Pat Willard

At a time in our country’s history when we are reevaluating so much about our heritage and place in the world, it is comforting to point out on our 232nd birthday that one aspect of our culture remains firmly intact: We strengthen our ties to one another with a celebratory meal. We have been doing this since the first strangers stepped upon these shores and realized that, if they were to live in harmony—let alone build a united country—they would need to somehow create mutual traditions. Our ancestors realized the best and quickest way to form ties with one another was to sit down at a table. For this reason, they cooked up a storm to thank nearby folks for helping to build a barn, plant crops, raise a church steeple. Baskets of baked good, pots of stews were brought around to sweeten town hall meetings, community fund raisers, school board elections. It can be said that, nearly from the beginning of our government, even the most humble politician knew that if a barbeque could be organized, the audience would most likely stick around, half listening to their rants and promises, and perhaps—just perhaps—remember their names when the time to vote actually came around.

It is good to report, then, that, despite the fact that we are busier then ever, and more likely not to have particularly strong ties to our communities—even to the places we call home—we still somehow manage to adhere to the traditions of our ancestors and every now and then sit down and enjoy a meal together. This is what I learned in a year of traveling around the country guided by America Eats!, the grand unfinished manuscript written by the Federal Writers’ Project during the Great Depression in the 1930s. As part of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Projects’ writers attended hundreds of group meals in the forty-eight states—harvest festivals, church suppers, fish fries, cemetery cleaning parties, potluck fundraisers, social club banquets and a lot of national holidays, to name a few—all to describe how American food developed and to uncover the role our cuisine played in our country’s growth. In the pages of America Eats!, you can see a nation of immigrants slowly blending together over the shared experience of learning how to incorporate the ingredients they found in this new world. At the same time, dishes passed among neighbors at communal gatherings, flavored by many foreign techniques and sensibilities, constantly served to renew and refresh our cooking repertoire.

This is among the most interesting themes in America Eats! and, to my mind, the signature glory of American food, the fact that it is harder to set our classic recipes in stone because we are a country regularly invigorated by the arrival of strangers eager to find a place among us. In the places I revisited from America Eats!—from East Bend, North Carolina where the whole town turned out for the Independence Day festivities and enjoyed country ham and biscuit sandwiches moistened by a rough, fiery salsa, to South St. Paul, Minnesota where the neighborhood commemorated Veteran’s Day with a dozen different versions of booya stew—it is clear that our idiosyncratic and individualistic cuisine is still evolving and that we still hold dear the joys to be found in our communal gatherings.

So, this Fourth of July, as you sit down to eat, rejoice at all the influences that have come together so well in something so simple, so complex, as our country’s cooking. Share a biscuit, a chicken wing, and a slice of that blueberry pie someone slaved over with the folks you don’t know around you and it’ll be certain you’ll find yourself in a new kinship.

And that is a mighty fine thing for us to celebrate.

In honor of St. Patrick's Day, I am about to reveal my mom's recipe for soda bread.  It's actually probably her mother's recipe, which means it's the version--more or less--made in Glen, a bitty town on the west coast.  The accompanying photo is of Ma on her wedding day in her family's house in West Philadelphia. As you see, she's about to throw the bouquet, not that the two old women--the Irish mafia, as Dad would call them--care.  They've seen enough of men: you can see that plainly on their face.  There are, in fact, only two men in this picture.  The small boy on the right is my cousin Eddy Willard.  He grew up to be a Christian Brother and a better man you won't find anywhere except in my brother Joe's house.  The other man is Dad.  You can just make him out in the background--the glare off his glasses and the collar of his white shirt the most tell-tale signs he's lurking in the dining room watching his wife.  Ma looks ecstatic....she's leaving that crowded house and going out on her own!  Dad, or what you can make of his face, appears a bit more apprehensive. I won't speculate why.

In any case, this is what I want you to know about Annabelle: she danced a jig on her wedding day--right out on the lawn of the church.   Here's the other thing: she made a hell of a soda bread.   Evidence for that is below, made from her recipe and already a third eaten a mere hours out of the oven.

