Nothing in Storehouse but a Jointof Beef Crossword

The day after the Fourth of July my wife and I drove across the George Washington Bridge and up the Hudson on an expedition in search of local food and drink. When I told a friend what we were looking for, giving it the name "regional gastronomy," he asked if there was any in America, or had I perhaps invented it? I believed it existed, and I hoped on this brief tour to be able to document my claim, beginning with High Tor Vineyards, only twenty-eight miles from Manhattan, where a man named Everett Crosby was said to be making New York City's own vin du pays.

We found Crosby in his pleasant old house on a small mountaintop above the Hudson. He turned out to be a former radio and television writer who had had no vineyard experience before he bought the seventy-eight-acre High Tor property in 1950. (His boyhood Italian neighbors in California had made wine, but his family hadn't.) A devoted amateur in a profession where knowledge is usefully accumulated for generations (a vineyardist has only one chance each year of his life to see how something will grow), he planted his first vines knowing approximately what he wanted to do but not exactly how to do it. About half the High Tor acres are plantable, and Crosby now has about half of these in vines, all French hybrids. One full-time assistant helps him tend the vineyards and press the grapes.

After more than a decade of making and selling wine, Crosby's bottling amounts to less than 5000 gallons a year of white, red, and rose combined. This is nearly five times the average production of the world-famous Romanée-Conti, but only about one bottle for each 1000 bottles of the popular Muscadet produced by many winemakers in and around Nantes. Crosby makes nothing but dry table wine, his most successful to date being a 1963 Rockland White that he marked "Special Reserve." French hybrid grapes are not used in any of the world's great wines, but they account for a lot of good vin ordinaire.

"If you can't make dry wine," runs an adage in the trade, "then you make champagne. If you can't make champagne, then you make sweet wine." In America this vinous hierarchy is complicated by the fact that we have a national sweet tooth which is large, vulnerable, and frequently aching. Most of us like sweet foods, sweet soft drinks, and sweet wines, only salving our conscience by insisting that our Martinis and whiskey be extra dry. Posset, one of the drinks our ancestors enjoyed, was made by curdling hot milk with ale or wine, well sugared and spiced. My wife and I saw a kitchen where they did that, after we left High Tor and crossed the river to visit the Van Cortlandt Mansion at Croton-on-Hudson.

From Croton we continued up the east side of the river, and when we stopped for coffee at Hyde Park I was reminded that the community had once made a name for itself in the caviar trade, when the Hudson teemed with sturgeon. Unfortunately, progress brought industrial growth, wastes emptied into the water, and the sturgeon disappeared. My wife remarked that the same thing seemed to be happening to the shad. We both like shad roe, and shad without roe, broiled on a plank. And stuffed shad, and baked shad with roe soufflé. "Anything that hasn't lost out to industrial progress," she said, studying the dregs in her styrofoam cup like a fortune-teller, "will get done in by standardization and mass distribution."

We drove on to spend the night at America's oldest hotel, the Beekman Arms at Rhinebeck, where they've been offering public bed and board daily since 1700. George Washington slept there. Franklin Roosevelt had his own place to sleep just nine miles down the road, but he was a daytime visitor. Local culinary history records that both Presidents were served a cream soup made with such fancy imported ingredients as crabs and sherry. The Hudson River Valley has always been worldly in its outlook; one nearby inn claims proudly to be the oldest serving continental food.

Another neighborhood hotel, the Old Drovers Inn, first catered to New England cowboys herding cattle from ranches in western Connecticut and Massachusetts down to New York City. Today the chef at Old Drovers roasts his pheasants in French Burgundy, but his Cheddar cheese soup is a native New York specialty.

The Treasure Chest Inn, which was built in 1741 near Poughkeepsie, had a colonial cook who made such good bread that the invading Redcoats posted a guard to keep her baking. When you dine there now an individual loaf is sent to your table in her memory. They make the same gesture at Beckman Arms without invoking the Revolution. If they give you far more than enough good food at dinner, possibly they mean to tide you over all the way to noon the next day. For America's oldest hotel suffers from a very modern ailment, lack of service, and no breakfast is available on the premises.

"I've never questioned the joys of old country inns," my wife said, nibbling her sticky buns at the bakery across the street, "but a drinkable local wine, cheese soup, and a loaf of fresh bread don't make a regional cuisine."

I checked our stock of Crosby's Rockland White, two bottles in Jiffy bags. "We're just beyond the periphery of the corrupting influence of the big city," I said casually. "Today's going to be our first real attempt at living off the land." With McArthur's Smokehouse and the Shaker Museum on the itinerary, I thought the odds were in our favor.

