Lady and gentleman farmers, the homestead of your dreams lies in Westchester County just up the road from Sleepy Hollow. Once the Rockefeller family’s personal dairy, Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, NY, has become the most beautiful of sustainable farms. It’s pig heaven.

Happier pigs you will never see. Three-month old Berkshire piglets root around in a muddy oak grove, snuffle each other playfully, and nestle beside mama sows, two 400-pound behemoths of bounty.

Although earthy with a touch of ruggedness, Mr. Henry cannot claim to be a farmer. He does not really understand grasses, earthworms, pests, crop rotations, maturation cycles, or harvest schedules. Although an avid meat-eater, he does not possess the requisite sangue-froid to personally participate in slaughter, either.

He was perfectly capable, however, of serving himself from the salad bar at Blue Hills Cafe where he devoured the most devilishly delicious egg salad. The farm sustains a Blue Hills restaurant there as well as one in New York City.

But like most pilgrims, Mr. Henry journeys to experience the known and the unknown. In addition to much important new information regarding sows in farrow, from his noonday livestock tour he carried away an otherworldly sense of natural harmony, momentarily satisfying the perpetual American longing for utopia. He also carried away Stone Barns holy relics – t-shirt, cap, food book, heirloom tomatoes, fresh greens, and a frozen butt of pork.

But Mr. Henry’s legendary curiosity, one that in the past has gotten him into compost piles of trouble, leads him to ask the popular question of today: “Where does our food come from?”

Stone Barns chickens eat bugs and grasses. Like Gypsies they reside in ramshackle wooden caravans transported daily to a fresh spot of pasture ripe with sheep droppings the chickens pore over like college girls at an H & M sale. Stone Barns chickens know perfectly well where their own food comes from, so why shouldn’t we?

And the bees! The bees! The tintinnabulation of the bees, bees, bees, bees, bees. No colony collapse disorder plagues these honeybees. Order here reigns supreme. They understand there is work to be done on earth as well as in heaven.

Mr. Henry is not a person of faith. For him, ideology is bunk, and religion is über-bunk. Nevertheless, even cynical hounds have to decide what to eat.

The final sentences of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma read:

But imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few remarkable things: What it is we’re eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost. We could then talk about some other things at dinner. For we would no longer need any reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we’re eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world.

At the instant of this writing Mr. Henry is snarfing down blue corn tortilla chips.

Although organic and without trans fats, these are surely more the product of industry than of nature. Reflecting upon his personal feeding habits, he tries not to despair, for he has not forgotten that despair is one of the seven deadly sins, right up there alongside gluttony.

Should we structure our eating around belief systems? Don’t we do that already even if we pretend we don’t? Isn’t what we call culture or tradition in fact a set of rather arbitrary beliefs, many ungrounded in logic or science?

Cuisine marks culture more distinctly than any other lifestyle choice. It’s the most conservative cultural trait. (Japanese-American families keep umeboshi in the fridge no matter what fashions they wear, music they listen to, or ideologies they favor.)

Organic is good. Local is better. Taste should be your guide. The perfect, most harmonious marriage of these virtues, however, is sustainability.

Eating from a farm like Polyface that achieves a balance of beast and field, of nature and nurture, in which each creature and each plant achieves its full biological potential, is the holy grail of sustainability. The land improves, our health improves, the beasts live happy lives (right up to their moment of demise), and the energy to run the place comes almost completely from the sun.

Prince Charles started talking about these issues years ago. Although in the Diana legend Charles has been cast down as the frosty fogey, the emotional retard, it may come to pass in the long judgement of history that Princess Diana’s media successes will wane and Charles’ push for sustainable development will rise.

Now that he has converted, Mr. Henry feels obligated to pursue the virtuous life. As soon as he finishes this marvelous bag of chips, he will begin casting about for information regarding local farms in the New York City area. (Query to the faithful: Must the convert lead an impeccable existence, or merely a good one? Temptation is everywhere. Sustainable farm products are scarce.)

Like The Manolo, Mr. Henry has been traveling, holed up in a Cape Cod rental bungalo without internet access.

