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Best of The Buttery Hatch
What was The Buttery Hatch?
'Twas a blog I created during my leave in 2015-16. Its motto was "edo ergo sum." And for the unbuttery among you, here is the basis for its name:
buttery n. A place for storing liquor; but the name was also, from an early period, extended to ‘the room where provisions are laid up’ (Johnson). [OED]
buttery-hatch [also buttery hatch] n. The half-door over which the buttery provisions are served. [OED]
The conceit was to serve my own buttery provisions in verbal form through the hatch we called the internet.
Here are a couple of old posts somewhat randomly chosen. Technical challenges prevent me from just linking to the archived original. Perhaps I will overcome those, but probably not. And I'll add more as I go through them.
Jaffrey! (Orig. post April 2016)
Asafoetida. Ajowan. Jaggery. Fenugreek. Curry leaves. Chaat masala. Urad dal. Life is getting spicy on Westnedge Hill! We’d rarely if ever used any of these, but then we got Madhur Jaffrey’s latest book, Vegetarian India. A few months back we’d made a lovely radish and orange salad Lynne Rosetto Kaspar had included on her website after interviewing Jaffrey, which had just the right balance of crunchy peppery bite and sweet juiciness. And then when we checked V.I. out of KPL when it first came in, we started reading it and just wanted to make everything in it. So now we’re eating vegetarian Indian food 3-4 nights a week. We wouldn’t be able to make the recipes, though, if it wasn’t for World of Spices, at 5911 S. Westnedge in Portage, a place I’d driven past countless times but had never gone into. What a wonderful Indian grocer! The spices speak, the dals delight, the rices regale. And the people are friendly and helpful – as who wouldn’t be if you got to breathe in those scents hours every day? I’ve yet to strike out in looking for a needed ingredient there.
Jaffrey’s dishes are not difficult to execute, despite the sometimes formidable ingredient lists. But we’ve learned that when she suggests serving one dish with a variety of others, those lists can get tangled and dinner takes a long time to prepare. So for the moment we’re scaling back, making one-dish meals instead of the spreads she recommends, at least until we internalize recipes enough to more fluently combine them. They’re very easy to adapt to seasonal availability of produce too: we’ve had great dishes of spinach, potato, turnip, kale, and carrots, all bought at the winter market or Co-op (though we have splurged more than once on very non-local cauliflower, because, well, it’s cauliflower!). Dried legume dishes (chickpeas, black-eyed peas, lentils) are easy and satisfying and the book abounds in them. Make your own paneer (fresh cheese) and you can add that to the mix. New favorite condiment? Spiced yogurt (raita). Homemade flatbread is the work of just a few extra minutes. What’s not to love?
This Sh*t is Patriotic! (Orig. post July 2018)
Good ol’ George Washington. Ambitious young soldier, revolutionary general, first president who, à la the Roman general-cum-(elected) dictator Cincinnatus, nobly gave up power to return to his farm, we venerate him as the father of our country – and not without reason, for just about everything good and terrible about us and our history is embodied in this one man.
We’ve recently returned from a 10-day family trip, just over half of which was spent in our nation’s capital, and Washington, both the city and the man, and this tension between the good that America represents and the exploitation and blood in which it is grounded, are much on my mind, today especially. While in D.C. it was a challenge to feel any sense of pride in our nation’s alleged greatness: too many kids wearing “Make America Great Again” hats and t-shirts; an otherwise excellent exhibit in the Smithsonian’s American history museum on the wars of our past problematically titled “The Price of Freedom,” as if those who removed and slaughtered the native peoples, or who fought in any number of the many unnecessary wars that the U.S. has been involved in, were, simply by having worn the uniform, heroes of liberty; a visit to the Supreme Court building made in the fog of depression of the latest rulings and followed by the even gloomier news of Kennedy’s retirement; even the zoo was a downer, as nearly every exhibit told us of the vulnerable or endangered status of its inhabitant, and the valley the zoo is in was itself clogged with invasive species – all of which reflects the ecological catastrophes of American-led global corporate capitalism.
