New England's beer culture is as rich and robust as a dark, toasty stout. Our region boasts more than 100 breweries, so picking its five best beermakers poses a rather enjoyable challenge. Kerry J. Byrne, a food and beverage writer for the Boston Herald (and creator of coldhardfootballfacts.com, a site devoted to beer, food, and football), did the hard work of sampling.
A combination beer garden, smokehouse, and brewery tucked behind an unassuming white farmhouse on a leafy country road at the edge of stunning Acadia National Park. The beers are straight out of the old New England tradition: that is, British beer styles that often take advantage of American-grown malts, hops, and other native ingredients. Best brews: "Special Old Bitter Ale," "Coal Porter," and "Blueberry Ale," made with wild Maine fruit. Bar Harbor, ME; atlanticbrewing.com
No trip to Maine is complete without a stop at one of these cozy and inviting brewery taverns. Best brews: "Best Bitter" and "Black Fly Stout," preferably served at one of the pubs via traditional hand-pull. Auburn, Freeport, and Portland, ME; grittys.com
Longtime New England brewer and Connecticut native Dann Paquette specializes in what he calls "American artisanal" styles: beers brewed in the rustic Belgian tradition, but with American malts and hops and our nation's gift for style-bending creativity. Best brew: "Jack D'Or," a domestic version of the saison-style farmhouse ales of Wallonia. Cambridge and Westport, MA; prettythingsbeertoday.com
Although its Samuel Adams Boston Lager is brewed mostly in Cincinnati, Ohio, Boston remains the corporate home of the largest American-owned beermaker. The firm's small pilot brewery in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood--where brewers experiment with small-batch and vintage beer styles--is one of the city's most popular tourist destinations. Tasty test batches are served in the brewery's two taprooms. Best brew: "Samuel Adams Utopias," the world's strongest commercial beer. Boston, MA; samueladams.com
Named for Smuttynose Island, this maker produces year-round and seasonal beers that are sold up and down the East Coast and into the Midwest, plus a selection of limited-release brews for local markets. Best brew: "Finestkind IPA," a generously hopped India pale ale and, in my opinion, the single best beer brewed in New England. Portsmouth and Hampton, NH; smuttynose.com
When you think of Vermont--white church on the tidy green--you're not actually thinking of Hardwick, which in its days as the "Building Granite Center of the World" used to boast a dirty-movie theater and a lot of bars. And those were the good times. In November 2005 an enormous fire wrecked the historic Bemis Block in the middle of town. (It has since been reconstructed.)
Likewise, when you think of "compost," you may imagine a healthy-looking gardener spreading the loamy remains of his erstwhile vegetable soup on the raised beds where he'll grow next year's carrots. That's not Tom Gilbert.
He's healthy-looking enough, but he's standing in a dusty parking lot high on West Hill Road, overlooking town. "You're surrounded now by three decomposing carcasses," he says, pointing proudly to a trio of brown mounds. Tom Gilbert runs the Highfields Center for Composting, which introduced "livestock mortality composting" to Vermont. On a dairy farm, 5 percent of the herd is likely to die each year, so knowing what to do with the remains is important.
"You don't want to just haul it out to the field," Gilbert explains. "That's a lot of blood and bone that will go to waste," when it could be improving the soil. So here's one recipe: an 18-inch base of woodchips, a 6-inch layer of sawdust, a thin layer of fresh corn silage (or haylage, or horse manure), the animal, and then a cap of silage--24 inches of material on all sides of the carcass. Done correctly, with proper siting (away from surface and ground water) and air flow, the process inactivates pathogens and produces a rich compost.
"There's a full-grown Holstein in there--I put him in two weeks ago," says Gilbert, who sticks a 2-foot-long thermometer into the pile. "One hundred forty-five degrees. If you go in with a shovel, you'll find nice clean bone. We'll leave it a while, and the skull and the pelvis will still be there, but now they'll be brittle enough that you're not going to pop a tire if you drive the tractor over it."
Gilbert composts more than cows; in fact, he's pioneered a rural composting system that gathers up much of the food waste from the surrounding area, including schools, farms, and restaurants. The collection truck drives a 76-mile route; some of the stops are 15 miles apart, which reduces the economies of scale. Even so, once the workers have the garbage up on the piles, where they can roll it with a backhoe every few days, it doesn't take long before it turns into fertilizer. "If you assume that every cubic yard of compost offsets an equivalent amount of synthetic nitrogen (chemical fertilizer), and accounting for mitigated landfill emissions," Gilbert calculates, "our little operation here is offsetting greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to not burning some 26,000 gallons of gasoline a year."
