Some people live to garden, others garden to eat, and others see gardening, living and eating as part of a magical triangle in which they live their lives. Kevin West, the author of the newly published “The Cook’s Garden” and the pandemic primer on canning “Saving the Season,” appears at first glance to to fall into the third category. Except there are nuances in his approach that stem from a practicality that perhaps derives from his agrarian roots—he grows what he can, eats what he manages to harvest from his own garden or can acquire from others, and lives in the present while also preserving some food for the future. At the Berkshire Botanical Garden’s ecological conference on Sunday, November 9th, he will share his thoughts on food and its connection to history and identity, everyday life, and the dinner table.
A veteran journalist and writer about travel and food, West focused his book on canning in the hills of Los Angeles where, if he did not scour the farmer’s market for the produce that would end up in jars on his pantry shelves, his canning would have been confined to what he was able to grow in a miniscule plot attached to his residence in Laurel Canyon. He built relationships with growers who brought their produce to the farmer’s markets, inspiring him to make small batch jams, pickles and other fermented vegetables that wended their way into his monograph on preserving food —a book that feels literary in its aspirations and in its approach to food, citing writers from Shakespeare, Capote, and Thoreau to more expected cookbook inhabitants such as Edna Lewis and M.F.K. Fisher. As he shares recipes for cornichon, spiced beans, and strawberry jam, he connects the actions in the kitchen to the art of writers who waxed poetic about the connection between the food and the soul.
When West relocated to the Monterey in the Berkshires more than a decade ago, his access to land shifted dramatically and reconnected him to the garden and farming background of his parents and grandparents in East Tennessee and the Smoky Mountains. There his grandparents had the equivalent of a local truck farm, growing a variety of produce from melons to corn and okra. When his neighbors in Monterey, who gardened in the tradition of Scott and Helen Nearing, the authors of the iconic book “The Good Life” who espoused the concept of self-reliance and growing one’s own food, invited him to help them dig potatoes, West found himself back working the land. His current book is a guide in the spirit of the Victory Garden (an idea proposed to him by Knopf editor Lexy Bloom) that takes produce from the garden to the table and shares with his previous book a range of concepts that are of use to the aspiring cook, food preservationist, and gardener.
Whether one is thinking of gardening or making preserves, West recommends starting small. Small batches of pickles and preserves are easy to put up, require less equipment (and less produce) and often meet the needs of a small family. Several of his recipes for pickles and jams are scaled back to 4-6 pints and can be made in a short time in a small space. Similarly, he advises people to determine the size of their garden plot not by the amount of available land, but by the amount of time they can give over to it. Novices can start with a few small containers or a raised bed. In his estimation, a 10’ x 12’ plot may take 4-6 hours a week for watering, weeding, planting and harvesting, and can provide its caretakers with an array of tomatoes, greens, herbs, and even a few cucurbits.
Grow and can smartly. By understanding soil care and the basic rules of food safety, one can get results with less work. West prefers to care for the soil by using a no-till approach. This involves smothering an area for a season or two with leaf mold or mulch. Let the earthworms work the organic matter into the soil and don’t disturb the weed seeds that sit beneath the surface. Similarly in the kitchen, depending on what one is preserving, you can avoid unnecessarily sterilizing jars that will be hot processed, as the processing will do the sterilization for you. In “Saving the Season,” West alleviates the fears of many first-time canners by explaining how rare botulism really is and how easily it can be prevented with straightforward processes and techniques.
Learn from others and do what you can do well. Building a relationship with local farmers is a two-fold proposition—they can teach you best practices for cultivation and can also provide you with crops you can‘t grow yourself. Many farmers and cooks love to share what they know, be it technique for direct sowing beans or the best structures on which they can climb or a recipe for pickling those same beans for consumption later in the year. Local growers such as Elizabeth Keen of Indian Line Farm, Pete Salinetti of Woven Roots, and Max at MX Morningstar Farm, can provide not only produce but also on which varieties grow well and how to use them in the kitchen. West gave up growing okra when he realized his high-elevation garden in Monterey was not hot enough for it, but he keeps his eye out at the farmer’s market for okra from farmers on hotter sites.
Grow what you love and experiment with related varieties, taking on what you can. When West needed to take a year off from gardening last year due to the death of his mother, he cut back to only a quarter of the area he was cultivating previously while solarizing the remaining areas to reduce the weeds that had overrun the garden. It also made him realize what he wanted most to grow and how to prioritize those crops. And he likes to focus on maintaining the biodiversity of a crop by growing a range of varieties, especially when it comes to potatoes, onions, garlic and lettuces. In the garden, these varieties perform differently and can even exhibit different disease resistance and adaptation to the region; in the kitchen, they demonstrate the range of flavor that can exist within a crop type. And if he grows too much lettuce and tires of salad, he achieves variety by either grilling a head of romaine or by cooking some of these heirloom greens with cream. Growing a variety of carrots or winter squash also means savoring some fresh out of the garden and others that store better later in the season.
If West had a last piece of advice for gardeners and cooks alike, it would be to experiment, embrace your successes and your failures equally, and learn from your experience. It turns out we can learn as much about nature and ourselves from the vegetable garden and the kitchen as from a year at Walden Pond.