The highlight of the trip, however, and what gave me some sliver of hope for our collective political and ecological future, was a trip to Washington’s estate, Mt. Vernon. Its manor house perhaps stands as a metaphor for the nation it represents: built with wood covered in sand to make it look like stone, it gives the appearance of permanence, but it’s an appearance that cracks easily and takes constant effort to maintain.
The house was the least interesting part, however, even knowing the conversations among famous men that took place there. For moving out from it, the grounds turn out not to be just manicured creations for the aesthetic delight of the inhabitants and visitors, but a stunning example of what we would now call sustainable agriculture (with one not insignificant caveat, to which I’ll return). It turns out that our founding father was a man who knew his shit, literally. Washington saw the degradation of land that growing tobacco as a cash crop was leading to, and he envisioned a different agricultural future for the country, one based on constant renewal of the soil and wise use of the land. On his own properties, he implemented and further developed techniques from Europe’s 18th century “new husbandry” movement, central to which was the use of manure, delivered either straight from the source by animals grazing on land being rested from crop-growing, or indirectly through compost from the barns.
Other forms of compost were used, too, as were fish heads and tails from the large-scale harvesting of the piscine inhabitants of the Potomac, who provided, we were told, about two-thirds of the annual revenue of the estate. (A DC guidebook we bought says the estate’s distillery was the main profit source, but this may reflect different periods in the development of the Mount, or a stretching of the truth to appeal to our current booze-besotted times.)
The direct-deposit manuring was itself part of a sophisticated seven year system of crop- and animal-rotation on the lands of the farms that form Mt. Vernon, many of which were bought on the cheap from tobacco farmers who’d moved on for richer soil they could perform their same extractions upon. Learning this I couldn’t help but think of Wendell Berry’s Unsettling of America on the pressure for the West created by successive depletions of soil by farmers who knew it was easier to move than to care for where they were. This was a pressure that G.W. benefited from financially in no small way, as he invested in the lands taken from the native peoples of the Ohio Valley and surrounding areas. (This was made clear at a stop at the Fort Pitt museum in Pittsburgh on the way home.)
Reclaiming and rebuilding depleted soils and shifting the focus from tobacco to grains were just part of Washington’s vision for how to farm well by intelligently utilizing what resources were locally available. For instance, he used timber harvested from his estate forests for many purposes, including to make the boats that caught the fish in the Potomac who gave their heads and tails (and probably hearts) to the soil. (The edible parts of the fish were salted and preserved and traded far and wide, with the plantations of the Caribbean, themselves too busy making sugar to fish the rich waters around them, providing one of the primary markets.)
Our First Fertilizer also saw the importance of breeding animals suited to the peculiarities of the place they were used. Mules, horses, and oxen all had jobs on the farms of the estate, and other cattle, as well as chickens, provided meat, eggs, and dairy for consumption and at least some small amount of trade. We were also told that Washington launched one of the first mule-production operations stateside, which helped the mule to become a work animal of choice for many, and, of course, part of the promised compensation during Reconstruction for freed slaves.
But here I get to the caveat I mentioned about the sustainability of all this – animals obviously weren’t the only ones who had jobs on the estate. Washington was able to accomplish his agricultural wizardry because he had at his command three hundred-odd enslaved people. About a third of these were directly owned by him; he famously willed that they were to be set free upon Martha’s death, though she freed them sooner. So, obviously, if we’re to look to the farming systems he borrowed and developed, the innovations he introduced, etc., and see something to praise, we can’t but at the same time feel profound sadness for the people who were forced to labor for Washington’s enrichment and anger towards him and those others who were complicit in their enslavement.
But American patriotism, if is to amount to anything morally respectable (i.e., not just knee-jerk nationalism), has no choice but to take up the impossible Janus-faced stance of lamenting the price paid by so many in the past and building on the good things that past has made possible.
So, in the current moment, in which some widespread desire for a renewed and renewing vision of agriculture is felt, why not look in part to the man whom we for other reasons credit as being the father of our country, but for something other than a model of civic commitment and military success? If we’re going to remain committed to the patriotic vision of him as the military and political founder of our nation, let’s also teach our kids his vision of a sophisticated place-based, systems-oriented agriculture that focuses on renewable resources and the health of the soil. But let’s ask the question he didn’t, of how we can implement such a vision while respecting the humanity of those who do the intensive work it requires.
