It’s sugaring season, and Tuesday marked the second boil over at Danny’s place. Sunny and mild, the day couldn’t have been better suited to the occasion. Per normal, he started the fire and filled the pan early in the morning and I rolled in later to stoke the furnace and monitor progress while he did some work in the studio. Also per normal, I brought food to cook.
We lost power in the storm last Friday, which normally is not a big deal because of the generator I had installed shortly after we moved in. But this time it didn’t work, even after a repair dude spent the better part of an hour messing with it that afternoon. So we fetched water from our neighbors (whose generator worked) and showered there too and generally made do, charging phones in the car and sitting in front of the fire a lot. I cooked a coil of merguez in the fireplace, which wasn’t elegant but did make for a decent dinner. Our fireplace was not designed for cooking; it’s super efficient at heating the room and house in general but is shallow and we lack the dope apparatus my grandfather designed for the big old fireplace in Vermont. Nonetheless: hot lamb sausage, sharp homemade mustard, and crusty bread served handsomely. And then we had to eat the ice cream in the freezer so it didn’t melt and go to waste.
All this is by way of saying that there was more merguez in the fridge, so when I headed over to Danny’s I threw it in the box with a bottle of wine, a jar of yogurt sauce made with pickled green tomatoes and more of that homegrown mustard, freshly made Sichuan chili oil enriched with mandarin orange peel, some leftover sautéed bok choy, skewers, a corkscrew, a knife, and some quick naan dough I whipped up with sourdough starter, yogurt, and scallions. The dough rose in the car, and then some more near the fire until I was too hungry to wait any longer.
Danny brought his iron skillet down from the house and I put it in front of the truly infernal conflagration that was madly boiling the pan of sap. The BTUs radiating from this fire were no joke; I had to rub snow on my hands before I reached in to place or adjust food so my skin wouldn’t burn. I formed some approximate rectangles with the shaggy dough, using a fork to scrape dough off my hands, and let them puff up before flipping them over to brown thoroughly on the other side. I love cooking flatbreads like this; the intense heat gives them fragrant black blisters while the insides stay puffy and soft. It’s perfection: just brush them with melted butter and you’re in business. In this case, though, the breads were mere vessels for spicy lamb sausage.
I set the skewered spiral of meat in the pan, flipping it a few times until the sizzle and smell said stop. Then lunch was a simple matter of bisecting bread, adding meat and greens, slathering yogurt, dribbling oil, and eating (standing up, facing the fire, moving when the breeze sent the smoke our way). These were serious sandwiches: smoky, meaty, gamy, sharp, spicy, bright, oily, dripping, salty, perfect. Hunger is the best condiment, no doubt, but set and setting and company and project all enhance a meal immeasurably.
We both love this late winter ritual because it gets us off our asses and outside where we belong, and because it’s a unique alloy of rugged rural toil and sweet refinement: mountain alchemy, boiling water into gold. This task insists on a full cycle of sunlight, and involves lots of standing and waiting and orbiting the fire to stay warm, swiping sips of sap for the jolt of sugar that reminds us why we’re spending all damn day watching a pot boil. But the focus, the presence, the work, the attention to the passage of a day in service of a reward—sugar, which we evolved to prize above all others—elevate a lunch like this to a level of pleasure that fancy cooking can never attain.
