The last time I saw Odessa Piper, she was in the café underneath her Madison, Wisconsin, restaurant L'Etoile, dandling a spherical, green vegetable. She cradled it, humming, rocking it back and forth in her arms as if it were a friend's new baby. She gently laid the vegetable down on a wooden table. Then she whacked it in half with a long, sharp knife.
THWACK!
The vegetable, a beauty heart radish grown at Odessa's favorite local farm, a handsome, remote spread called Harmony Valley hidden in a fold of land not far from the Minnesota border, was gorgeous in cross section, a thin rim of pale green giving way to a vivid, almost pulsing magenta within. Piper mamboed around the kitchen, waving the dripping hemispheres like leguminous maracas, and improvised a song about winter in Wisconsin.
"I'm just starting to realize that vegetables have good years, just like wine," she said, brandishing a bisected radish. "This year, the beauty hearts are lovely; so mellow and sweet. Last year, they were so strong-tasting, so pungent, that you had to blanch them before you could even think of eating them. Vintage radishes. Who knew?"
Madison tends to be pretty bleak toward the end of February, when commuters begin to tire of skating to work across the thick ice of Lake Monona, and the rich greens and browns of the southern Wisconsin landscape have been repainted in unrelenting shades of white. The splendid Dane County Farmers Market has been on hiatus since November; the local supermarkets bulge with tasteless Chilean fruit. Cooks crush stray parsnip leaves between their fingernails and sniff the wistful fragrance of late autumn. Spring seems very far away.
About an hour's drive from the city, James Welch of Avalanche Organics trudges out through the snow to a stream that runs through his property, kneels down by the bank, and pulls out his winter miracle: fresh watercress. Watercress doesn't flourish at this time of year, but it grows slowly here in its streambed bounded by ice, staying crisp and green and juicy, the flavor bright and clean. It is a lot of trouble to harvest watercress in February, but it is the only fresh, local vegetable anybody in Madison will see for months. In midwinter, green things are precious.
A fair amount of this watercress will eventually make it to L'Etoile, where it might be puréed into a sharply flavored soup or composed into a salad. The restaurant, in a handsome century-old brownstone that has also seen use as a millinery and a finishing school, faces out onto Wisconsin's grand state capitol—and, not incidentally, onto the farmers market that convenes around the square on Saturdays, a phantasmagoria of organic tree fruits, lovingly grown vegetables, artisanal cheeses, and more kinds of tomatoes than you have seen outside a seed catalog. (The YWCA next door was at one time the grandest hotel in Wisconsin.) L'Etoile opened in 1976 and has functioned for most of its 25 years as the fanciest restaurant in Madison, which is to say it can sometimes swell with wealthy alumni after University of Wisconsin football games and with lobbyists when the state legislature is in session. Its fat wine list and elegant bison carpaccio are often cited as symbols of Madison's sophistication to scholars whom the university wishes to recruit. When the weekly farmers market is in session, especially on crisp football Saturdays, the line for L'Etoile's just-baked croissants twists down the block.
But L'Etoile is not just another fancy restaurant, and the cuisine you'll find there owes less to either the conventions of country-French cookery or the latest panethnic fashions coming from the nation's cooking schools than it does to the turnips and rutabagas being sold at the market outside. A symbiotic relationship with local farmers has made the Dane County Farmers Market one of the healthiest in the United States while at the same time helping to cement L'Etoile's reputation as one of the best restaurants in this part of the country. (If you hang out long enough at the back door of L'Etoile's kitchen, you will meet half of the organic farmers in Wisconsin: the veal guy Bill Moore, the couple from Northwood Farm who supply the restaurant's favorite soup bones, the orchard man who grows the perfumed Moonglow pears, the turkey farmer who feeds his flock on L'Etoile's vegetable parings. The restaurant has relationships with almost 200 small farmers, many of whom seem to be drinking coffee in the kitchen at any one time.) L'Etoile is a magnet for university professors moonlighting on the hot line, as well as for gifted young chefs from all over the country—Matt, Pete, Deb, Leo—who want to experience the Midwest for a while before setting out on their own.
Odessa Piper, L'Etoile's chef-owner, is sometimes spoken of as Alice Waters's Alice Waters, a cook whose commitment to local, sustainable, seasonal produce is almost Stalinist in its rigor. The restaurant's cooking seems hardwired to the rhythm of the seasons the way that junior high school students are wired to the rhythm of MTV. When Piper was a child in New England, her mother sent her out with her siblings to pick summer-warmed wild strawberries in the fields near the house. When she lived on a communal farm in the late '60s, her boyfriend put a big brass bed in the middle of a buckwheat field, and the two of them slept in it almost every night from late summer straight through to May. When the mornings came during the winter, she would slip out of bed, cram her feet into freezing boots, and run, stark naked and screaming, into the heated communal house, feeling every nuance of the land in every molecule of her winter-whipped bones. She has a biker-chick toughness about her: She's one of those rawboned women, a scarf eternally on her head and three projects always on her mind, who may have been pretty enough when they were younger but have become exquisite in their confident late forties. Piper, I suspect, knows well what it is to be a green thing bounded by ice.
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