If you want to change the world, or even a corner of it, compost helps a lot. If Vermont as a whole recycled all of its food waste, it could compost 20,000 acres of vegetable fields. Together with good cover crop practices, that could be enough to grow most of the produce its citizens consume. And Vermont is a little place. Imagine New York City composting; it's comparatively easy to collect food waste when there are more households in Manhattan alone than individuals in all of Vermont. The resulting fertilizer would be enough to make New Jersey the Garden State once more. "Soil is the frontier of where we need to be going," Gilbert declares.
But forget New York--Hardwick is interesting enough on its own. And compost is just, literally, the beginning. Almost everything here is conspiring to produce a produce renaissance, a (soy) milky way toward the future. In fact, it may be the single most interesting agricultural experiment on the continent. In a lovely new book, The Town That Food Saved, journalist Ben Hewitt declares that its residents "are more able to sustain themselves on food grown by their neighbors than perhaps any other community in the U.S." To understand why, follow the local food chain.
Some of Tom Gilbert's compost gets trucked about a mile down the road to Wolcott, to the gardens where High Mowing Organic Seeds grows its product. High Mowing is one of the country's biggest organic seed companies, which means it isn't all that big--a couple of million dollars a year in revenue. But it sure is beautiful.
"People say it's hard to grow organic broccoli and cauliflower," says Tom Stearns, the ebullient proprietor. "We try to find the ones that really crank--like these," he says, pointing to specimens approximately the size of beach balls. "Organics need to be really vigorous to out-compete weeds. And they tend to need more root hairs, because their fertility is widely distributed instead of being intravenously injected. These guys here are perfect if you like radishes; I don't much like radishes. This is spicy 'Golden Frill' mustard greens, a new variety we added in 2009. Here's an Asian green, hon tsai tai--just eat, eat. We have two fields up here, and we keep them a mile apart to prevent crossing. We have zucchini in one and pumpkins in the other. Or else you get pumpkinis. Or maybe zuckins."
The High Mowing warehouse is down the hill--metal shelves are filled with the beginnings of a million meals. Quinoa ... spelt ... a big bag of 'Tom Thumb' popcorn ... Italian flat-leaf parsley. But not just flat-leaf: double-curl, triple-curl. Two young women are hunched over a cutting board, examining onions. "We have a new favorite," one reports. " 'Rossa di Milano.' It really stood out. It beat 'Red Baron.' High, blocky shoulders."
Stearns is gushing on about his business--the fast growth, the network of small growers, the sterling germination rates--but I'm dizzy from the sheer fertility. "That bag over there has 30 pounds of cuke seed," he says. "That's 60 acres." Orders come in by the hour: "People who used to get five or ten packets are suddenly getting 20 or 30. The 10-by-10 garden is becoming 20-by-30. People are trying to put food up. I love high oil prices."
Lots of Stearns's seed goes a few miles north, to Craftsbury, where Pete Johnson of Pete's Greens has been pioneering year-round organic farming in northern New England. Johnson built a solar greenhouse as his senior project at Middlebury College, and then started thinking bigger. By now he's figured out how to move his greenhouses on tracks, so that he can cover and uncover different fields, and as a result grow greens 12 months of the year without any extra heat. And that lets him run his CSA (community-supported agriculture) operation, dubbed "Good Eats," year-round.
Say your family wants the spring share. You'd pay $748 for a weekly basket from February to June; in mid-April--a tough time of year for local farming--you'd be getting maybe a half-pound of mesclun, a bunch of parsley and some scallions, three pounds of carrots, some early radishes, two pounds of beets, two pounds of fingerling potatoes, a half-pound of oyster mushrooms, a loaf of local bread, a half-gallon of local cider, and a half-pound of local feta cheese. You can add a meat share if you like ($199 for monthly delivery): a five-pound chicken, some pasture-raised hamburger, a couple of locally farmed trout, and a pound of bacon cured without nitrates. By Johnson's calculation, it all comes to 20 percent less than buying the same stuff at a supermarket.