Or, put more succinctly: American history is full of shit. So let’s compost it.
Out of Our Mines (Orig. post Dec. 2015)
“Grandma, it’s Mines, not Mimes,” read the placard outside a building at the Colorado School of Mines. We were there to visit their geology museum the day after Thanksgiving, not being the types to brave the Black Friday crowds at the malls and big box stores. The campus, located in Golden, CO, just west of Denver, was deserted, but the museum was actually doing a brisk business, with something like 70 visitors before us that day. Gems and rocks draw a crowd, apparently, at least when the collection is as robust as the one you’d expect a leading mining school to be, and it’s what drew us. Two floors of displays of interesting bits of the earth, lit up and labeled, plus a little bit of mining history, made for a pleasant hour and a half. There was just enough snow to make the museum’s outdoor geology walk mostly undoable, but we did get to see the triceratops footprints and palm frond fossils in a nearby cliff up the hill from the museum. From our vantage point there we could look out over Golden and see the town with the massive Coors plant next to it. It was a striking sight: the sky hung low over the valley and the clouds merged with the clouds of steam escaping from the plant, a kind of beauty that only industrialization can provide (the fact that it can is one of the real if more subtle impediments to the economic changes planetary ecology requires we make).
A few years ago we went to a mining museum an hour south, near Colorado Springs. It was unabashedly a place of industry propaganda, extolling the engineering achievements in mining’s development and the usefulness of the substances brought up from under the surface. What it put front and center the CSM geology museum was more subtle about: “if you can’t grow it, you have to mine it.” This is, as it happens, true. Think about whatever device you’re reading this on, whatever it is sitting on, what whatever it is sitting on is sitting on, the space around you, the space around that… The human built environment, including our food and clothing, is made up either of plant and animal materials harvested from the thin blanket of soil that covers parts of the earth or other stuff pulled out from under that blanket, and most of the stuff we deal with on a day to day basis other than what we eat is bedding material.
I don’t know if anyone has proposed or rigorously formulated a way to measure it, but I bet a good way to determine at least roughly the ecological sustainability of a culture would be to look at its ratio of the grown to the mined. Even if that would be an unworkable metric for a whole culture, it might work if applied more narrowly to agriculture. Those forms of it that don’t take more than they give to the soil are ones that rely on plants and animals for plant health and soil fertility, rather than on mined substances synthesized into substitutes; and they are ones that rely on human and animal labor rather than machine: organisms made from and fueled by plants (indirectly, if the organisms are carnivores) vs. fossil-fueled devices made of metals, plastics, synthetic rubbers, etc. (which are all pulled from the earth with…fossil-fueled devices made of metals, plastics, synthetic rubbers, etc.). So everywhere that modern industrial farming contributes to the denominator (the mined), sustainable agriculture contributes to the numerator (the grown).
Of course, even those forms of agriculture with a high grown–mined ratio can be unsustainable. When they are, it’s typically (or at least often) because they adopt the extraction-industry mentality which tries to take everything of short-term value from a spot as quickly as possible at whatever cost. The history of farming in the U.S. provides a vivid example of this, as rapid depletion of topsoil by farmers growing cash crops drove settlers westward in search of new soils to exploit. (See Wendell Berry’s still relevant The Unsettling of America and the more recent work Larding the Lean Earth by historian Steven Stoll.)
At root, though, agriculture is itself a kind of mining, just a very, very slow form of it. We eat plants (and animals that eat plants) to get, among other things, minerals that we need to survive. This means we are relying on those plants, in conjunction with the complex soil ecosystems they inhabit and the energy they draw from aboveground (the sun), to draw to the surface subsoil elements and compounds. As they do this, they break apart the underlying rocks, thus slowly altering the geological structures of the earth. So biology is an extractive industry too; it’s just one that is solar-powered, slow, and so, to that extent, self-sustaining. Agriculture that works within the cycles of biological extraction might thus hope to sustain us. Agriculture that doesn’t, probably won’t.
