Chef's Table

I rarely watch television, but in the last few weeks, both my sons and I have seen several episodes of Chef's Table on Netflix. My favorite is about the chef Magnus Nilsson and his restaurant Fäviken in Jämtland, Sweden. Nilsson created a menu that drew almost exclusively from ingredients that could be foraged or grown and raised on the land and in the waters near the restaurant. Since the area is covered in snow for months of the year, dishes utilize produce and meat preserved in various ways, from pickling, storing in a root cellar, and salting and drying. Nilsson also researched and wrote the massive Nordic Cookbook, in which he collected recipes from home cooks from all over Scandinavia and other countries.

I know, of course, that my Texas Czech great grandmothers (and even one more generation back) also foraged for and grew and raised what they ate every day. But I never knew them, so have no direct knowledge of what they grew, or how they cooked what they grew. No recipes survived my great grandmother or her mother. And by the time I was an adult, my grandmother, who lived her adult life in town, no longer gardened. I have certainly been exposed to and eaten traditional foods. I've learned to make others through various members of my family and the Texas Czech community. But last weekend, I felt I'd walked into a Texas-Czech episode of Chef's Table when I visited my cousin Ann Adams near Floresville.

I visited Ann with her sister, Mary Christine (at left) - a nun at Our Lady of the Lake in San Antonio, so that we could see some family memorabilia Ann had. But the day ended up being so much about food. Though I know a lot about Czech food in Texas, it's really more from study as an adult than absorption as I grew up. At Ann's, I felt like the proverbial city slicker who thinks milk comes from cartons instead of an animal's mammary glands.  The house that Ann and her husband Gerald occupy near Floresville was built by her parents in the 1960s and is on land that is abundant with edible things. This fact is combined with Ann's knowledge of Texas Czech and Czech cooking and yields delicious results.

For lunch, the spread we sat down to at Ann's "chef's table" included sandwiches (homemade pimiento cheese and homemade tuna), deviled eggs, a salad of homegrown tomatoes, bread cubes, and basil, plus jars of pickles and pickled okra to help myself from, and iced tea.  Ann's family has strong connections to the Czech Republic (her mother immigrated just before World War 1) and she and her sisters have visited relatives there many times. We ate off of plates she'd purchased there. Farther down on the same enormous table was an enormous pile of basil, literally the size of a bush. Ann confessed to eating a lot of basil, and that she was going to dry it for use in the coming year.

After lunch, Ann's daughter (my second cousin), Christine, and a friend of hers and I walked out onto the property to see the state of the wild grape vines. I was hoping to head home with enough for a batch of jelly, my younger son's favorite. Sadly, there were no grapes to be had. Either the vines hadn't produced or the grapes had shriveled and fallen off without Ann knowing they'd been there. We did to walk past fields of wild flowers that grow on the property and Christine remarked how lovely it was to see various flowers coming up as the seasons passed, continually renewing the fields with different colors.

Late in the afternoon, we sampled Ann and Gerald's homemade cantaloupe wine, which was much less sweet than you'd think. Ann ushered me into their bedroom to show me the almost-empty carbo, plus an almost-full carbo of persimmon wine that were both sitting on the floor in front of the glass doors that went out to the screened-in porch. We could see a male and three female wild turkeys parading around the yard beyond the porch. They don't shoot the turkeys because Gerald doesn't think turkey is worth eating. I have to agree with him. Turkey is my least favorite part of the Thanksgiving meal. Maybe that's why the turkeys on Gerald's property come so close to the house... nothing to fear.

    

We talked about snakes (Ann was bitten by a rattle snake once), rural kids being "farm strong", Ann's desire to forage on the property for whatever she could find, and kolach fillings. Apparently Ann's across-the-road neighbor grows poppies to harvest the seeds for baking. This is a task I've longed to learn how to do, but always seem to find out about someone who still does it after the right season to help. But we also talked South Texas influences on her cooking, theorizing about prickly pears and cajeta (caramel made from goat's milk) in kolaches.

At the end of the day, as Sister Mary Christine and I prepared to go, a neighbor dropped in to relay news about his wife's cancer treatment and brought a dozen beautiful yard eggs of varying colors. And as I passed through the laundry room/pantry to head out to the car, Ann handed me a jar of homemade pear butter. I left longing to come back and spend weekends cooking, canning, picking, and otherwise absorbing the knowledge she has about traditional Texas Czech food. And inspired to experiment with more and more dishes for my own table.