He tried to eat locavore. He made a real mental effort. But as a citizen of the world he believes no neighborhood is truly so far removed from his acquaintance that he cannot partake of its proudest fare. And where, he asks, is the local food exit off Interstate-95?

In the spirit of a summer share, therefore, he would like to offer a few travel tips:

On the highway, don’t drink the iced coffee at Starbuck’s. It’s a guaranteed stomach cramp. Try Newman’s Own Organic at MacDonald’s instead. It’s delicious, neither watery nor burned, and costs half as much as the Starbuck’s one.

As for eating roadside fast food, just don’t. Pack a picnic you can enjoy at the rest stop. Pretend the sound of roaring cars to be Niagara Falls. (Mrs. Henry added a dollop of sour cream to her chicken salad which rounded out the mouth feel and slightly disguised the mayonnaise — altogether a nice picnic choice.)

Don’t go to Cape Cod for codfish, which in every case will be an anodyne, frozen, white fish filet caught months ago far, far away — the very same filet you might get in Peoria or Topeka.

Don’t eat oysters on the half shell in Wellfleet. They are OK, but the clams are far sweeter, especially the littlenecks.

If stuck shopping at the local superette, a quick and easy barbecue sauce can be made from three parts ketchup and one part worcestershire sauce. Slather it on AFTER the ribs come off the grill. (Please don’t even pretend you’re going to do a dry rub marinade. Be reasonable. It’s summer. In the morning, dinner always seems to be a long way away.)

Boil your corn until underdone, a mere seven or eight minutes. Let it cool and slice it off the cob. Mixed with chopped tomato, celery and cilantro (or whatever pungent fresh herb you can find). Splash it with oil and vinegar and you will have a marvelous crunchy salad on hand for snacks or for meals.

For the best possible dinner, take Little Henry and posse out to the marshes. Let them loose in the shallows with buckets to dig fresh cherrystone clams, littleneck clams, razor clams, and mussels. (Rubber gloves are a good idea because clam shell edges can be sharp.)

Sautéed in a big fry pan with onion and white wine, each variety will cook at a different rate. Pluck them out when they open so as not to render them rubbery. Reduce your sauce a touch and add a dab of thickener to help it grab hold of the pasta. (Mr. Henry likes heavy cream but sour cream works fine, too.) Serve over linguine with a chilled bottle of Sancerre close at hand.

Reports of the budding locavore movement got Mr. Henry thinking. What if ALL forms of sustenance were to become local? What if right-thinking persons such as Mr. Henry were forced by farsighted, busybody children not only to favor local growers but to go local in every other pursuit?

Mind you, Mr. Henry is all for reducing his carbon footprint, as well as for reducing his monthly expenditures and daily caloric intake. He is strictly conservative in these important domains. However, why should he exclude all foods and libations apart from sustainable ones grown within a 150-mile radius of New York City?

This sort of artificial food radius is all perfectly fine if you find yourself residing in central California surrounded by the premier fruit and vegetable fields in America. But what about the rest of us? What if Mr. Henry were forced to drink New York wine and (shudder) bourbon whiskey? (Yes, sour mash like Maker’s Mark will do if caught in a Montana rainstorm, but honestly, can you fathom an American gin?)

This month Mr. Henry has elected to pursue twin ideals: he will be not only a locavore but also a localector. He will read exclusively novels written about New York.

Cathleen Schine’s new novel The New Yorkers is an irresistible tossed salad of quirky, crunchy, local characters. Deliciously unexpected characterizations pop up mid-sentence the way an heirloom tomato surprises you with flavors of mint, citrus or papaya. Try some today.

What accounts for Mr. Henry’s personal sense of style?

Without question, appearances matter. On this he agrees with Oscar Wilde (or was it Racine? or The Manolo??) who said that only shallow people believe fashion to be unimportant.

Those who know him by sight agree he does not conform to the dictates of common custom. More than once while wearing socks with sandals he has been accosted in the streets of New York by Nordic tourists in the mistaken belief that he was one of their own.

On the question of Mr. Henry’s personal style, between Little Henry and Stinky there is a marked difference of opinion. Little Henry maintains that Mr. H. resembles Arwin the janitor from Disney’s The Suite Life of Zack and Cody. Stinky strongly disagrees, arguing that Mr. Henry resembles more closely Mr. Bean.

