In what is turning out to be the most challenging year of our business life, three things are getting us through the days. Knowing everyone on staff is healthy is paramount. Cooking the best food of our lives, sourced as fully as possible from the surrounding ‘view’ restores a sense of mission. And playing with the concept of virtual service keeps us brainstorming creatively, making us stronger as a team. Each dish, cocktail, and wine choice is now channeled through a disembodied voice. For now, the physical anonymity of text or a telephone conversation with no actual contact at the table is overwhelmingly welcome by the majority of our guests, safer for our staff. But everyday we’re juggling with this new paradigm, learning new ways to work within it to tell an honest story about what you are looking at on the plate or in your glass. Brave New World indeed. Then again, being forced to question ourselves - what is flavor anyway? - isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We’ve always wanted to communicate the joy in provenance, and always, always, how things are made. If we can’t do that in person for a while, so be it.
But when it all gets a bit much (and it does) we fall back to our main source of élan vital - the farm.
Henri Bergson coined the term élan vital in 1907 in his book Creative Evolution. For him it referred to a life force, one responsible for growth, change, and the ability to recognize necessary or desirable adaptations. All admirable if not crucial attributes right now. The farm has always been this kind of élan vital for our family, in great part because its indelible beauty and its fecundity thrives in adversity, is in fact inseparable from it. Our dry farmed orchards struggle, yet produce better tasting fruit, with more condensed sugar. The energy is palpable up here, constantly buzzing and leaping just out of sight, with everything dying then regenerating through innumerable ecosystems of insects, animals, plants and seeds. It’s all about balance. And a constant lesson to strive if you are to survive.
There is simply no more elegant fruit here than what we harvest from our 100 year old fig trees. Figs are in the Mulberry family, one of the earliest fruit trees in history to be cultivated. In legend it was a fig that grew outside the Lupercal cave where Romulus and Remus drifted ashore and were suckled by a she-wolf that kept them - and the very notion of a Rome - alive. The fig tree was thought then to be an emblem of the future prosperity of the race - and while that didn’t work out so well for the Roman Empire, it’s interesting to note what eventually brought them down: climate upheaval which affected crops, a series of pandemics brought about in great part because of the way they lived, and massive inequality that went hand in hand with political corruption. How many times do we need to hear the phrase ‘those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it?’
In the meantime, old fig trees drape their branches to the ground, deeply lobed leaves hiding swelling fruit from predators. Most years the blue jays are a nuisance, but this season sleek western Tanagers have appeared in droves. They have taken to dive bombing the figs at twilight, yellow and green flashes of light that zig and zag, mad jazz, quite beautiful. Give me a dozen Tanagers, some really old fig trees, throw in a martini or two and we’re good to go tomorrow.
Big shout out to Jordan and Francisco - great farm partners this month. We now have jam, Aunty Lynn compote, figgy syrup cakes. If you have booked to dine soon in the gardens look for Barndiva Farm figs on several new dishes.
Stay healthy.
Thank you @daniel.james.co for looking after and loving the farm as you do. And for posing (which I know you hate/love) for all our action shots, lol.
Next up on farm report: The Ongoing Apple Syrup Project. Don’t miss it.
@chef.jordan.rosas
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