I come to Madison in the autumn because I've heard that the restaurant manages to serve regional organic produce through the worst of winter, and I'm as fascinated with the preparations for the impossible season as the grasshopper in the Aesop fable must have been with the frenzied autumn busywork of ants. I stand in a corner of the kitchen, pressing myself flat against racks of cooling bread as cooks whiz past with trays of ground-cherries, wild plums, and elderberries. I am almost decapitated by a speeding flat of currants before Piper rescues me and leads me outside, past the gaggle of farmers on the kitchen's rear steps, and into her main storage room downstairs, the heart of the heart of the restaurant.
I'm not sure what I was expecting from L'Etoile's cellar—probably gleaming rows of canning jars stretching into the middle distance, something like a cross between a well-stocked gourmet shop and the preserves competition at the Dane County Fair—but I was completely unprepared for the reality of the place, which looks less like Dean & DeLuca than it does like your Uncle Craig's basement during hunting season, a labyrinthine complex of wheezing chest freezers, a low-tech pioneer storehouse … essentially a museum of Wisconsin summer fruit.
Piper bends over to open one of the chests, and her eyes open wide. "These are beautiful, beautiful Tokay red plums," she says, shaking a rime-crusted plastic sack. "I tend to mix them with wild plums—they're extremely tannic, but the flavor is just unworldly. We blend them, then cook them down with just enough sugar to set the flavor. In winter, we sometimes sweeten them up for dessert or reduce them with a little stock, as an accompaniment to duck." She rattles another bag. "These red currants freeze great. I use them to finish lamb dishes, and I like to pop them in when I'm doing a couscous or pilaf to steam a little at the end." She shakes a couple of leathery red discs out of a baggie and gives me one to taste. It is a dried cherry tomato, crunchy, a little chewy, and exploding with concentrated summer flavor. There are no canned tomatoes anywhere, although she has put up a purée of yellow heirlooms. I spot some wild blackberries—"The season is very short, but they're very flavorful. I use them to build a base for a sauce for winter venison"—and the exotic papery husks of Wisconsin ground-cherries, which look like Chinese lanterns and have a mild, almost gamy flavor that sometimes takes a little getting used to.
"I see you're looking at the ground-cherries," Piper says. The plant is a Midwest native, a small, parasitic prairie vine that snakes along the ground until it can find a timothyweed stalk to wrap around, at which time it forms its husk. "It's a little like a Cape gooseberry: We use ground-cherries a lot—they're great with meat."
I peer over her shoulder into another chest freezer and spot kilo after kilo of hickory nuts gleaming dully through the plastic, feral-tasting nuts shaped like tiny squirrels' brains, enough to make 10,000 crisps or 100 square yards of brittle. If you have seen Piper at special dinners or chefs' events, you have seen her carry bags and bags of these nuts.
"Hickory nuts are my shaman," Piper says, popping a handful of frozen nuts into her mouth. "But they take enormous patience to shuck, and they all have to be shucked by hand. One of the things I love about hickory nuts is how they involve every generation on a farm. Kids love to scramble for them, gathering them off the ground.
"The cracking of the nuts is left to old people—their gnarled hands seem ideal for the purpose, and they're patient. Whole families get together for hickory-cracking parties right after the solstice—the nuts need a few months to cure in the attic. They trade stories, and crack nuts. Those are great evenings together on the farm."
The elderly father of Mary Ellen Frey, one of Piper's most beloved suppliers, was for years a fixture at the Saturday market, where he would sit and crack nuts. He had a theory that if his fingers were busy, his mind would stay sharp. As he cracked nuts, he recited Robert Frost poem after Robert Frost poem.
A year after the old man died, Frey tugged on Piper's sleeve when she passed by Frey's market stall and silently led her over to the family's truck. The bed was piled with bags containing the last nuts Frey's father had ever shucked. She found herself unable to put them on sale, and asked her friend if she would take them off of her hands. And Piper used them, the last of Mr. Meinholz's nuts, in the restaurant, where they quietly gave pleasure through the year.
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