“But you’re not as ugly as Mr. Bean,” Stinky added sympathetically.

When arranging his morning accouterments, however, Mr. Henry’s mental self-image seldom strays toward fresh faces from among the popular pantheon. He imagines instead a revolving array of legendary bad boys – Harry Flashman, James Bond, Rowdy Yates – icons that have stood the test of time.

Like the imaginary antecedent of “it” in phrases such as “it’s a nice day,” Mr. Henry’s looking-glass reflects not only what is there but what is not. It compensates by adding an imaginary compliment. It imagines his hairline to be closer to his eyebrows than true measurement might find, though lately the eyebrows of their own accord have been striving to bridge that sad gap.

Mr. Henry imagines, as well, that he does not live in a grasping military-industrial empire or a burgeoning police state. Thus, he wakes each day to a glorious egalitarian democracy of free expression and social harmony.

And so it is with personal style. Sometimes the referent is imaginary. For clothing he strives to dress in harmony with the seasons and with attention to practicality. He likes a well-fitting suit, preferably one cut from super-100 worsted wool. But normally he finds his closet offers few solutions more comfortable and forgiving, more soothing to the temperament, more freeing to the imagination than a Patagonia shirt and J. Crew chino. In this everyman disguise he glides unnoticed past average citizens who do not suspect his secret life as an arbiter of taste and fine things.

Recently, spying him dressed in small round eyeglasses and wide round sun-hat, his dog-run friend Mary compared him to Mr. McGoo, a mainstay of his youth but a rare figure on today’s dramatic stage. Sometimes the imaginary referent gets a little misplaced.

Since Mr. Henry’s principal concern is in food as an expression of personality, as clan sign and in-group marker, he seeks expressions in food that others seek in fashion. He notes the most common examples of this, notably the great cry of “yeah!” from the studio audience whenever Emeril says, “and now we gonna add some gaaaaahlic.”

Indeed, food has become fashion. Food is to this decade what fashion was to the last – a popular obsession that is at the same time a genuinely exciting genre of high craft. While this obsession may not last, for the moment throughout the U.S. there is a full-blown, accelerating hunger craze for fine cuisine, a gustatory tulip-mania.

Like all popular movements, this one has born lots of nonsense, e.g., Emeril Lagase and Sandra Lee. Nevertheless – and now Mr. Henry betrays delirious optimism – everyone is not a boob. Here and there good recipes get made, new pairings shack up. Life goes on, except, of course, for those life forms we eat.

Before consuming a beautiful roast loin of pork encrusted with a Mario Batali dry rub (a pulverized mixture of dried porcini, red chili flakes, garlic, and brown sugar), Gail and Jeff plied Mr. Henry with a small shot of syrupy Hendricks gin straight from the freezer.

Mr. Henry has converted. Can there be a summer libation more apropos than this? The juniper is balanced by citrus peel and, surprisingly, coriander. It was the consummate aperitif. Afterwards, sitting in front of his TV, visions of the perfect martini swirled in Mr. Henry’s brain as he watched The Tudors chew the scenery.

Toddson Says:
May 22nd, 2007 at 3:55 pm e

Actually, it IS possible to ruin tiramisu following this recipe. An article in The Washington Post several years ago was written by someone who came from someplace (alas, I forget which) where “ladyfingers” refers to okra. As a result, she sliced okra, soaked it in coffee, and proceeded from there. It was not a pretty sight and, seemingly, tasted worse than it looked.

Ladyfingers in the tiramisu! What a hoot! The South is SO worthwhile. Mr. Henry’s dear friend Trudy, bound in the shallows and miseries of Washington, DC, reported lately that one of her friends there promised to keep her “abreasted” of new developments, and this surely is one.

As it happens, okra is one of Mr. Henry’s secret lunchtime quick-fix foods. He places them in a bowl, rinses them, covers them with a dish, and nukes those fuzzy ladyfingers for two minutes. That’s it. Total preparation time: two minutes and change. Don’t eat the gnarly lil’ stems, by the way. (Mr. Henry is fearful that his reading audience might abandon all common sense in slavish devotion to his recipes.) The rest of the okra is a crunchy and gelatinous treat, a toothsome combination of green vegetable and nutty seeds.

