Excerpts

My kitchen: an introduction Today, having your child choose a career in farming has become almost prestigious, as America's interest in food has reached new heights. But I assure you that back in 1993, when I graduated high school, no one in Palo Alto, California, was dreaming their daughter would grow up to run a meat company. My parents had been charmed by my entrepreneurial spunk when I started a cookie business as a teen and were happy that I was able to cook for them from a fairly young age, but when I announced my plans they were worried about what exactly I would end up doing .  My parents are academics and school is pretty important to them. I went to college mostly to make them happy, but even then I knew my career was going to have a culinary bent. I got a fellowship straight out of college that provided me with the funds to spend a year working in cheese dairies in very rural parts of southern Europe and northern Africa. To get around on the cheap, I bought a folding bicycle and figured out how to use the train system. My budget for the whole year of travel was $25,000: $20,000 from the fellowship and a $5,000 check my grandfather gave me as my college graduation present. The fellowship was for recent college graduates to "expand their horizons" in a field where there was no linear path to further their expertise, and artisan cheese making certainly checked that box. Most days I woke at the crack of dawn and cycled down some bumpy road to visit a dairy, trying to get there when the milk was still warm. I visited the United Kingdom, Switzerland, France, Greece, Tunisia, and Italy, stopping in at farms and dairies all along the way. I learned a lot about self-reliance in that year, even spent a night in a county jail in Greece (long story), but above all I learned to eat.  Every time I visited a dairy and spent a few hours hanging around the aging room with one of these rural masters, they would invariably invite me to join them for the main meal of the day, lunch. We would eat for a few hours and talk further, and I would see a meal unfold in traditional fashion: bread set right on the table, salt pinched out of a bowl (and it was different than the salt I was used to), butter spread thickly, and eggs or a big piece of fresh cheese drenched in oil as a main course.  When I think back, a lot of the food I cook today came directly from what I learned from watching farmers eat simple food in their own homes. For example, I saw an animal being killed for the first time--a pig, in a courtyard, with a knife--and learned to make blood sausage and chicharróns that very same day.  I started that year of cheese making as a wannabe gourmet and ended it as a nascent farmer. I'd spent a year talking my way into dozens of dairies in languages I did not really speak and had developed a taste for travel and exploration. I was not ready to move back to the United States.  I had met a fairly well-organized research group--the Consorzio Ricerca Filiera Lattiero-Casearia (CoRFiLaC)--while I was visiting Sicily during my year of cheese making, and I was able to secure a work visa and a job offer from them. Shortly after, I moved to Ragusa, a town in southeastern Sicily, and began two years of work with a team that I affectionately nicknamed the Cheese Mob. At the time, the group was primarily responsible for managing denomination of origin labeling for cheese (these are the DOP or AOC labels you see on many quality European products), an authority that was taken from them in later years thanks to shady dealings.  When I worked there, the Cheese Mob was flush with EU cash, primarily earmarked for projects intended to stimulate the regional food economy in this underdeveloped region of Sicily. I led a business development program, and my work consisted of writing a few financial and marketing plans, attempting to implement them, organizing an export program, and eating a lot of epic dinners. In retrospect, the EU contracts must have stipulated that they hire someone who was not from Sicily, as I was definitely woefully underqualified for the job and can think of little reason that I would have landed it otherwise. But I remember feeling that I was in the right place when my first week of work landed me in a Sicilian village that was hosting a competition that involved rolling giant wheels of sheep's milk cheese down the mountainside in a sort of race (they boarded the windows and doors of the homes along the route--those cheeses moved fast).  