Hope you're sipping some Four Roses up in paradise, Ma! 

This posting has nothing to do with America Eats!  I just sent in the last of the photos and now is the long wait until the book comes out in July.  In the meantime, I'm moving onto new projects, new book ideas.

And surviving the winter blues:

It's about this time of year when I start pressing my face to the window and staring out into the garden.  I'm trying to will spring into coming, or at least a daffodile to bloom.  I'm in desperate need of some sign that it won't be cold and sooty forever.  If I'm not too despondent, I actually go out and start rearranging things, riping out the flower bed borders, pruning trees.  This year, the garden is more of a mess than usual:  it's a pretty good picture of the state of my mind: apple tree cut way back; old bamboo fence pulled off, exposing the bones of the garden, flower pots in disarray.  I plan to build a new--very cheap--fence soon.  But it'll probably have to wait until March.

   In the midst of this I found something that's better than a shot of Prozac: the rosemary bush still thriving.  I trimmed it back and tonight I'll  cook with it.  I don't know what yet:  maybe lamb stew with a thick winey rosemary sauce.  That will help me get through, too. 

 

    Just as the Swedes hold forth with their Smorgasbord and other banquets in north Idaho, so the annual Sheepherders Ball of the Basque in south Idaho has attracted much attention.
    Following the first World War, many Basques came to this country.  The usual practice was for a brother to send for his nearest male kin, until the whole clan followed.
    “Bosco” a colloquial name for themselves and their tongue, is spoken universally.  Yet most of them also speak Spanish and English fluently.
    They play cards but rarely gamble, drink but do not become boisterous or vulgar.
    At the annual Sheepherders Ball, where dress clothes are prohibited and denim overalls quite the thing, the feasting is attended with dancing their own folk numbers, as well as American and Spanish dances.  The men wear bright sashes.    

    This doesn’t at all do justice to what the Basque went through as they made their way in America and it certainly doesn’t begin to relate the joy of the Sheepherders Ball that still takes place in Boise every year--this year it will take place on December 22.
    But, before the Ball, a short history of the Basque in America: Many came to this country between 1900 and 1920 and worked, as most immigrants before and after them have done, at a hard job that no one else wanted to do.  In the case of the Basque, that was herding sheep up in the high desert mountains of the west.  The precise nature of being an immigrant is to be estranged, but the Basque were separated further by the very job they signed up to do–for much of the year living by themselves in nomadic isolation in the mountains.  To make matters worse, they were shepherding in cattle country and found themselves, and their flocks, often in violent, even deadly conflict with cowboys who didn’t much appreciate sheep, let alone foreigners, crowding increasingly shrinking public range space.  Cattle companies hired gunmen, at $50 a month, to keep shepherds off what were considered cattle ranges. The federal government seemed, at times, against the shepherds, too: Some of the legislation that hemmed in the public lands and created national parks and forests limited grazing access to only American citizens who owned private ranches–a measure that was widely praised in the local press as a victory over “Basque tramp sheepmen.”
    The early Basque settlers were primarily young men, used to a lush countryside and a strong family life.  They held a deep love for their homeland, where dancing and music were important and where sitting down together over a long meal was integral to their well-being. Now, in this new country, they found themselves, in their late teens and early twenties, living in arid mountains furred with sage brush, windy, cold, and desolate, with just a horse or a mule, a dog, and up to a thousand sheep for company. In their loneliness and boredom, the men populated the barren landscape with women–their faces and full bodies–whittled in the bark of the surrounding aspen trees.  While their flocks grazed out on the rugged open pastures, the shepherds passed their time by sometimes piling rocks on top of one another, sometimes as high as six feet tall.  Known as harrimutilaks, or stone boys, the stones marked shepherd routes and kept them company, their silent compatriots, through the long nights.  
    The only human contact they had were the camp-tenders who checked in on them every now and again, delivering supplies and fresh bread baked in small stone ovens constructed in the hills.  With money owed to ranchers for their passage over, many Basque men lived like this for years on end. Somewhere in the mountains above Boise, a shepherd carved these words into a tree: “I would rather be dead than live like this.”