‘

Emboldened by freely wandering the antique byways of Rome, Little Henry’s friend Stinky launched an accusation that Mr. Henry will not permit to stand uncontested in this or any other forum:

“Mr. Henry talks a lot about cooking but never does any!”

Ha! Only weeks ago Mr. Henry prepared a tiramisu at home that even the skeptical Stinky admitted was a bona fide, authentic, and glorious tiramisu.

It wasn’t exactly cooking, mind you, because no heat was applied. But it greatly impressed the crowd. Here for his gentle reading public so long ignored because he has been re-arranging his life, his office, and his books, Mr. Henry offers up a recipe of sorts, or rather recipe guidelines, for la vera tiramisu di Signor Henry.

Don’t worry. The thing is failproof. You can fudge any proportion and it turns out just fine.

Mr. Henry’s Tiramisu

6 eggs
1 cup confectioner’s sugar
splash of scotch
1 large tub mascarpone (500g)
5 ounces bittersweet chocolate
1 ounce unsweetened chocolate
1 package ladyfinger cookies (200g)

First brew some coffee quadruple strength (In deference to the children Mr. H. chose decaffeinated.) and let it cool to room temperature or colder. Grate some good chocolate like Scharffenberger, mixing half a bar of bittersweet with a modicum of unsweetened to intensify the flavor. Have close at hand, as well, a bottle of single malt scotch whiskey. (Mr. Henry believes this to be sound advice for any recipe.) For this recipe, Mr. Henry chose The Macallan.

Separate six eggs. Whip the whites until stiff. Cream the yokes together with a cup (or more) of confectioners’ sugar, beating until the color becomes pale. You raw-egg worry-worts at home, please relax. The sugar preserves the egg. In the fridge the concoction will stay perfectly fresh far longer than it will survive repeated servings to you and yours.

Finally to the creamed yokes whip in a splash of scotch, dark rum, or any other spirit appropriate for a coffee, chocolate, and mascarpone confection. This last touch brings a perfume to the dish that separates it from a quotidian custard.

With big gestures and a big rubber spatula, lightly fold in the mascarpone and then the egg whites. Ecco! Mascarpone custard cream. Now you build.

Slice the ladyfingers in half lengthwise if you like. (This is a decision more of style than of taste.) Spread half of them loosely in a deep dish pan. Using a pastry brush soak them – yes, soak them – with coffee. [A Mr. Henry Dictum: Italian desserts must be either soggy or hard as brick.] Cover with a layer of mascarpone custard cream. Then cover the cream thoroughly with half the grated chocolate. Repeat the procedure to create a second story. Chill until set, at least three hours.

Mr. Henry is reminded of an equally false accusation hurled his way by his diminutive and opinionated life-long consort, Mrs. Henry, namely, that whenever he gets an idea for a new dish he feels compelled to purchase a new kitchen utensil. This is falseness itself! Mr. Henry always makes do with whatever is at hand. (A recent purchase of a Le Creuset oval enameled gratin pan was NOT an indulgence. Someday soon she will thank him for it, and mean it sincerely.)

As an example of his resourcefulness, on the morning after returning late from JFK he prepared a fine breakfast of marmalade and crackers borrowed from several of Italy’s nicer hotel breakfast baskets and conveyed trans-Atlantic in Aunt Bev’s backpack. Although there are grocery stores within walking distance of his apartment, Mr. Henry prefers not to conduct his marketing at 3:30 a.m., an hour when he receives stares from street strays and riff-raffy youth.

He prefers the adoring glances he believes he got in Florence from American college students envious of his casual insouciance and his fluency in Italian. He did not actually witness these glances, mind you, being too polite to stare slack-jawed at breathtakingly beautiful young women. Mr. Henry, you see, has faith in the unseen.

From the perspective of maintaining waistline, the true indicator of male fitness, travel is evil. In Florence how could Mr. Henry NOT try the roast hare and wild boar at Il Latini?

How could he forego the fried artichokes and zucchini flowers at Cammillo? Should he have skipped the pizza in Rome? Skipped the quickly roasted chicory and taleggio at Taverna Fiammetta off the Piazza Navona?