In Millerton, close to the Connecticut border, stands a dark red frame building housing a ninetyyear-old smokehouse named McArthur's. With all the original integrity and excellence of 1876, hams are pickled here for seven weeks in salt, molasses, and water, then smoked four full days at 135 degrees over green hickory logs. This is called cold smoking. It takes longer and results in more shrinkage than the hotter smoking, which produces precooked hams (some of which are said to come out of the process weighing more than when they went in). Cold-smoked hams still need to be baked, and McArthur's will do the job if you ask for it, before packing and shipping anywhere you say.

McArthurs bacon is given a saltier pickling and an intense hickory smoking. Smoked Canadian roast, a house invention, consists of two trimmed pork loins tied together. Other products include sausage, chipped beef, and pork crown roast. We opened a bottle of wine and made lunch on sliced Canadian roast stuffed into fresh buns from the little bakery across the railroad tracks. Molasses cookies and greengage plums completed the menu.

I'd have gone to a picnic table in the town park, but Jack Crawford of McArthur's invited us to use the big round table he'd brought down from Williams College to furnish his reception room, where visitors stop for hot coffee. The dark, old-fashioned room is a museum of antique scales, sheers, and discarded tools of the porker's trade.

As we drove north from Millerton toward Old Chatham and the Shaker Museum I wondered what legacy this extinct community might have left in its neighborhood. Shaker cookery brought to mind simmering soup pots; great community ovens baking the daily bread, cookies, pies, and cakes; lavish use of herbs in such dishes as spinach with rosemary, or chive-and-parsley omelets with fresh blue chive blossoms folded in at the end. They had a pudding called strawberry flummery, recommended in the special diet for the aged; surely it must have been one of the compensations for growing old. The Shaker cooks were thorough and exact, used the best ingredients, worked hard, were completely honest. They made up good recipes for such native American foods as corn, sweet potatoes, lima beans, pumpkins, and cranberries. They improved crops and marketed the first commercial canned goods.

We toured the museum awed by the Shakers' creativity. They invented dozens of gadgets for food preparation, including a sausage stuffer, a device for making popcorn balls, a pea sheller, a water-driven butter churn, an apple parer, a selfacting cheese press, a revolving oven. They're also credited with condensed milk, pure medicines, the first washing machine, lots of good furniture. They practiced brotherly love, celibacy, and danced for joy, or at least for the exercise, and "to drive away wrong desires."

En route to the dairy country east of Lake Ontario, we stopped at Cooperstown to see the Farmers' Museum, a reconstructed rural community of a dozen buildings dating from 1795, showing how people then met the prime needs described by Thomas Jefferson as "bread and covering." The few things they couldn't grow or make for themselves they bought at the country store: coffee and tea, spices, patent medicines, cotton cloth, brightcolored candies. The licorice roots we chewed while we were there left their bite with us the rest of the day.

Close by the Farmers' Museum lies Otsego Lake, which James Fenimore Cooper called Glimmerglass in The Deer slayer. It was here at his father's house in the western wilderness that Cooper wrote the first of his Leatherstocking Tales, which quickly won international acclaim. He wrote with an "independence of spirit," criticizing native American vulgarities, which led to controversy, wide unpopularity, and frequently, libel suits against the press.

We passed through Rome on the way to Copenhagen, in the center of the cheese country. The map showed Florence and Turin, Antwerp and Palermo, Denmark and Mexico not far away. We'd already seen Berne and Paris, and we'd be reaching Geneva, Bath, and Naples later on. It seemed equivalent to a twenty-one-day air tour of Europe, minus the Maxim's meals in flight.

The Queens Farms Dairy in Copenhagen sold us a pound of aged Cheddar for our picnic lunch. They weren't pushing their retail business, and I had to look through several fully automated rooms before I found a live man who could open the refrigerator and take my 50 cents. Most grocers in this area carry two large wheels of local cheese, "this year's" and "last year's," or mild and sharp; it can be very good cheese. The local stores had plenty of fruit, ripe tomatoes, and a choice of beer from neighboring waters, but the bread was nothing more than porous white sponge. And all the crackers were either tricked up with too many flavors or were cookies in disguise. We learned then to keep a box of plain rye crackers in the car.

New York State as a whole, and particularly Herkimer County, gained an early reputation for local cheese, but today few small operations survive. The milk goes instead to cities such as Utica, where large factories turn it into Cheddar and Limburger.

"Utica, Carthage, Ithaca, Memphis," my wife murmured drowsily as we drove on.