'Twas a blog I created during my leave in 2015-16. Its motto was "edo ergo sum." And for the unbuttery among you, here is the basis for its name:
buttery n. A place for storing liquor; but the name was also, from an early period, extended to ‘the room where provisions are laid up’ (Johnson). [OED]
buttery-hatch [also buttery hatch] n. The half-door over which the buttery provisions are served. [OED]
The conceit was to serve my own buttery provisions in verbal form through the hatch we called the internet.
Here are a couple of old posts somewhat randomly chosen. Technical challenges prevent me from just linking to the archived original. Perhaps I will overcome those, but probably not. And I'll add more as I go through them.
Jaffrey! (Orig. post April 2016)
Asafoetida. Ajowan. Jaggery. Fenugreek. Curry leaves. Chaat masala. Urad dal. Life is getting spicy on Westnedge Hill! We’d rarely if ever used any of these, but then we got Madhur Jaffrey’s latest book, Vegetarian India. A few months back we’d made a lovely radish and orange salad Lynne Rosetto Kaspar had included on her website after interviewing Jaffrey, which had just the right balance of crunchy peppery bite and sweet juiciness. And then when we checked V.I. out of KPL when it first came in, we started reading it and just wanted to make everything in it. So now we’re eating vegetarian Indian food 3-4 nights a week. We wouldn’t be able to make the recipes, though, if it wasn’t for World of Spices, at 5911 S. Westnedge in Portage, a place I’d driven past countless times but had never gone into. What a wonderful Indian grocer! The spices speak, the dals delight, the rices regale. And the people are friendly and helpful – as who wouldn’t be if you got to breathe in those scents hours every day? I’ve yet to strike out in looking for a needed ingredient there.
Jaffrey’s dishes are not difficult to execute, despite the sometimes formidable ingredient lists. But we’ve learned that when she suggests serving one dish with a variety of others, those lists can get tangled and dinner takes a long time to prepare. So for the moment we’re scaling back, making one-dish meals instead of the spreads she recommends, at least until we internalize recipes enough to more fluently combine them. They’re very easy to adapt to seasonal availability of produce too: we’ve had great dishes of spinach, potato, turnip, kale, and carrots, all bought at the winter market or Co-op (though we have splurged more than once on very non-local cauliflower, because, well, it’s cauliflower!). Dried legume dishes (chickpeas, black-eyed peas, lentils) are easy and satisfying and the book abounds in them. Make your own paneer (fresh cheese) and you can add that to the mix. New favorite condiment? Spiced yogurt (raita). Homemade flatbread is the work of just a few extra minutes. What’s not to love?
This Sh*t is Patriotic! (Orig. post July 2018)
Good ol’ George Washington. Ambitious young soldier, revolutionary general, first president who, à la the Roman general-cum-(elected) dictator Cincinnatus, nobly gave up power to return to his farm, we venerate him as the father of our country – and not without reason, for just about everything good and terrible about us and our history is embodied in this one man.
We’ve recently returned from a 10-day family trip, just over half of which was spent in our nation’s capital, and Washington, both the city and the man, and this tension between the good that America represents and the exploitation and blood in which it is grounded, are much on my mind, today especially. While in D.C. it was a challenge to feel any sense of pride in our nation’s alleged greatness: too many kids wearing “Make America Great Again” hats and t-shirts; an otherwise excellent exhibit in the Smithsonian’s American history museum on the wars of our past problematically titled “The Price of Freedom,” as if those who removed and slaughtered the native peoples, or who fought in any number of the many unnecessary wars that the U.S. has been involved in, were, simply by having worn the uniform, heroes of liberty; a visit to the Supreme Court building made in the fog of depression of the latest rulings and followed by the even gloomier news of Kennedy’s retirement; even the zoo was a downer, as nearly every exhibit told us of the vulnerable or endangered status of its inhabitant, and the valley the zoo is in was itself clogged with invasive species – all of which reflects the ecological catastrophes of American-led global corporate capitalism.
