Four flocks and larder menu4/19/2023 ![]() Here, a few years ago, Sally prepared one of life's memorable meals for my husband Lee's birthday, a mix of Anderson Valley, Tuscany, and ideas from her own childhood on a farm near Fresno: bread and tomato soup marinated leg of lamb, inspired by Fresno's Armenian cooks, grilled outside by Don and apple clafouti made with pink pearl apples, beauties with rose-colored flesh. Just good knives, pots, and chopping blocks.'' Like the valley itself, Sally's cooking is tolerant and inclusive, absorbing outside influences without disturbing deep local traditions. ''Back to basics'' is Sally's slogan for her cooking school: ''You won't find a Cuisinart or microwave here. Delitha and Phil are gone now, but as I watched my daughter following Sally's deft ways of chopping onions and preparing chutney, I saw values being transmitted to another generation. Now a beautiful young New York photographer, Christie was the little girl I'd watched from the window as she and her brother Don walked hand in hand, along a country road roaring with logging trucks, to Phil and Delitha Clark's cottage, where a fresh-baked pie always awaited them. Sally's cooking class was a rite of passage. ![]() There are small changes-like Bruce Bread, whose chewy French loaf locals call the best toasting bread in the world-but no serious threats there it's the few cute tourist shops that make me nervous.Ī lump comes to my throat as I remember taking my daughter Christie into Sally's kitchen for the first time three years ago. Hungry for valley news, I park with the pickups at the market to buy a copy of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, the inflammatory weekly newspaper whose liberal credo-''Peace to the cottages! War on the palaces!''-earned it a national reputation. I cruise Boonville's few blocks: the small wood-frame stores, a few boarded-up buildings. Valley wisdom holds that as long as the road coils through the hills like a rattler, the rural quality here will prevail. I roll past Johnson's sheep ranch on the right and the fairgrounds on the left into Boonville, whose sleepy main street I scan anxiously for signs of change. As always, the magic grips me as the thick blanket of morning fog burns off and Octopus Hill's velvety green flanks emerge through the mist. Today, it is the Schmitts, as much as my hilltop, that lure me over the twisting road to the valley. (''Unfortunately,'' says Glover, ''there are only five real Boontling speakers left, so the language can't survive long.'') ![]() For me, Boontling's vitality became a measure of the valley's immunity to change. ''We were selling beef, but eating venison,'' confirms star Boontling speaker Bobby Glover, who went to school with the sons of the inventors of that jargon of made-up words, contracted from names, places, and events, that let the young bucks talk bawdily in secret. With the Mendocino Coast only an hour's drive west, ''rock cod, abalone, salmon, and venison were the staples that kept people going,'' says Tom Lemons, whose family had the first store in Philo. Homesteading families who'd come in the last century-Gowans, Johnsons, Rawleses, McGimpseys, and Hiatts-were now the fourth and fifth generations to thrive on the region's bounty. Three waves of migration had intermarried and overlapped. Too old to be hippies, my then-husband and I became part of the infant boutique winery movement, attempting to grow the finest wine grapes possible in a valley whose name we had spotted in a viticultural textbook, cited as one of the few remaining undiscovered pockets of cool-climate vineyard land.īut over time I discovered that we were merely the newest of several layers of arrivistes already stitched into a lively, crazy quilt of cultures here. A native of western Canada, I was starved for bare feet, a garden, and good, honest food, and in 1967 I joined the migration back to the land-to California. ![]() I discovered this place over thirty years ago from a flame-stitched wing chair in my Greenwich Village brownstone-a young banker's wife sick of paying obeisance to France with beef Wellingtons, croquembouches, and pompous clarets. It's a springtime Saturday and I'm ''piking to Boont'', as they say in the local lingo, driving over the serpentine twists of mountain road that, for over three decades, have been leading me into a rural Shangri-la called Anderson Valley, and to Boonville, a town caught in a time warp that lets a rare country life-style-and a ''language'' called Boontling-survive.
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