"Look for Hammondsport," I said, "just above Bath and Rheims." We came down into the tranquil beauty of the Finger Lakes, the country below Syracuse and Rochester, where four great wine companies make the bulk of New York State's still and sparkling wines. Oddly enough, a minor newcomer, Vinifera Wine Cellars, is doing by far the most interesting work. Its owner, Dr. Konstantin Frank, is a Ukrainian-born German agricultural scientist who came to America in 1951, spent a brief unhappy period at the Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, New York, then joined one of the major companies, Gold Seal, as director of vineyard research. After a decade with them he founded his own company.

In a sturdy brick house surrounded by vineyards looking down on Lake Keuka, Dr. Frank has his own laboratory and cellars, holding 20,000 gallons of superb wines. His mission has been to plant the grapes from which the greatest French and German wines are made—Johannisberg Riesling, Pinot Chardonnay, Gewürztraminer, Pinot Noir, and Cabernet Sauvignon among them — and to make them flourish in the colder winters and more humid summers of New York. All these grapes have been grown successfully in California, where summers are longer and winters milder, but the wines they produce taste different from the European wines pressed from the same grapes —possibly because of differences in soil and rainfall.

New York's soil and summer climate are closer to those of northern Europe, but it gets colder here in the winter, and the vines sometimes freeze. Dr. Frank solved that problem by grafting European grapes onto hardy Canadian rootstocks, which force early ripening, then enter the dormant winter stage and drain their sap underground before the annual freeze. The wines he has made from these grapes, the first of which went on the market in 1966, include a Johannisberg Riesling spätlesc that will astonish anyone familiar with the best German Rieslings. How soon other growers can duplicate his results in quantity remains to be seen. But he has already accomplished his first mission, to prove that Vitis vinifera grapes will grow and produce excellent wine in New York.

If Dr. Frank is something of the bete noire of Hammondsport, Charles Fournier, president of Gold Seal Vineyards, is the community's grand patron. Fournier came here from Rheims in 1934 — Rheims, France, not the village down the road. In 1943 he began making a dry premium champagne, Charles Fournier Brut (locally called "C. F. Brut" to rhyme with "nut"), a wine that has won prizes in comparative tastings with California and French champagnes. He makes it from a blend of Pinot Chardonnay (the French champagne grape), one of the French hybrids, and some native Delaware and Catawba. Gold Seal has more recently brought out Fournier Nature, a dry white wine with the champagne taste and a trace of carbonic gas, but without the big fizz or the tax.

Fournier goes on experimenting with the vinifera grapes planted by Dr. Frank, but the small amount of wine produced is used mainly in blending, rather than sold under its varietal name. In the firm's hundred years of operations, sparkling wines have always come first and dessert wines second. The bestselling table wine is sweet Pink Catawba, made from the popular native American grape. Pink Catawba has become so popular that its production by all the wineries of the Eastern United States exceeds the possibilities from the known acreage, according to one expert. But then wine statistics are often baffling. New York wineries bring in a million gallons a year of neutral California wine to blend with the native Eastern grapes — and to become New York State wines. Bordeaux wine shippers estimate that three times as much "claret" is sold in England (where the admirable French system of Appellation Controlee is ignored) as is shipped there from Bordeaux.

The other major wine producers are Taylor and Great Western at Hammondsport and Widmer at Naples. The first two together (Taylor owns Great Western) made more champagne last year than was shipped to our country by ail the French champagne companies combined — 450,000 cases versus 380,000 cases. Widmer has done the most of any winemaker to develop varietal wines of New York, and people who really prefer the foxy or Concordgrape taste of our native Vitis labrusca can do no better than to drink Widmer's red Isabella or Ives (labeled Burgundy, with a vintage year), or their white Vergennes, Elvira, or Delaware. No mere purveyor of sweet Catawbas, the Swissdescended William Widmer has a personal cellar of the family's varietals going back to 1890.

We drove from the Finger Lakes back to New York City with only one stop, at Binghamton, where Crowley's Milk Company turns out buttermilk and cottage cheese of such superior quality that they command not only a premium price but the loyalty of consumers not unlike that of members of a secret society.

"You know about Crowley's?" one of our Danish friends whispered, on learning that we liked buttermilk. "It tastes like the old-fashioned buttermilk of Denmark, only better."

"It's the only Schmierkäse we can keep in the refrigerator for a few days without the flavor going off," a German gourmet observed. Fortunately you don't have to go to the source for Crowley's, or for most of the other good food and drink we enjoyed on our trip. But is there a more pleasant way to spend four days?

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Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1967/06/a-four-day-outing-from-new-york/659309/

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