I feel it is very important to honor the animal’s life.  I know a lot of people don’t name their livestock, so they don’t become attached to the animal.  Mostly, it’s for children learning about the nature of farm life.  Personally, I don’t subscribe to that theory, and I am glad the Eagers don’t as well.

I won’t give you all the details (if you want them let me know and I’ll give you all the gory bits).  But the main routine of the process was: tie the leg, shoot, drain (saving the blood for sausage), scald, shave, behead, carry up the hill, secure the bung, dress the carcass (saving all the offal for future use), hang, halve the carcass, process the halves and then freeze, cook, refrigerate, or cure.  That is the whole two days, condensed.  I can understand how, traditionally, the slaughter was an occasion for celebration, as the more hands you have doing tasks, the easier it is, and fresh pork is truly worth throwing a party.  I was absolutely exhausted at the end of it, it didn’t help that I was fighting off a head cold, but there was no way in hell that I was missing this.

It was hard work, but I learned how a pig is put together

 

The real joy of the weekend was the food.  I hadn’t realized, but while Paul was illuminating the joys of tying a bung, Liza was cooking.  When I finally joined the rest, I found: lentils, onions, foraged, mushrooms, roasted red peppers, kale and arugula (both five minutes old), fresh bread and a modest bottle of Spanish table wine.  But the highlight was the hour old liver.  If you don’t like liver then you will absolutely hate the uber fresh, farm raised, grass fed pigs’ liver (it’s intense).  I don’t hate liver, so I loved it.  This might not have been the best meal I have ever had.  However, its only rival is an eleven course affair at a restaurant that won a James Beard Award. 

One of my favorite parts of the meal was how Liza just placed the food on the table.  For example, she just cut the bread and set it there, no basket, no plate.  Same with the greens.  This kind of informality really made you feel like family.  The next day our gracious hostess made the crew a breakfast of eggs, toast with homemade jam and goat cheese, and morcilla.  For our lunch, we had leftovers of lentils and sides from the day before with tenderloin wrapped with caul fat and seared.  I think it was one of the best things that I have ever cooked.

And yes he is looking at you.

The slaughter was a blessing for Stacey (she had revelations on the life of food) and I.  By no means should this be taken lightly; it was a trying weekend.  Not only was the killing tough, but the carrying and moving of the carcass, the processing, the smells (for a week all I could smell was pig), and the dreams (these also lasted a week) were demanding as well.  And that isn’t even mentioning the curing and cooking and sausage making.  The weekend was completely unexpected and exactly what I needed at the time.  Life has a funny way of giving you just the right thing at the right time.  I think the Rolling Stones might have written a song about this.  Thank you, Mr. Jimmy, for giving Mick the words to counsel the world.  And thank you Liza, for sharing your little slice of Maine life with us.

A Brief Introduction

Hello out there.  This being my first post, I will keep this short.  I just wanted to say hello and let you know what this site will encompass.  It is my desire to share my love of everything culinary about Maine.  But first I should probably tell you a little about myself.  My name is Galen Cunning, I’m approaching my thirtieth birthday, and I am a chef.  Wait, I don’t really like that word (it’s a little pretentious), I like to cook, and I do it for money.  I realize that kinda makes me sound like a prostitute, but oh well. 

I started working in kitchens when I was sixteen.  My father got me a job washing dishes at a restaurant that a friend owned.  At first it was just a job; I wanted to snowboard professionally, either as a big mountain rider or an instructor.  As I grew older, however, I realized that I just wanted to snowboard and not work at making money with it.  So then, cooking was a way to travel and survive; it is such a mobile craft after all.  And it certainly allowed me to roam.  I have lived in California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, Alaska, Wyoming, Colorado, and Maine (doesn’t really count, I was raised here), working in kitchens in all of them.  Somewhere down the line, I’m not sure where, I started to love cooking.  I would “practice” on my day off, read about food after work, and talk about my favorite ingredients with a passion unrivaled (almost).

Soon, I was paying attention to what was going on food-wise in this country.  How we have been led astray from the cyclical nature of life and have been trained to want what we want, we are Americans after all.  It seemed that with all this focus on making “progress”, we have forgotten the foundation that helped mankind crawl from the primordial muck.  To me this seemed like a costly mistake, as studies are starting to show that the factory farming that makes the western diet possible has many dietary and environmental repercussions.  This revelation has made me realize that my childhood, often spent agonizing about how I was “trapped” in Maine, wasn’t nearly as bad as I had previously thought.

My childhood, you see, wasn’t spent in front of a television.  In fact, I wasn’t able to even buy anything I saw advertized there.  My folks had bought a nineteenth century farmhouse in mid coast Maine, Belfast to be specific (some of you might be familiar with the area, or even with my parents).  Having bought a farmhouse, they proceeded to put food in the ground and built pens for animals.  Now they didn’t have a full on subsistence farm, but growing up I had more than my fair share of fruit and vegetables directly from the plant or ground, the dirt merely washed off with water from the hand pump.  There were also many wild strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries.  That’s not even mentioning the bounty of incredibly fresh seafood, so much so that I took it for granted.   As I recall, one of my favorite foods as a small child were mussels, steamed in butter, white wine, and parsley.  The odd thing about my tastes were that as I grew older, I developed a dislike for them.  I do realize that makes me a strange sort.

So as I matured as a person, I began to realize that it wasn’t my home town that made me restless; it is just built into my personality, as evidenced by my roaming.  And with this perspective, my infrequent journeys home started opening my eyes to the wonder that is Maine.  I can now appreciate my parent’s choice to settle here.  While not perfect (I realize that no place is), the problems here are being faced head on by a populace that, having fought hardship for generations, is well suited to tackle them.  The water might be a threatened by acid rain, but at least there is water, unlike parts of the drought ridden west.  The fish stocks might be declining, but our greatest culinary export, lobster, is still doing alright thanks to regulations wisely put in place decades ago.  There is still the threat of GMOs pollinating organic crops; however, the mindset of the populace and geography of the state make the mega farms of the Midwest problematic.   Though things are tough all over, it is my belief that Mainers have the resources and wherewithal to withstand the hardships of life in the 21^st century, funnily enough, by relying on the lessons learned by their ancestors.

 These are but few of the challenges we face collectively as a nation; but seeing and talking with the everyday people of my early days gives me faith that, out of all my travels, nowhere is more suited to fighting the good fight than this sparsely populated, economically challenged, cold and rocky chunk of land at the edge of America.