In the Kitchen

The kitchen is the social center of Schiestl Farm, which for all its virtues and wonders— balconies laden with geranium-filled boxes, rattling showers, secret passages between bales of hay—has no living room. There are no couches on the farm. Just benches surrounding the tables in the guest dining room next door and here, in the kitchen. The dining room is pleasant and spacious, with plenty of room for normal-toned conversations and three tables to the kitchen’s one, but here in the kitchen is where we entertain neighbors and sisters and special guests. It is also the fascinating world that draws our smallest guests, who watch wide-eyed as we prepare supper and wander in and out as we carry small trays, full of tea and coffee, out to the dining room in the morning. Home to the white, tiled monster of a wood-burning stove, its flat top strewn with steaming teapots, the kitchen is also the warmest room in the house, at least ten degrees warmer than the pantry across the hall.

Midmorning, and I am contemplating color as I slice apricots. I have spent little time with apricots in my life, so these do not take me away into memory as cooking so often does here. With childlike delight I marvel at how easily the stones fall out of the center of these tiny fruits (“Really from Lower Austria!” Annemarie exclaimed as she purchased them from a farm stand two days ago), having expected the battle I so frequently wage with the hearts of stubborn peaches. Now, as the pile of wedged apricots builds up in the Tupperware bowl, I pour syrup over them and thirstily drink in the tropical sunset orange that practically glows up at me.

It’s been a summer of color. Dark green, on the feathery straightness of the evergreen forest across the pasture; in the spicy, eye-watering scent of the leeks that I chop up and leave to dry on top of the stove. The pink of flowers so numerous that they splash a red hue on the hillsides as we walk up and up, through valleys and over passes, to waiting bowls of soup in the Alpine huts. Blue-black berries stain hands and clothes blood red, leave purple bruises on enamel pots and cake plates. And the greys (not really a color, I know, but to me it is the most important one): grey of the smooth, dirty cows down the road; grey of skies, a thousand greys in every cloud; grey that today reminds me that autumn approaches quickly, bringing a low and early snow to these mountains, bringing me back home to English, friends, the city, and a paucity of hours for baking.

Irmgard has come in now with a pot full of meat. I’ve asked already what it is, to which she replied, with mock defensiveness, “Ein gut fleich!” A good meat! She then jerked the raw meat away from my sight and disappeared into the pantry. Now, as she drops the pot on the hot stovetop and begins slicing vegetables, I remember the mystery of the meat.

“Was machst du?” I ask. What are you making?

Irmgard, who speaks virtually no English, replies with a long German word—or perhaps a few words—that I don’t know, and I shrug in ignorance. The question, answer, and shrug of non-comprehension are the elements of many of our conversations, especially about food.

Irmgard: Was machst du?

Me: Um… tuna melt.

Irmgard: Tunafisch?

Me: Ja… aber... melted.

Irmgard shrugs, trusting that whatever it is, it will be fine. This is the shrug I give her now. Or, rather, this is the half-shrug of my reply, for with my shoulders raised to my ears, but not yet dropped down again, I recall a familiar word in part of the long title.

“Wait,” I say. “Hase? Rabbit?”

Irmgard shakes her head, not knowing the English word.

“Hase?” I repeat (pronouncing the two syllables, HAH and seh, with teenaged insistency), putting my hands to my head and pointing two fingers at the ceiling.

She laughs and nods. “Hase!”

I glance into the pot, half expecting to see two ears, like the top of a chocolate Easter bunny, draped over the side. But there are none. No ears. No tail. Just some meat. A good meat. With a reciprocal laugh, another shrug of confidence in the rabbit’s tasty potential, I return to the pantry for butter.

Pie-making is a complicated affair here on the farm, given the lack of familiar tools. The tools are absent, I was told shortly after I arrived, because in continental Europe no one makes pie. It is apparently a strictly British inheritance, and even they seem to have mostly the small and savory variety, none of the gigantic fruit pies to which I am accustomed. “As American as apple pie,” I’m learning, is not just a phrase. And as I am spending a great deal of time here concocting desserts from the mounds of fruit grown and purchased in the fertile Austrian summer, it was inevitable that I would eventually come up against the pie problem.

Now, on my third attempt at pie, I am experienced. I know that there is neither a pie pan nor a pastry cutter. I unfold a huge block of margarine into a pile of brown and white flour. Estimating that it looks like just shy of a cup, I slice a bit more off of another block. Now is the time to cut, and I start pulling two knives—one sharp and one less so—through the flour-butter-salt. It is awkward, this kind of cutting, nothing like the pleasant childhood chore, with the pastry cutter and a bowl of mostly shortening. What it is like, actually, is my Grandma Nadine’s pie-making. Her routine with the knives on Christmas morning, preparing the pie crusts for Mom to fill with apples or pumpkin, always seemed like extra work for me, a graceful and dangerous trick she was playing to avoid the clumsiness of our newfangled gadgets. How a pastry cutter was newfangled I never understood, since I was the one that was busily chopping up the other pie crust with my own wrists and hands, working plenty hard. But now I see.

The butter and the flour, which I’m shaking to mix it up, occasionally stirring with the not-sharp knife, once in a while cutting a stray clod with the sharp one, is nearly as it should be.

And I never leave home behind when I travel. Everywhere I go, part of me is still there. Or part of there is still here with me. I’m not sure which. Because even now I am thinking about how the forest across the pasture reminds me of another forest across another pasture, one so dark and green, when we would watch each winter the line of snow creeping down and down, tree by tree, until it filled in all the way to the pasture and to us. Remembering how once I unknowingly ate rabbit, in some kind of stew prepared by a guest at our home in the mountains and, contrary to all predictable endings, I didn’t die or throw up when I found out what it was. And of course recalling, just in time, how Grandma Nadine taught me that the making of flaky, buttery pastry required nothing more than two ordinary kitchen knives.