A Woman of Sustenance

A woman from pastry wanders into the cellar, carrying bags that bulge with dusky purple fruit.

"Hey! Taste these huckleberries," Piper says.

"They don't taste all that good, do they? But look at this." She smashes a berry into a small bowl, which films with dark, blue-purple juice. "We make a syrup flavored with lavender and put these berries in for color. It's one of the great natural food dyes."

Piper, one of five children, was raised in a sea captain's house in New Hampshire. Her father was a Yale-educated dermatologist; her mother, who had a degree from Smith, was the daughter of an important physics professor at Yale and would eventually teach nursing at a Dartmouth-affiliated hospital. Piper herself vaguely dreamed of studying to become a ballerina, or an astronomer.

But it was the late '60s, and the pull of the land was strong. Piper left high school a year early and moved to a nearby commune that called itself Wooden Shoe, after the clogs that French saboteurs had tossed into the gears of industrial-age-machinery. The other members of Wooden Shoe were only of college age themselves, but they attempted to grow, store, and cook everything they ate in a brave stab at self-sufficiency. Piper stayed there nearly two years. The rutabaga crop, she recalls, was sensational.

She hitchhiked out to Chicago to visit her sister at college, and ended up in a Wisconsin organic farming collective, where she did a lot of baking under the tutelage of JoAnna Guthrie. In 1972, she followed Guthrie to Madison to help her open the restaurant Ovens of Brittany. The proto-French café near the university ushered Wisconsin into the Age of the Croissant and nurtured primordial longings in UW alumni for something called a Brittany Bun.

Piper discovered she loved the restaurant life, loved the long days, the way things smelled, the knowledge that if she got to the restaurant early enough, she could blast Bach and Palestrina from the stereo while she worked. Guthrie owned an organic farm in the Kickapoo River Valley whose products were featured at the restaurant. And Piper learned to love the splendid wild products of Wisconsin, the butternuts, wild plums, and native herbs that began to mark her cooking when she opened L'Etoile in 1976, and picked up her predilection for what she calls octaves: celery and celery root used in the same dish, for example, or the creation she calls "three generations of squash": fried squash blossoms stuffed with sautéed squash, sprinkled with toasted pumpkin seeds and often drizzled with pumpkin seed oil.

About the same time, she began to develop her fairly extraordinary relationship with the region's organic farming community. Zipping around the perimeter of the Saturday farmers market with Piper, always counterclockwise, is what it must have been like to stroll through the lobby of the Sands with Frank Sinatra. You have never seen orchardists or growers of antique squash varieties with wider smiles.

"Dollarwise," explains Richard de Wilde of Harmony Valley Farm, "L'Etoile may not be a big part of our business, but in terms of inspiration, the restaurant is everything. When Odessa puts something new on her menu, suddenly people want to cook with it. She was the first around here to really use black radish, rutabaga, beauty heart, crosnes, burdock—and especially celery root. I thank her for celery root: Growing stalk celery is a major, major pain."

A few months later, browsing through L'Etoile's sweet-smelling kitchen on one of the coldest days of winter, I begin to realize the vitality, the reverence for ingredients the restaurant engenders. Each chicken is treated as if it were an honored friend of the farmer who raised it, each berry inseparable from the beauty of the tree that produced it. Her staff are as obsessed as she is—many of the cooks tend to spend their weekends hanging out with hog growers and squash men—and I have overheard the line cooks talk about the orchards and egg farms they hope to run someday the way their Los Angeles equivalents talk about the sitcoms they would like to see developed.

Piper darts into the kitchen with a tiny, expensive bottle of Austrian plum vinegar, meant for sipping, that she wants to use in a quick dried-fruit deglaze to sauce a duck confit. She married wine importer Terry Theise in 1996, and is always acquiring things—cold-pressed Riesling seed oil, elderflower syrup, a habit of drinking Grüner Veltliner with asparagus—on their trips together through Austria and France.

But it is not easy to be L'Etoile on this five-degree day, when the lovely Moonglow pears you've been hoarding have gotten soft and spotty, when the trout farmer's delivery is late because of a storm upstate, when Harmony Valley, the biggest and arguably the best of the farms that service L'Etoile, has sold to somebody else the vegetables you mistakenly thought you ordered, which means that the restaurant is down to the ends of turnip boxes, and radishes that have started to turn soft.