    And then autumn arrived, the swift descent of early snow in the high pastures, and the Basque shepherds drove the sheep down from the mountains to breed and graze in lowland pastures.  They would come into town and find a room in one of the boarding houses run by Basque families.  Returning to these houses felt like returning home.  They could speak their own language, hear their own music, and find waiting for them mail from family overseas.  Most of all, there were Basque women who had come over to work in the boarding houses.  Sundays, the one day of complete rest,  were especially festive, the dining tables laden with plates of choriza and stews thick with chilies and broad beans.   Over glasses of good red wine, the men played jai alai and cards and, at night, joined the women in dancing and playing music.
    By the time Christmas drew near,  the hardships of the mountains, if not completely forgotten, seemed sufferable and still far enough away to put out of mind until the new year began.  For now, there were the holidays to celebrate and, best of all, the annual Sheepherder’s Ball to attend.    
There are several Sheepherders Balls held across the west in towns where a Basque community formed.  Rumor has it that the Ball in Caldwell, Idaho, was a particularly wild one, with bars set up in the four corners of the hall and all the drinks anyone would ever want.  But the Ball in Boise that is held each year at the Basque Center has the distinction of being the oldest and the biggest.  

     The Center caps Grove Street,  the official seat of all things Basque in downtown Boise.  The block contains a marketplace; two old boarding houses–one the oldest brick building in Boise and the other a fronton, or Basque handball court; the Basque Museum and Cultural Center (which houses a terrific exhibit on the history of the Basque, as well as a library, archive, and classrooms where the Basque language is taught two times a week); and Gernika, a pretty good Basque bar where the Saturday special is a spicy beef tongue platter and you can always find chorizo, the slightly hard, spicy pork sausage that are as big as knockwurst at this establishment.
    The Basque national colors fly over the Center, a two story white stucco building with clay roof tiles that would not be out of place in Spain or the south of France. The front doors, hung with handsome wooden plaques showing Basque crests composed of lions, the sacred Gernikako Arbola tree, and fleur de lais,  opens into a room where men are either playing at a game that looks a lot like skeet-ball, or who are sitting at the bar drinking coffee.  A lone woman walking into the place is not greeted as a welcoming sight, but no one openly complains.  Instead, the men turn back to their game and coffee cups, to the episode of X-Files playing on the TV screen. The young college student tending the bar continues to carefully unwrap a thin cigar for an elderly gentleman and, as he lights it and then pours more coffee into the big cup on the bar, rib him about who he might take to the Ball.
    “I’m not dancing anymore,” the man says, his English cushioned in a thick accent. “Too much, too much,” he adds, waving his hand and looking a little askance as I take the seat beside him at the bar.  
    Julian Lete, the manager of the Basque Center, is very busy setting up for the Ball that will take place in the big hall next to the bar. A dinner will be served downstairs before the music and dancing begins.  The kitchen is already busy cooking up lamb stew, garlic mashed potatoes, baked fish (fresh from local waters), chocolate pudding, and all the wine and coffee you can drink–all for twenty dollars, which also buys entry to the Ball.
    When Lete comes up stairs from the dining room with a box of wine for the bar, I introduce myself and ask if I can buy a ticket for the dinner and the Ball.
    “Mostly families come to the dinner,” Lete says, which seems to be his polite way of saying outsiders do not usually sit down for the dinner–not that they’re not welcome but, as he quickly adds, “It’s usually our families that come and only 250 people can fit in the dining room.
    “You come at 8 and see the dancing, and stay for the Ball,” he adds. “It’s special this year.  Our new dancers will perform.”
    I’m not about to move from the bar without a ticket, not with the prospect of lamb stew before me.  So, eventually, a ticket is offered, if only so the men can get back to not having a woman in their midst.
    “I’ve been waiting all year for the Ball,” says the young woman tending the gift shop at the Museum.  She’s not Basque but many of her friends are and she says a lot of her friends in Boise eagerly attend the Ball each year.   When I tell her I also have a ticket for the dinner, she raises her eyebrows and gives me some advice: “It’s a long night so you have to pace yourself but really, everyone goes to the Ball.  You just have to see for yourself.”
