by Gay Davidson-Zielske
I was grazing the recipes of this week's New York Times Magazine, which explained how someone named Debbie, evidently famous, had done things with vegetables that would make a confirmed carnivore ashamed of his habit.
"Hey, wanna go vegetarian this summer?" I yelled to my husband, who was doing the taxes and in no mood for trivial gastronomic planning. As usual, Ken didn't grace my silly inquiry with a response, so I kept on marketing my idea, suggesting that since we're already members of a farming cooperative, it would be best to start in the summer when veggies are plentiful and we already get this heaping box of cool things we've never seen before and how sometimes those Martiany green tenacled things sort of sat in the fridge until they shrank to nothingness and that was really a waste of MONEY and he sat up straight at that word, but still didn't respond.
As usual, I didn't really care whether he responded because I was already well into thinking how good "that first meatless summer" would sound as a chapter in my memoirs, which I am hard at work writing, having decided to skip the distasteful step of getting famous first so that anybody would want to read my memoirs.
Then, I decided to check out the ingredients in one of the recipes. Near the top of the list was the item "juniper berries," stated as matter- of- factly as one might write "salt," (which by the way I have noticed in these recipes is nearly never "salt" but rather "kosher dill cranapple diced salt.")
"Juniper berries!" I snorted. Ken said "huh?" and I waited for his follow up, which never came.
It's difficult to pique the interest of a man who's up to his armpits in non- deductibles. Also, my last pre-tax conversational bid concerned trying to find out from him whether he's ever heard of people piercing their pets' appendages. I was idly examining the beautiful silken tip of our cat's ear and the thought popped into my head that somebody somewhere would think scarification, piercing, and tattooing animals would be just fine and a neat fashion statement. And my head, as everybody knows, is a great gumball machine. Whatever thought tumbles down out of my cranium is immediately shot out my mouth.
Since it was clear Ken wasn't sharing my interest in my random musings, I began to imagine myself hopping off to the corner grocery for a packet of juniper berries, how the clerks at Norris Court would look at me when I requested help finding them on the shelf. Now, I like Norris Court. One St. Patrick's day, the owner, Kathy Newport , was more than wonderful about stocking me with tons of Blackstrap Molasses. We even shared black bread recipes. They are very accommodating there and a great asset to our community. I like the young man with the little boy who kids with me a lot. But sometimes I can't find even fairly normal stuff there--like yeast and cottage cheese and marshmallow cream. So I doubt they stock "juniper berries" on any kind of regular basis.
But forgive me for being just a little disingenuous, (which is a euphemism favored by politicians and means "I'm lying my hiney off,") since Madison is pretty cosmopolitan when it comes to food. If Norris Court doesn't have juniper berries, there's still one of the many cooperatives which stock things like Royal Bee Jelly and pollen, which apparently somebody finds palatable.
Then I began to wonder how the "juniper berry" scene would play out in a really small town-- say Steward, Illinois, population 200, mostly dead, where I was raised. I could just see myself, now grown up and having been forced by the witness relocation program to return to live in Steward for my own protection (which is the only way I would ever return to live in Steward.)
Though even the grocery store dried up there years ago, in my youth we had Haig's, which stocked the usual stuff--lots of corned beef hash and Campbell's soup and a few fresh things, though the fruit and vegetable bin was pretty much restricted to items nobody could or did grow in their gardens-- a few oranges and some celery. The dusty ceiling fans turned in the pressed tin ceiling year round and the floors were wooden planks. The meat freezer always smelled a little off, but the milk was 100% butterfat and the bread was Sunbeam.
We bought salty Sealtest ice cream in small
cardboardy-tasting cups and ate it with wooden spatula spoons which could leave slivers they were so crude, though it was worth the risk. Sealtest came in your choice of flavors as long as it was vanilla.
Mr. and Mrs. Haig, knowing their clientele, specialized in penny candy- especially the suckers called SAF-T-POPS, the letters embossed on the surface and the handle a white string looped through the bottom. There were pastel wafers in pellucid waxed rolls and Bit O'Honey candy bars and Bazooka pink bubble gum. At Christmas, they brought in a few turkeys and hams, I guess, though I don't remember my family ever getting one.
But juniper berries? I doubt it seriously. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if when the adult me even asked the question, the news of my request would ricochet through the seven streets of the town like news of an outbreak of anthrax so that by evening of the same day, the preacher of the First Methodist church would be trying to figure out how to quell the disturbance. Public consternation would be even greater than the time a full-racked bull moose was found wandering around by the grain elevator one cold Sunday morning. The story might be bigger than the one about a talking mina bird that flew through Mrs. Cantrell's kitchen window, shat on her doily, and came to rest on the Philco. Maybe we'll not go vegetarian a la the New York Times Magazine. Maybe it's safer to start with a few bean sprouts and tofu and work our way up. I heard that one couple is eating whole wheat bread in Steward.
The rest of the town is waiting to see what will happen to them.