The highlight of the trip, however, and what gave me some sliver of hope for our collective political and ecological future, was a trip to Washington’s estate, Mt. Vernon. Its manor house perhaps stands as a metaphor for the nation it represents: built with wood covered in sand to make it look like stone, it gives the appearance of permanence, but it’s an appearance that cracks easily and takes constant effort to maintain.
The house was the least interesting part, however, even knowing the conversations among famous men that took place there. For moving out from it, the grounds turn out not to be just manicured creations for the aesthetic delight of the inhabitants and visitors, but a stunning example of what we would now call sustainable agriculture (with one not insignificant caveat, to which I’ll return). It turns out that our founding father was a man who knew his shit, literally. Washington saw the degradation of land that growing tobacco as a cash crop was leading to, and he envisioned a different agricultural future for the country, one based on constant renewal of the soil and wise use of the land. On his own properties, he implemented and further developed techniques from Europe’s 18th century “new husbandry” movement, central to which was the use of manure, delivered either straight from the source by animals grazing on land being rested from crop-growing, or indirectly through compost from the barns.
Other forms of compost were used, too, as were fish heads and tails from the large-scale harvesting of the piscine inhabitants of the Potomac, who provided, we were told, about two-thirds of the annual revenue of the estate. (A DC guidebook we bought says the estate’s distillery was the main profit source, but this may reflect different periods in the development of the Mount, or a stretching of the truth to appeal to our current booze-besotted times.)
The direct-deposit manuring was itself part of a sophisticated seven year system of crop- and animal-rotation on the lands of the farms that form Mt. Vernon, many of which were bought on the cheap from tobacco farmers who’d moved on for richer soil they could perform their same extractions upon. Learning this I couldn’t help but think of Wendell Berry’s Unsettling of America on the pressure for the West created by successive depletions of soil by farmers who knew it was easier to move than to care for where they were. This was a pressure that G.W. benefited from financially in no small way, as he invested in the lands taken from the native peoples of the Ohio Valley and surrounding areas. (This was made clear at a stop at the Fort Pitt museum in Pittsburgh on the way home.)
Reclaiming and rebuilding depleted soils and shifting the focus from tobacco to grains were just part of Washington’s vision for how to farm well by intelligently utilizing what resources were locally available. For instance, he used timber harvested from his estate forests for many purposes, including to make the boats that caught the fish in the Potomac who gave their heads and tails (and probably hearts) to the soil. (The edible parts of the fish were salted and preserved and traded far and wide, with the plantations of the Caribbean, themselves too busy making sugar to fish the rich waters around them, providing one of the primary markets.)
Our First Fertilizer also saw the importance of breeding animals suited to the peculiarities of the place they were used. Mules, horses, and oxen all had jobs on the farms of the estate, and other cattle, as well as chickens, provided meat, eggs, and dairy for consumption and at least some small amount of trade. We were also told that Washington launched one of the first mule-production operations stateside, which helped the mule to become a work animal of choice for many, and, of course, part of the promised compensation during Reconstruction for freed slaves.
But here I get to the caveat I mentioned about the sustainability of all this – animals obviously weren’t the only ones who had jobs on the estate. Washington was able to accomplish his agricultural wizardry because he had at his command three hundred-odd enslaved people. About a third of these were directly owned by him; he famously willed that they were to be set free upon Martha’s death, though she freed them sooner. So, obviously, if we’re to look to the farming systems he borrowed and developed, the innovations he introduced, etc., and see something to praise, we can’t but at the same time feel profound sadness for the people who were forced to labor for Washington’s enrichment and anger towards him and those others who were complicit in their enslavement.
But American patriotism, if is to amount to anything morally respectable (i.e., not just knee-jerk nationalism), has no choice but to take up the impossible Janus-faced stance of lamenting the price paid by so many in the past and building on the good things that past has made possible.
So, in the current moment, in which some widespread desire for a renewed and renewing vision of agriculture is felt, why not look in part to the man whom we for other reasons credit as being the father of our country, but for something other than a model of civic commitment and military success? If we’re going to remain committed to the patriotic vision of him as the military and political founder of our nation, let’s also teach our kids his vision of a sophisticated place-based, systems-oriented agriculture that focuses on renewable resources and the health of the soil. But let’s ask the question he didn’t, of how we can implement such a vision while respecting the humanity of those who do the intensive work it requires.
