Su Libro

people, place, and spirit

Writers look at how we live here, from the food we eat to the houses we build and the communities we occupy.

By Charles C. Poling This article first appeared in Autumn 2008 Su Casa

Renewing America’s Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent’s Most Endangered Foods, edited by Gary Paul Nabhan, foreword by Deborah Madison, Chelsea Green Publishing, paperback, $35.

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Like Jack Loeffler’s Survival Along the Continental Divide, excerpted in this issue, Renewing America’s Food Traditions offers further evidence of the widening and deepening of American thought regarding environmentalism and culture. Author Gary Paul Nabhan founded the Renewing America’s Food Traditions collaborative with seven partner groups that shared the goals of conserving “heirloom” foods, including foraged plants and wild game, and protecting “traditional hunting, fishing, farming, and gathering grounds.” Hand in hand with this conservation comes cultural stewardship, with the aim of preserving the diversity of lifeways among people. When people live closely connected to the land, the reasoning goes, they’ll take good care of it. Such integral thinking—environmentalism meets cultural preservation—fosters “biocultural” or “eater-based” conservation strategies that link the continuum of farms, wildlands, and waterways to our dinner tables.

Lest all this sound dryly academic, fear not. Renewing America’s Food Traditions tells lively stories about grapes, acorns, chiles, corn, bison meat, beans, shrimp, duck, and on and on. The book also offers easy-to-follow recipes for cooking them and lovely photos of it all, from habitat to table. After a brief foreword by Deborah Madison—a well-known food author herself who now lives near Santa Fe and champions local food and farmers’ markets—the book moves from the background and philosophical underpinnings of this movement into a selection of heirloom foods from each of 13 “gastroeconomic regions.” Nabhan describes these “food nations” as “ecocultural regions named for an iconic food.” Hence we have, for instance, Acorn Nation along the California coast, Bison Nation spanning the Great Plains, Chestnut Nation in southern Appalachia, and our very own Chile Pepper Nation. In each region, Nabhan (and his cadre of able contributors) takes a handful of representative foods, talks about their origins, history, and traditional uses, then gives a recipe or two for preparing them.

Of the foods, Nabhan notes that “it is a rather bizarre menagerie of swimmers and fliers, of rooters, roosters, and climbers, that has filled American bellies and minds over the centuries and millennia. . . . Collectively, they tell America’s story.”

Let’s take the example closest to our hearts, the El Guique New Mexican chile pepper, a “living link to 400 years of New Mexico history,” according to Eric Votava of New Mexico State University, quoted by Nabhan. This heirloom chile, “so strongly associated with Pete [Casados] and his wife Juanita that it is sometimes called the ‘Casados Native’ chile as well,” remains one of the few New Mexico chiles uncontaminated by hybrids. It’s great green or red, but good luck passing up the accompanying recipe for carne adovada, that ultimate celebration of chile colorado.

Downriver from the Casados’ Española Valley farm, the pueblo people have cultivated Santa Domingo casaba melons since at least 1598, when this melon is known to have arrived from Mexico. But the melon had gotten around, having originated in Turkey thousands of years ago. So the transmission of seeds parallels the spreading and mixing of cultures, reminding us that while local food traditions are a key to preserving indigenous culture, all human societies have borrowed from one another from time immemorial.

Filled with this kind of lore, the scope of Renewing America’s Food Traditions widens from its ostensible topic to become a paean to place, a point Nabhan makes explicit: “Our sense of place is determined as much by the food we see and taste as we walk the streets or drive the backroads of our home ground as it is by our postal address.” While that theme winds its way through the book, making it a pleasant coffee table tome, the feel-good tone belies an urgency underneath. It surfaces at various places, such as the section on the passenger pigeon. Once astonishingly prolific, it was hunted to extinction in the 1800s, a fate that nearly overcame the bison, too. So what if we lose an heirloom melon or rare variety of corn? For Nabhan, these foods mark the sustainability of our culture. Seen from the biocultural viewpoint, assuring the diversity of our foods helps preserve our world. Nabhan admits the book stretches between the poles of celebration and sorrow: celebration of the diversity and connection that remain, sorrow for what’s going fast or gone already. Yet the overall message here remains upbeat, enthused, empowered.

Beside the Rio Hondo: A Memoir of Rural New Mexico, by Phaedra Greenwood, Sunstone Press, softcover, $22.95.

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New Mexico literature, particularly the memoirs of transplanted Anglos, abounds with stories about people starting new lives here based on their quest for personal awakening and self-actualization. Ironically, the myth of rebirth in this not-quite-American physical and cultural landscape fits into the overall American myth of rebirth in a new land, of the “American Adam” and all that. So New Mexico’s belief in its own exceptionalism can be seen as exceptionally American at root.