    The doors open promptly the next night at 5:30 for the dinner and, by six, the small room downstairs fills to near capacity, indeed with families, all of whom seem to know each other intimately.  There’s no one to greet me, no one hailing me to their table when I enter, and so I quickly stick out like the stranger I am among these happy people.  One family graciously offers up a corner of their table for me to sit and I take it as if I have found a safe port.  Thank God the food begins to arrive–and a lot of it, too: the thick, dark, flavorful stew poured over mashed potatoes, chocolate pudding, and especially the wine, help a lot to ease my discomfort of being the odd shoe in the mix.
    I’m not so alone upstairs in the hall. By 7:30, the hall and the bar are already crowded.  Families and friends have used bottles of wine and coats to claim parts of the long tables that are arranged around the dance floor before the hall’s stage.   Flags from the Basque regions flutter from the high ceiling and there’s an excited whirr of children running between the tables while the adults lounge back in their metal folding chairs, sip their drinks, and chat.  If anyone is a shepherd  just down from the mountains, they don’t stand out at all.  It seems to be a typical Saturday night crowd in a western city, all casually dressed with a few of the women in rhinestone-decorated jeans and a couple of the men sporting impressive cowboy hats. A bar is set up in back tended by two very friendly men who, along with drinks, are cooking and serving chorizo sandwiches.  In the Center’s main room, the bar is three deep and the young guy from the previous day is muttering to himself that he’s been left stranded and can’t handle the crush.  
    “I don’t know what I’m doing here,” he says to no one in particular, but still manages to fill five shouted orders at once.
    Through the ceiling overhead comes the sound of pounding feet–the dancers rehearsing; outside the open front door a couple is spied on the corner in native garb (the man in billowing white pants and shirt cinched by a crimson sash at his waist, the woman in a black aproned skirt, her hair pinned up under a ribbon wreath).  In practicing some intricate steps, they whirl up the street, then around the stop sign, around the corner and out of sight.
    Back in the hall, anyone who stands too long in the vicinity of the bar is adopted by the two bartenders.  Between filling drink and food orders, they begin to share stories with me about their families, along with some pretty lame jokes. (What does a Basque man give his wife on their wedding day that is long and hard?  His name.).
    Dave Aspitarte’s grandfather left the town of San Sebastián when he was nineteen; Don Totorica’s grandfather arrived in 1916 with his sons–including Don’s father who was five at the time.  They were all shepherds up in the Juniper mountains and eventually owned a ranch with 5,000 sheep.  The ranch is now owned by Don’s brother.  
    A man comes up and shouts “zazbi zazbi,” at Dave.
    He translates, “That’s a seven-and-seven.  That’s about the extent most people here know of the old language. ”  He shrugs and moves away to make the drink.
    One of the dancers is Dave’s daughter, Daniela, a pretty, dark haired seventeen-year-old who comes downstairs to ask her dad where her mom is: she needs her to hold her cell phone while she’s dancing.  Since she was three, her Sundays have been devoted to dance lessons at the Center.  Lately she’s added Tuesday nights to take accordion lessons.
    “None of my friends at school do this but I don’t care,” she says, adjusting the ribbon wreath in her hair. “It makes me unique.  It’s who I am.”
    Her father comes over to tell another joke that goes like this: A Basque man comes to America during Franco’s time.  The man lands in Manhattan and goes straight to a Basque boarding house.  He was poor and used to eating nothing but beans, but at the boarding house he’s given a great meal of everything he loves.  He eats and eats.  At night, he shares a room with a sick man who the boarding house owners are looking after.  At some point in the middle of the night, the wife comes in to give the sick man an enema but, in the darkness, she gets mixed up and gives it to the newcomer, instead.
    The next morning, when a new guy shows up at the boarding house, the man says to him, ‘It’s a great country but don’t eat too much or they’ll take it away from you.’
    “Oh, Dad,” Daniela sighs and drifts off to join the dancers who are marching into the room behind drummers and flag holders.  