Or, put more succinctly: American history is full of shit. So let’s compost it.
Out of Our Mines (Orig. post Dec. 2015)
“Grandma, it’s Mines, not Mimes,” read the placard outside a building at the Colorado School of Mines. We were there to visit their geology museum the day after Thanksgiving, not being the types to brave the Black Friday crowds at the malls and big box stores. The campus, located in Golden, CO, just west of Denver, was deserted, but the museum was actually doing a brisk business, with something like 70 visitors before us that day. Gems and rocks draw a crowd, apparently, at least when the collection is as robust as the one you’d expect a leading mining school to be, and it’s what drew us. Two floors of displays of interesting bits of the earth, lit up and labeled, plus a little bit of mining history, made for a pleasant hour and a half. There was just enough snow to make the museum’s outdoor geology walk mostly undoable, but we did get to see the triceratops footprints and palm frond fossils in a nearby cliff up the hill from the museum. From our vantage point there we could look out over Golden and see the town with the massive Coors plant next to it. It was a striking sight: the sky hung low over the valley and the clouds merged with the clouds of steam escaping from the plant, a kind of beauty that only industrialization can provide (the fact that it can is one of the real if more subtle impediments to the economic changes planetary ecology requires we make).
A few years ago we went to a mining museum an hour south, near Colorado Springs. It was unabashedly a place of industry propaganda, extolling the engineering achievements in mining’s development and the usefulness of the substances brought up from under the surface. What it put front and center the CSM geology museum was more subtle about: “if you can’t grow it, you have to mine it.” This is, as it happens, true. Think about whatever device you’re reading this on, whatever it is sitting on, what whatever it is sitting on is sitting on, the space around you, the space around that… The human built environment, including our food and clothing, is made up either of plant and animal materials harvested from the thin blanket of soil that covers parts of the earth or other stuff pulled out from under that blanket, and most of the stuff we deal with on a day to day basis other than what we eat is bedding material.
I don’t know if anyone has proposed or rigorously formulated a way to measure it, but I bet a good way to determine at least roughly the ecological sustainability of a culture would be to look at its ratio of the grown to the mined. Even if that would be an unworkable metric for a whole culture, it might work if applied more narrowly to agriculture. Those forms of it that don’t take more than they give to the soil are ones that rely on plants and animals for plant health and soil fertility, rather than on mined substances synthesized into substitutes; and they are ones that rely on human and animal labor rather than machine: organisms made from and fueled by plants (indirectly, if the organisms are carnivores) vs. fossil-fueled devices made of metals, plastics, synthetic rubbers, etc. (which are all pulled from the earth with…fossil-fueled devices made of metals, plastics, synthetic rubbers, etc.). So everywhere that modern industrial farming contributes to the denominator (the mined), sustainable agriculture contributes to the numerator (the grown).
Of course, even those forms of agriculture with a high grown–mined ratio can be unsustainable. When they are, it’s typically (or at least often) because they adopt the extraction-industry mentality which tries to take everything of short-term value from a spot as quickly as possible at whatever cost. The history of farming in the U.S. provides a vivid example of this, as rapid depletion of topsoil by farmers growing cash crops drove settlers westward in search of new soils to exploit. (See Wendell Berry’s still relevant The Unsettling of America and the more recent work Larding the Lean Earth by historian Steven Stoll.)
At root, though, agriculture is itself a kind of mining, just a very, very slow form of it. We eat plants (and animals that eat plants) to get, among other things, minerals that we need to survive. This means we are relying on those plants, in conjunction with the complex soil ecosystems they inhabit and the energy they draw from aboveground (the sun), to draw to the surface subsoil elements and compounds. As they do this, they break apart the underlying rocks, thus slowly altering the geological structures of the earth. So biology is an extractive industry too; it’s just one that is solar-powered, slow, and so, to that extent, self-sustaining. Agriculture that works within the cycles of biological extraction might thus hope to sustain us. Agriculture that doesn’t, probably won’t.