But we're used to thinking of local food as more expensive. "Compared with what?" Johnson asks, when a reporter from The Christian Science Monitor raises the price question. "Compared with the absolute junkiest food you can buy in a supermarket? It's too bad we think we can't afford the most important thing in the world, when we're so wealthy."
Other seed from High Mowing is dispatched a couple of miles in the other direction, to the headquarters of Vermont Soy, in Hardwick. They hand it out to four or five Vermont farmers, who in turn produce the beans that become tofu and soy milk in the small factory here. (Only half the space is used for tofu; the other half somehow turns cow's-milk whey into varnish for furniture.) The owner, Andrew Meyer, grew up on a local dairy farm, the kind of farm that's been going under for decades as the milk industry turns into a commodity business dominated by huge Western dairies. So he understands the need for a more regional food economy. "I think Vermont hasn't even tapped its capacity for growing food," Meyer says. "Someday the train will come back, and we'll be sending a refrigerated car once a week right to Chelsea Market. We've got two of the biggest markets in the world right nearby: Boston and New York."
But for now, forget about Boston and New York. A fair amount of the food from Hardwick is going to ... downtown Hardwick. To, for instance, a lovely new restaurant, Claire's, which in its first year of operation won a spot on Condé Nast Traveler's "Hot Tables" list. Fifty local investors put up a thousand bucks apiece to help get it started, and they're taking their money back out in the form of dinners.
And what dinners they are: Some weeks, local garlic, tomatoes, eggplant, and basil might combine for a Northeast Kingdom ratatouille; other nights an area apiary might pour its newest mead. Linda Ramsdell, a partner in Claire's and owner of the uniquely delightful Galaxy Bookshop across the street, often brings in cookbook authors for special dine-and-read evenings; needless to say, the regular live music is as local as the food.
And, needless to say, the evening often ends with a plate of cheese. One of the real foodie highlights of the Hardwick area is the newly opened cheese cave in Greensboro, where many of Vermont's best-loved artisanal products spend their final few months aging in the climate-controlled rooms.
Proprietors Andy and Mateo Kehler were already making award-winning cheeses at their Jasper Hill Farm, but they knew that many of their small-scale colleagues around the region had trouble storing and shipping their products. So when they were building a facility for their own stuff, they just kept building; it's now 22,000 square feet, with seven underground vaults: different climates for everything from blues to clothbound cheddars. It can store 2 million pounds at a time, from 39 degrees to 55 degrees; it's a pungent paradise.
But it's also part of an economy. It's a way to take fluid milk, which is currently a drag on the market--selling for less than it costs to produce--and turning it into something that goes for $20 a pound. That means jobs, and everyone on the Hardwick food scene is at least as serious about jobs as they are about flavor. This year, the Vermont Food Venture Center is moving into Hardwick's industrial park. It's a place where new "agrepreneurs," to use a term coined by Ben Hewitt, can figure out how to make that new cheese, that new salsa, that new tempeh, all on a scale that will also let them make money.
"We need businesses that can feed off each other," says Andrew Meyer. "The waste stream of one would be the feedstock of the next." And all of it would provide real resilience for a rural economy that would like to depend neither on the boom-and-bust of quarrying nor on the quaint unreality of providing scenic vistas for summer homes.
Over lunch at the headquarters of The Center for an Agricultural Economy, which sits next to Claire's and serves as the organizing hub for this food experiment, Tom Stearns points out that he's had 40 job applications in the past week at his seed farm. No wonder: Some of the slots pay $40,000 a year, they come with benefits, and there's all the produce you can carry away from the test gardens. "We still have to convince the local kids, though," he says. "They've all grown up believing that there's no future in farming. But now there is."
To read more about Hardwick, we recommend Yankee contributor Ben Hewitt's new book, The Town That Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food (Rodale, 2010).
Beets are both delicious and nutritious. Try these recipes or visit our food page for more ways to prepare beets.
At a recent farm-to-table dinner at the Gibbet Hill Grill in Groton, Massachusetts, I found myself in deep conversation about beets with Bill Adler. He's a bigwig in the hip-hop music world and an encyclopedia of information on myriad subjects. He's also a beet fanatic. His wife, Sara Moulton, a celebrity chef, isn't.