As time went on, my work environment became increasingly operatic, with tears (regularly) and knives (occasionally) appearing during staff meetings, and my boss making the regular accusation that one or another of his core team were "betrayers." It was colorful and frankly pretty stressful for twenty-three-year-old me, but the life I was living made it worth it. I spent the weekends in the countryside, evenings in the piazza, ate granita with brioche for breakfast, and became fluent in Italian. I joined the town's marching band and played my oboe at all of the processions that marched through our town and the neighboring villages. The band's favorite piece to play while marching behind the swaying statue of the Virgin was the theme from The Godfather , which has an awesome oboe solo. I had fun. One thing that really struck me was how the middle-class families in Ragusa were excited about eating at the new McDonald's in town. It was a status symbol to eat at this "see and be seen" place, since most of the cheese makers I worked with fed their families from their own small farms and by foraging in the surrounding forests. A meal at McDonald's meant your family had money to burn. Unlike in America, in Sicily, the poorer you were, the more likely you were to be eating organic, artisan-made foods. It was topsy-turvy: poor people had gardens, rich people were proud not to have gardens, and it was completely opposite to the emerging food scene in the States. Seeing that firsthand ignited a passion in me for social change around food, a passion that really came to life when I moved back home to California a few years later. In Sicily, I learned how to find wild asparagus, how to crack open sea urchins, how to skin a warm pork belly fresh off the carcass. Depending on the season, poorer families in Ragusa would bake ricotta in the wood-fired oven to make it last through the winter or fill hundreds of empty beer bottles with fresh tomato pulp. For my friends there, these were skills they just grew up possessing and were eager to leave behind (so they could go eat at McDonald's). For me, a kid raised in the suburbs with easy access to a grocery store, this type of year-round "meal planning" was eye-opening. I had made jam with my mom before, but actually needing to put up a significant amount of food every month, all of it varying with the season, was a different level. There was also an ease of execution and a spontaneity that was impressive, something I later learned the Sicilians are famous for. I'd be chatting with my coworkers by the espresso machine close to lunchtime and someone would mention wanting to eat urchin now that the days were getting colder. Within a few minutes we'd have formed a plan, and within an hour, five of us would be in a little Zodiac boat with diving knives strapped to our legs, while one remained on shore to boil a big pot of water for the spaghetti and peel some garlic. Within the same hour, lunch was served on the rocks: spaghetti ai ricci . The Sicilians had a similar carefree attitude toward preserving the harvest. Faced with a glut of tomatoes or artichokes, they'd transform it, with little fanfare or planning, into something they'd eat all year-round. They all seemed to have a reserve of techniques that allowed them to quickly and spontaneously turn any abundant harvest into preserved food, something that deeply impressed and inspired me.  Some of my discoveries in Sicily were simple--like using a lot more fat than I was used to in cooking--or cooking only vegetables that were in season. But the true secret, if there was one, was preparing food using homemade or hyperlocal base ingredients, as most of the families I ate with did, from the fresh cheese in the lasagna to the home-dried herbs they mixed with salt and rubbed into meat.  After two years in Sicily, I moved to Piedmont to work at the headquarters of Slow Food International. The dysfunctional politics in Sicily had gotten to be a bit too much, and while I was not yet ready to leave Italy, I wanted a job with a more global impact. Slow Food was just that. It was a magical time for the organization: founded by the charismatic Carlo Petrini a decade earlier, it had just broken through internationally from its base in a small Piedmontese town (Alice Waters, Eric Schlosser, and Corby Kummer were regular faces in the headquarters in those early, heady days). When I joined, there were about forty of us on the payroll, one of whom was my future husband, Renato Sardo, who was the head of Slow Food International at the time. It was an incredible chapter in my life: we fell in love during a time of growth for a movement we both really believed in while living in Renato's hometown, which quickly felt like my hometown, too.  I started at Slow Food working on their English-language magazine and helping organize their international events. About six months into my tenure, Carlo Petrini decided to form the Slow Food Foundation as a means of concretely supporting farmers and food makers. I started working at that foundation directing microloans and investments that helped small-scale food producers around the globe grow production and comply with food safety laws. I think back on this period in my career as an on-the-ground MBA in small food and farm businesses. I worked with a group of women from Bosnia to help export their delicate plum preserves and with air-dried reindeer bresaola makers in Sweden's Sami region to bring their product up to code for EU distribution. Part of the mission of my company, Belcampo, is to "balance traditional food production techniques with economic viability," a philosophy that comes directly from this time in my life, when I saw how small farms were struggling to make ends meet. I saw how challenging it was to make something delicious, with integrity, and make money doing it. After six years of living in Italy, I missed home, and Renato and I, at that time married, decided to return to California.  