My wife, Blair, recalls:
You were in Birmingham, coming home the next day. I was asleep.
In my dream, you arrived with a sack full of rutabagas. We were going out for dinner that night. We decided to eat them as an afternoon snack. We mashed the rutabagas and stirred them full of buttery sunlight. We ate them out of our wedding china-white bowls.
I woke up.
You called home and told me that you were driving back with a sack of rutabagas.
Shazam.
We didn't eat the rutabagas as a snack. Later in the week, I mashed them for dinner. And I stirred in butter. Sprinkled salt and cracked pepper. Just before I cooked them, I took this picture.
I like the silk pillow as a rutabaga pedestal. I like the contrast between the skins and the iridescent silk. The rutabagas are ugly, but beautiful. Like a bewhiskered catfish. Like a cur dog.
I annotate:
Those were special rutabagas. Look closely. You’ll notice that they’re not coated in wax like grocery store tubers. And they’re not monsters. They’re petite. And almost pretty.
Margaret Ann Toohey and David Snow, who till and plant and dig at Snow’s Bend Farm, 10 miles west of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, on a bend in the Black Warrior River, raised those.
Just before they handed over the bag—a gift, given at the close of a long and lovely dinner at Birmingham’s Highlands Bar and Grill—Margaret Ann and I started talking of rutabaga gratins. Of alternating layers of potatoes and rutabagas. Of scattering shards of cheese. Of drenching the whole in freshly churned cream. That’s what’s next.
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