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.
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.
A woman from pastry wanders into the cellar, carrying bags that bulge with dusky purple fruit.
"Hey! Taste these huckleberries," Piper says.
I take a bite and wince. They're like the berries I used to eat off of hedges when I was in kindergarten."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.
Today, the unthinkable has happened: L'Etoile has essentially run out of food for the season. This isn't to say that customers will actually go hungry—the Crawford Farm lamb, the Lange Farm beef, the Cherokee Farm bison, and the beautiful local greens from Rock Spring Farm, tented under hoops heated only by the midwinter sun, are in plentiful supply—but there are two weeks left of local potatoes, tops, and three weeks left of beets. One case of apples remains in the cellar, and only three of celery root. Even the beauty heart radishes are running low.
"I know it sounds strange," Piper says, "but I don't know what I'm going to serve. We can call California like everybody else, but it wouldn't feel right. What are people going to eat?"
She bangs open a door in frustration and stalks into the kitchen's old walk-in refrigerator. Surely there must be something she's overlooked. She claws through a dozen boxes looking for enough sound root vegetables to serve with the trout. Eventually, she pulls out a fullish box of crosnes, the sweet, corkscrew-shaped root vegetable, popular at the moment in France, that some people have occasionally mistaken for elaborately carved baby turnips on the plate. "Aha," she says, letting a handful of the tiny tubers slip through her fingers as if they were gold coins. "We started doing these a few years before anybody knew what they were. We got Harmony Valley to grow them for us. They're popular at places like Charlie Trotter's in Chicago, and the price has been bid right up, but we've got to have them. And we have them now."
"They can't be worth the effort," I say, anticipating the massive amount of labor it must take just to peel the things, and discounting the mild taste.
"But they're, they're … little buttersluts," Piper blurts. She flushes the deep pink color of a chiogga beet and hides her face in her hands. "I mean, they're great when you braise them in butter."
Matt Overdevest, a senior cook, who has been trying to pretend he isn't eavesdropping, suddenly propels half a cup of coffee through his nose.
At dinner that night, the trout, lightly peppered and sprinkled with salt, smeared with buttery mascarpone cheese and baked in parchment with sunchokes, celery root, and buttersluts—I mean crosnes—is a triumph. For at least a little while longer, California can wait.
Chef's Secret
From Odessa Piper: Produce can speak at different levels in a dish if you cook in "octaves"—use celery and celery root in the same dish, or stuff squash blossoms with sautéed squash.