Dan Barber - The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food

A corncob, dried and slightly shriveled, arrived in the mail not long after we opened Blue Hill at Stone Barns. Along with the cob was a check for $1,000. The explanation arrived the same day, in an e-mail I received from Glenn Roberts, a rare-seeds collector and supplier of specialty grains. Since Blue Hill is part of the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, a multipurpose farm and education center, Glenn wanted my help persuading the vegetable farmer to plant the corn in the spring. He said the corn was a variety called New England Eight Row Flint.

There is evidence, Glenn told me, that Eight Row Flint corn dates back to the 1600s, when, for a time, it was considered a technical marvel. Not only did it consistently produce eight fat rows of kernels (four or five was the norm back then; modern cobs have eighteen to twenty rows), but it also had been carefully selected by generations of Native Americans for its distinctive flavor. By the late 1700s the corn was widely planted in western New England and the lower Hudson Valley, and later it was found as far as southern Italy. But a brutally cold winter in 1816 wiped out the New England crop. Seed reserves were exhausted to near extinction as most of the stockpiled corn went to feed people and livestock.

The cob Glenn had sent was from a line that had survived for two hundred years in Italy under the name Otto File (eight rows), which he hoped to restore to its place of origin. By planting the seed, he wrote, we would be growing an important and threatened historic flavor of Italy while simultaneously repatriating one of New Englands extinct foodways. Congratulations on your quest, Dan, and thank you for caring. Glenn added, in case I didnt care, that the Eight Row was quite possibly the most flavorful polenta corn on the planet, and absolutely unavailable in the U.S. At harvest he promised another $1,000. He wanted nothing in return, other than a few cobs to save for seed.

If his offer sounds like a home run for Stone Barns, it was. Here was a chance to recapture a regional variety and to honor a Native American crop with historical significance. For me, it was a chance to cook with an ingredient no other restaurant could offer on its menu (catnip for any chef) and to try the superlative polenta for myself.

Yet I carried the corncob over to Jack Algiere, the vegetable farmer, with little enthusiasm. Jack is not a fan of growing corn, and, with only eight acres of field production on the farm, you cant blame him for dismissing a plant that demands so much real estate. Corn is needy in other ways, too. Its gluttonous, requiring, for example, large amounts of nitrogen to grow. From the perspective of a vegetable gardener, its the biological equivalent of a McMansion.

In the early stages of planning Stone Barns Center, I told Jack about a farmer who was harvesting immature corn for our menu. It was a baby cob, just a few inches long, the kernels not yet visible. You ate the whole cob, which brought to mind the canned baby corn one finds in a mediocre vegetable stir-fry. Except these tiny cobs were actually tasty. I wanted to impress Jack with the novelty of the idea. He was not impressed.

You mean your farmer grows the whole stalk and then picks the cobs when theyre still little? he said, his face suddenly scrunched up, as if he were absorbing a blow to the gut. Thats nuts. He bent over and nearly touched the ground with his right hand, then stood up on his toes and, with his left hand, reached up, high above my head, hiking his eyebrows to indicate just how tall a corns stalk grows. Only after all that growth will corn even begin to think about producing the cob. That big, thirsty, jolly green giant of a stalkwhich even when it produces full-size corn has to be among the plant kingdoms most ridiculous uses of Mother Natures energyand what are you getting for all that growth? Youre getting this. He flashed his pinky finger. Thats all youre getting. He rotated his hand so I could see his finger from all angles. One tiny, pretty flavorless bite of corn.

One summer when I was fourteen years old, Blue Hill Farm, my familys farm in Massachusetts, grew only corn. No one can remember why. But it was the strangest summer. I think back to it now with the same sense of bewilderment I felt as a child encountering the sea of gold tassels where the grass had always been.

Before Blue Hill Farm became a corn farm for a summer, I helped make hay for winter storage from one of the eight pasture fields. We began in early August, loading bales onto a conveyor belt and methodically packing them, Lego-like, into the barns stadium-size second floor. By Labor Day the room was filled nearly to bursting, its own kind of landscape.

Making hay meant first cutting the grass, whichfor me, anywaymeant riding shotgun in a very large tractor for hours each day, crouching silently next to one of the farmers and studying the contours of the fields. And so, by way of no special talent, just repetition, I learned to anticipate the dips and curves in the fields, the muddy, washed-out places, the areas of thick shrubbery and thinned grasseswhen to brace for a few minutes of a bumpy ride and when to duck under a protruding branch.

I internalized those bumps and curves the way my grandmother Ann Strauss internalized the bumps and curves of Blue Hill Road by driving it for thirty years. She always seemed to be going to town (to get her hair done) or coming back (from running errands). Sometimes my brother, David, and I were with her, and we used to laugh in the backseat, because Ann (never Grandma, never Grandmother) rounded the corners in her Chevy Impala at incredible speeds, maneuvering with the ease and fluency of a practiced finger moving over braille. Her head was often cranked to the left or to the right, antennae engaged, inspecting a neighbors garden or a renovated screened-in porch. (She sometimes narrated the intrigue happening inside.) During these moments her body took over, autopiloting around corners without having to slow down, swerving slightly to avoid the ditch just beyond Bill Rieglemans home.