"There was a great meeting of cultures in my house," Bill laughed. "After Little League baseball practice, the great American sport, my Russian parents would give me a tall glass of cold beet juice—instead of milk or lemonade—and I loved it."
Sara's face puckered in distaste, quickly changing to a smile. "I love my husband," she said, "so I had to figure out a way to embrace the beets. I came up with a recipe that even I can't resist."
Sara, a former executive chef at Gourmet magazine and now host of a popular PBS cooking show called Sara's Weeknight Meals, riffed on taking a common salad combination—roasted beets, walnuts, and goat cheese—and serving it with pasta. This dish is arrestingly beautiful on the plate, rich and creamy without gobs of fat, easy, quick (the beets go in raw), and vegetarian. (Swap out the feta and substitute a dairy-free ingredient and it's even vegan.)
As for us, we're crazy for these root vegetables--they're earthy and sweet, and come in oh-so-beautiful colors, from deep, purply reds to rich, egg-yolk yellows to silly pink-and-white-striped. All are filled to capacity with vitamins and other nutrients that promote heart, liver, and colon health. See more beet recipes.
The waist-high bookshelves that line the reading room at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art are crammed with stories that span a lifetime. When a child tugs loose one of the colorful spines and brings it back to her grandmother to read, there's no telling what treasure she'll hand her. Maybe it's a brand-new Caldecott or Newbery Medal winner, maybe a classic she once read to the child's mother, or maybe it's a book her own parents put her to bed with so many years ago.
When the Carle opened in 2002, promising to "celebrate the art we know first," it instantly became an oddity in the museum world, not just because it's the first to focus on the art of picture books, but also because the collection hanging in its three small galleries is arguably its least important aspect. The Carle shares the same simple mission as the books it promotes--getting children to think--so the paintings are only the beginning. After children go through the galleries, someone may ask them for their two cents at an interactive book reading, or they may see a play or a movie based on the book in the museum's auditorium. And no child's trip through the Carle is complete without stopping at the craft room--overflowing with paper, glue sticks, and opportunities--to make some art of one's own.
In a time when schools are forced to weed libraries and art classes out of their budgets, the Carle is a bastion for anyone who sees the merit in things "not on the test." Staff members routinely hold professional-development workshops for educators and even do outreach programs at schools that have lost their art curricula. It's a dynamism not seen in many museums, but when the Carle's curators see a child clasping an open book, wrapped up in the adventure of some hungry caterpillar, they understand which of the two is the true piece of art.
I tip my hat to those plucky 19th-century seamen who first manned the lightships off the shores of Nantucket.
Unlike the world's great and tortured artists, I've never found periods of isolation, loneliness, and boredom to be inspiring or productive. For me, they don't summon the muse; they only beget more of the same.
These hardy souls not only endured months of desolation in solitary confinement at sea, they created a unique art form, both beautiful and purposeful, known as Nantucket lightship basketry.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the foggy shores of Nantucket were some of the most treacherous in the Atlantic. More than 100 whaling ships and trading vessels were shipwrecked there. Whaling captains petitioned Congress to anchor "lightships," essentially floating lighthouses, off the shoals around the island to help vessels navigate the dangerous waters. Sailors stationed aboard these ships made baskets as a way to pass the time and to earn extra income.
The earliest forms of Nantucket baskets were utilitarian creations, made free-form using wooden splints woven to a round pine-board bottom. During the 1860s, basket making aboard the lightships became an art form. Attached to molds, round and oval baskets were woven of cane or rattan. Handles were made from bent oak or hickory, and bottoms were made of cherry, oak, or maple, hand-turned on a lathe and beautifully shaped. This cottage industry flourished with interest from islanders and tourists alike. Fitted nests of baskets were designed, ranging in size from a few inches up to nearly two feet in diameter.
Makers such as Captain Charles Ray and George Washington Ray produced some of the finest examples of Nantucket baskets ever made. Originally selling for as little as $1.50, Nantucket lightship baskets now fetch several thousand apiece, with complete nests bringing tens of thousands, even six figures at auction.
By 1900, the sailors' pastime of basket making had all but died out. Back on the island, artisans such as "Mitchy" Ray and Jose Formoso Reyes carried on the lightship tradition; today, contemporary makers still create baskets by hand. Perfectly woven and delicately polished, they are beautiful, to be sure. But they're not for me.