Should he NOT have tried each and every gelato flavor at the Gelateria del Teatro on the via dei Coronari? Should Mr. Henry take vows, renounce all worldly pleasure, seek satisfaction only in the hereafter, and sulk alone in his upstairs garret?

Yes. Because Mr. Henry has grown thick, beefy, almost fat. Little Henry has been taking huge delight in chucking his chins and daring him to wriggle into that Speedo over at the JCC pool. Ice cream, previously relegated to the list of foods favored by the morally craven, has become a hideous obsession. He reaches for it even after breakfast. Without turning to spiritual guidance, 12-step programs, or other superstitious behaviors such as ph-balancing or an all-meat diet, is there no way he can regain the true path?

Facing his summer wardrobe, he trembles, not least because Mrs. Henry may not countenance another mad shopping spree at Patagonia. (Mr. Henry imagines himself surfing pipelines on Hawaii’s south coast, afterwards donning slouchy trousers for their insouciant slacker-headed drape rather than for their abundant “relaxed-fit” seat.)

His sense of self, his inner cool, the requisite confidence for continuing his career path, indeed his entire future depends upon regaining that athletic form he had only two short weeks ago, before Italy, before pasta, before caky white breakfasts and crunchy white breads.

On the tenth day of debauchery in Italy, after a shameless pig-out at Il Latini where he quaffed two carafes of vino da tavola and two glasses of complimentary vin santo, Mr. Henry’s liver went into serious crisis. The next morning on his birthday (one he shares with Olivia) he staggered green with bile along the streets of Florence. Mr. Henry’s liver and Mr. Henry’s American Express card, appropriately positioned in his jacket pocket directly over that benighted organ, throbbed in unison. Dinner for five without wine at a fine but not exceptional restaurant, one much less exciting that the average Manhattan eatery, cost three hundred dollars. Porca Miseria!

But before panic takes hold, Mr. Henry must remind himself that his torso swells each year in spring. He is fighting off a Florentine flu, and extra carbs help keep his energy up. Also, markets don’t offer much fresh produce these days. Wherever lies the blame, Mr. Henry must remember that he is not a victim of the seasons. His own mental rigor will overcome the seductions of Italy. He is made of stronger stuff, even if that stuff feels slightly soft around the middle.

Mr. Henry does not leave well enough alone. Even with well-established recipes, he tinkers.

Last month, to provide a colonial-era touch of sourness to cornbread, a Mr. Henry favorite that can easily become too sweet, he bought a quart of buttermilk. Later that week he poured a goodly portion of buttermilk into pancake batter. In both cases results were splendid. Buttermilk in baking always yields extra fluffiness. Indeed, when using buttermilk, because of its acidity you may decrease your baking powder.

But ultra-pasteurized buttermilk just lasts and lasts. Not wishing to simply throw away perfectly good buttermilk but eager to free up refrigerator space, from time to time he spirited a dollop of the antique sour and creamy liquid – a poor people’s leftover from the preparation of heavenly butter – into other menu items not born with buttermilk in mind.

To grated celery root remoulade made with an entire bunch of chopped dill he decided that a healthy splash of buttermilk might add an appropriate hint of creaminess without overpowering what in essence remains a light, crunchy, winter salad.

Without permission from Little Henry, master of the vinaigrette, he added a dollop there, too, a bright foil to an acidic Italian red wine vinegar. Flush with success, the next night he let the buttermilk dominate the salad dressing, masked slightly by a final addition of grated parmesan to the finished salad, and no one complained.

Tonight he plans a bolder stroke. Because chicken is such a boring bird, Mr. Henry invariably marinates it before cooking. What will happen to chicken steeped for hours in buttermilk? Mr. Henry recalls southern fried chicken from his youth that carried magical aromas possibly attributable to buttermilk, though tonight he will add curry to the marinade and bake it tandoori-style. And with chicken, without question he will make buttermilk biscuits.

Mr. Henry is thankful for the recurrence in New York of a first-class winter storm. Cold weather grants him special sanction to eat with wild abandon. Rules, after all, are meant to be broken.