It was only when we moved back that I realized how much I had changed. I had previously had a flash of how different I had become when I saw my sister's face, aghast at the massive platters of carne cruda and raw pork sausage we served at our wedding on a hot sunny day in Italy, and hadn't really understood why she thought that was weird. But Stateside, the difference became more pronounced. I had left the United States a child of the low-fat 1980s and '90s and returned with a hunger for salami and butter sandwiches, and my cooking style had developed a distinctly old-world sensibility and cadence.  Within six months of moving back to California, I bought a cow. A dead one. I wanted good beef at a reasonable price, and I also wanted braising cuts that I couldn't find at the store. I coordinated the purchase with a few friends but still was blindsided by the total volume of meat. I ended up strapping the freezer in my tiny apartment in Oakland, California, closed with electrical tape and baking dozens of meat loaves out of my mountain of ground beef. I also started buying a whole pig every year to process into salami and cured meats, vacuum-packing a few months' worth of sausages for my freezer. My career continued in a way that, in retrospect, feels linear: I started a produce-distribution business with very small California farms and ran a farm-to-school program, then returned briefly to the Slow Food fold when Alice Waters asked me to orchestrate a massive event in San Francisco--Slow Food Nation--that involved, among other things, planting a half-acre vegetable garden in front of San Francisco's city hall. On the tail of that event's success, I was able to launch my own consulting business doing the type of work I had done for the Slow Food Foundation investees. I developed business plans for a dozen or so clients, including Todd Robinson, a veteran of the financial world who wanted to invest in the sustainable food world. Within months of meeting Todd, we had begun work on an idea that would bring a new scale and ambition to a high-quality artisan food business. We founded Belcampo together in 2011 and I had the opportunity of a lifetime--a chance to work on a bigger venture than anything I had ever tackled before. With Todd's backing and commitment, we started building a vertically integrated supply chain for pasture-raised organic meat. I bought land to build our slaughterhouse near our California farm at the end of 2011, and in 2012 my team was able to build the first multispecies slaughterhouse certified by the USDA in the state in decades. Shortly after, we opened our first butcher shop and restaurant, and since then our team has opened eight more locations. In the meantime, our company took over a property Todd had purchased in Belize, revamping the restaurant, renovating the existing hotel, and planting hundreds of acres of cacao, sugarcane, and other tropical crops. Our growth at Belcampo has been in step with a new interest in sustainable, quality food that is produced with techniques that go beyond organic certification: careful management of pasture and ecosystem, humane animal handling, and artisanal processing techniques. Belcampo has given me many things, but chief among them was the farm that I had longed for since leaving Italy. I go to the farm--near Mount Shasta, close to the Oregon border--as often as I can, where I cook with our team and my friends, and where my toddler daughter loves to join me for all sorts of adventures, including lots of grilling (free access to a lawn with a goat chop in hand is her happy place). Being close to the ingredients we raise and the easy access to a lot of wood and a few big grills inspire me. I also get down to our farm in Belize every three or four months, where we have a huge organic vegetable garden to feed guests at our hotel. Throughout my journey, from cheese maker on a folding bicycle to CEO of a sustainable agriculture company, I've tried to take an old-world approach to food and craftsmanship and make it relevant to modern American life. Belcampo and the nonprofit Food Craft Institute, which I started in Oakland to teach business skills and food safety to new food businesses, are a few of the ways I've tried to share my approach with others. But much of it is more personal--I hope to inspire friends to celebrate traditional recipes and the ritual of breaking bread together by cooking dinners, hosting canning parties, and creating celebrations around food. I am fortunate that my life's work and passion align deeply. Through the recipes in this book, I've tried to capture the core of the food of my life, the food that taught me about the pleasure of cooking, and the food I make now to share that pleasure with others. Enjoy, Anya Fernald From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from Home Cooked: 100 Essential Recipes by Anya Fernald, Jessica Battilana All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.