I feel compelled to search for one that holds a century's worth of dust among its lacings. I could tell you it's because I like the wear on the handle and the soft color of the original surface. But in truth, I think it's an attempt to bridge the time and distance between myself and that forlorn sailor who spawned a thing of beauty out of sheer isolation, loneliness, and boredom. Now that's what I call a light in the darkness.
Catherine Riedel represents Skinner Auctioneers and Appraisers of Boston. skinnerinc.com
I'm not a good one to tell you what to do in Sandwich, Massachusetts, especially if you have just a weekend. There's so much to do and see, and on each of our annual visits, we add more to the list. My advice about Sandwich is "go early and often."
And by "early" I don't mean in the season, though that works, too. I mean early, like dawn. There's no better way to begin your day than by watching the sunrise turning Cape Cod Bay a dusty rose. The beach is best accessed by a 1,000-foot boardwalk across a winding tidal creek.
It's hard when strolling here to not look down at the names of families, dogs, businesses, and lovers engraved on the boardwalk planks -- but save that for the return trip.
Raise your eyes instead to the vast salt marsh that stretches to the sea. This gentle view is punctuated by a single tower that holds a big platform for ospreys. Even with the naked eye you can watch a nesting couple feeding fish to their young.
From the Town Neck end of the beach you'll catch a rare view of the entrance to Cape Cod Canal. On our last visit, we watched a chubby tugboat tow a big tanker from the North Atlantic into the mouth of the canal. We talked about trying to race the ship to watch it pass under Sagamore Bridge. But sand, lapping waves, pebbles, and shells made us linger at the water's edge.
Later we returned to our room at The Dan'l Webster Inn to develop a game plan. We always check in on Friday night to guarantee that we'll be local for the morning beach ritual. Lodging has been offered on this site for more than 300 years; in its Revolutionary days, the tavern served as Patriot headquarters for this area.
A horse-drawn carriage filled with planters of pansies and geraniums sits out front. We enjoy rooms with four-poster beds and gas fireplaces. The modern amenities offered here -- spa treatments, Jacuzzi, contemporary cuisine, and an award-winning wine list -- do not clash with the inn's Colonial atmosphere.
The day revolves around history, and with good reason: Sandwich is the oldest town on the Cape. Come here to amble, as in the days when the road was just a cart path traveled by settlers from Plymouth Colony. Visiting Sandwich is like seeing an old friend whose stories are familiar. We do not search for something new; rather, we become attuned to nuance. Now, after several visits, the Hoxie House isn't just the oldest home on the Cape; to us it's also the tiny windows, built in the days when glass was scarce, and the way someone might have had to stoop where the severe saltbox roof meets the ground.
At Dexter Grist Mill, we don't see just a restored 17th-century wooden paddlewheel; we picture farmers bringing precious corn to be ground into meal. Around the corner, the Sandwich Glass Museum chronicles an early American industry in thousands of sparkling, colorful glass pieces. Here we envision a lady dressed in a silk ball gown, holding in her hand a graceful cologne bottle, the one displayed here.
A Sandwich weekend shouldn't simply be the stuff of guidebooks: three centuries of architecture; a perfect walking village complete with duck pond, museums, and antiques shops; and, of course, dunes and beaches. When you visit, do as we do: suspend time. Float, as if on a gentle wave, in and out of time and the interesting stories of the people who once lived where you now linger.
Often referred to as "liquid salad," gazpacho may be a vegetable's best expression of summer. Its success (and yours) depends on the freshest of ripe ingredients, which are all at their peak now through the end of August.
This chilled soup, of Spanish provenance, keeps your kitchen and you cool (no oven or burner to turn on), no matter what the thermometer reads.
We offer a great list of vegetables to put into this soup, but feel free to work with what you have handy. Like most recipes, "authentic" gazpacho is a well-debated subject and can run the gamut from garnishes such as grilled shrimp and chopped eggs to some with nary a tomato invited to the party.
This version is left chunky, but feel free to puree the whole kit and caboodle (if so, no need to dice the ingredients finely -- a rough chop will do just fine).
Watch food editor Annie B. Copps make gazpacho on "207," a Portland, Maine, TV newsmagazine.
RECIPE
One of the best things to do with summer's fruits is bake them into a pie. Here are a few ways to do that with strawberries, rhubarb, peaches, and blueberries.
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RECIPES