    On the stage, musicians are warming up an accordion and pipes.  The drummers join them and, after a short introduction, the dancing begins.  Everyone in the room presses forward around the dance floor as the first dancer–a slightly embarrassed looking teenage boy–begins a very strenuous series of high leaps, twirls and kicks. The dances continue one after another and as they become more fiery and complicated, the audience claps and hollers louder and louder.  By the last dance, young men in the audience in their everyday jeans and tee-shirts have joined the troop in their festive garb.  The floor vibrates with all the feet stomping.  The lamb that is to be auctioned after the dancing and which has suddenly appeared in a black cage near the bar, baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahs plaintively in alarm.
    “It’s all right, darling,” a man says to the lamb as he leans with his beer bottle against the cage.  This is one cute lamb–velvety black face and legs, creamy wooly coat, a pert bow around its neck.
    A little girl pushes the last of her chorizo sandwich through the bars for the lamb to nibble but it turns its head and bahs once more.
    As soon as the dancers march out of the hall, the lamb’s cage is wheeled up front.  Some people begin to leave but others crowd even tighter around the dance floor.  The Center has engaged a professional auctioneer and the money that will be raised will benefit the Basque Foundation, which extends help to members in need of emergency or medical assistance.  This year, the money will help a member of the community fly back from Seattle to be near his family for cancer treatments.
    The auction starts at a thousand dollars, then quickly jumps to four thousand.  The lamb in its little black cage gilded with a gold ribbon doesn’t look a bit happy about the proceedings and is letting go a stream of nervous pee every time the auctioneer struts near the cage.  Here’s an important tip to remember at a livestock auction: if you’re not looking to buy, do not move any part of your body.  Not knowing this fine point and having brushed my hair back from my face several times, I slowly come to the  realization that I am the proud owner of one very expensive lamb.  This starts me fretting about whether the Center accepts credit cards, and how does one get a lamb through airport security, or how to explain its sudden presence in my backyard to the myriad other animals and humans already living in the house. Not to mention, would the lamb be happy living in Brooklyn? The closest patch of grass is in a park two blocks away.  My brain is freezing around a vision of leading the lamb through traffic to pasture.
    Thankfully, after a few long minutes, someone steps up to raise the bid.  The auction proceeds swiftly over several rounds with the lamb won and given back at least four times.  Eventually, about twenty thousand dollars is raised and the lamb, instead of flying to Brooklyn, is wheeled off to a local butcher to be made into a feast that will take place at the Center later in the month.
    It’s almost ten o’clock and most of the remaining families are leaving.  But that doesn’t mean the Ball is over.  On the contrary, a new band is setting up on the stage and every person in downtown Boise who is between the ages of nineteen and thirty seems to be crowding through the hall.  The dancers are still in their native dress but now many of them circulate the room holding beer bottles, mingling with their friends in low-riding jeans, tightly cropped shirts (for the women) and baggy sport jerseys.  In years past, when the Ball was held out in the pavilion at the Fairgrounds, there would be almost 1,500 people in attendance, many of them teenagers drawn by the certainty that they would be able to sneak some beers and glasses of wine.
    “Oh, it was out of control there for awhile,” the Center’s manager, Julian Lete,  says.  Not that it isn’t a little chaotic now as he helps out behind the bar.  Over the heads of those crowding in front of him demanding his attention, he explains how the Center wanted to return the Ball to how it used to be–just for the Basque community and their guests.  Those requirements are still on the books for the Ball but no one is checking the membership list at the door and, while the distinct dark features of the Basque people are predominant, there’s a good amount of lighter hair mingling in.  Soon the great hall is bursting to capacity–a good 500 to 600 people if you count the folks jammed around the main bar.  The band is jumping into gear with an eclectic mix of traditional, rock, and alternative music.  It’s all pretty boisterous and, as a girl gets giddily swung high into the air by her partner,  it’s easy to imagine why the Ball is something eagerly looked forward to each year.