None of which detracts from enjoying Phaedra Greenwood’s memoir of a year living in Arroyo Hondo north of Taos. Writing from a temporal distance that smoothes out the narrative pretzeling that twists most of our lives into barely disguised chaos, Greenwood sums up the book in her preface: “Beside the Rio Hondo is a work of creative non-fiction that follows the seasons for one pivotal year of my life. In 1992, at the age of 49, I separated from my husband and made a beeline for our family home in Arroyo Hondo, a quiet valley in the mountains of Northern New Mexico. Embraced by the emptiness of my nest, I returned to an unfinished task that I had shunned at the age of eighteen: to establish an independent identity.” In the old adobe near the river, she “slowed down long enough to experience an epiphany.”

The path to that epiphany was paved with incidents, accidents, and encounters with neighbors, newspaper publishers, animals both domestic and wild, children and once and former husbands, weather, and black widow spiders. A typical year in northern New Mexico, right? But Greenwood has a houseful of karma to clear, and she’s exceptionally forthcoming about the life patterns she seeks to undo as she becomes her best idea of herself.

Challenges confront Greenwood immediately: getting the house squared away after years of renting it to others, finding work, winning the confidence of her neighbors (most of whom have deep ancestral roots in the valley), overcoming her sense of isolation and loneliness, grappling with the internal and external obstacles to being a writer, and finding a way to buy out her estranged husband’s controlling interest in the property so she can remain indefinitely. Along the way, Greenwood recalls the events that mark the days and seasons of rural New Mexico life and that often elevate to ritual: cleaning the acequias for irrigating, mud-plastering the old church, inner tubing on the Rio Grande, chopping firewood, hunting elk, celebrating Christmas Eve on Taos Pueblo. She digresses beyond 1992 to explore seminal events in her earlier life, taking that crucial step memoirists—the brave ones—must take to turn themselves into a character in their own story. By investing her with three dimensions, the backstory explains how the Phaedra Greenwood of 1992 came to this pivotal spot. She has always been questing, chafing under the bonds of convention and mainstream expectation.

Finding work proves a tough challenge. Earning the respect of her (male) neighbors, though challenging, comes easier as Greenwood pitches in with shovel and plastering trowel, proving her toughness and competence. But settling her ownership to the property seems nearly beyond hope as the year—and the story—draws to a close. At an apparent impasse with her husband, the home she’s spent the last year reclaiming seemingly slipping away, Greenwood settles into a philosophical sense of self-acceptance. At the low point, thinking the home is lost, she realizes she has become a “woman who stands by herself,” a characterization invigorated by its double meaning. Somehow, we infer, this little adobe by the Rio Hondo sparked this epiphany. Maybe it’s the high-altitude light, or the provocative tricultural mix, or the isolation from parking lots and shopping malls, or maybe it’s the place itself.

Kitchens: A Sunset Design Guide, by Karen Templer and the editors of Sunset Books, Sunset Books, paperback, $22.95.

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This new title from Sunset’s design guide series brings together advice from a panel of experts (architects, interior designers, a cabinetmaker, a builder), hundreds of juicy photographs, and an interactive DVD that lets you create 3-D plans of your own designs.

Kitchen design sometimes feels like a Rubik’s cube as you shuffle around the required elements to meet your needs within a finite space: only so many places accommodate the sink or the oven, and each element must sit in a useful relationship to the others, according to function and traffic flow. Layered on top of these criteria, aesthetics add another dimension to the decision-making process, a dimension that seems to shade into an infinity of choice.

The best way to sort it out just might be leafing through the pages of Kitchens: A Sunset Design Guide. The panel of designers and builders sport publication credentials from magazines like Sunset (of course), Cottage Living, Dwell, House Beautiful, Veranda . . . so if you’re guessing there’s not much Southwestern or Santa Fe style, you’re right. But at Su Casa when we annually begin preparing our Summer kitchens issue, we often find ourselves wandering into a conversation about just exactly what defines a Southwestern, Santa Fe, or authentically New Mexican kitchen. The fact is, historic adobe homes here had humble, utilitarian, even crude origins. No one really wants a shepherd’s fireplace above the stove and an outside horno for baking bread. Sure, they look good, but ¡híjole! man, get real. Thus we often find kitchens that pull from other regional or even generic aesthetic conditions for cabinetry design, surfaces, flooring, and the like, though a regional flourish like saltillo tile flooring, a Talavera tile backsplash, and of course a viga ceiling provide an interesting counterpoint.

Chapters in Kitchens cover cabinetry, counters and backsplashes, sinks and faucets, appliances, flooring, storage and display, finishing touches, and the crucial “getting it done.” General principles and a sorting through of choices forms the backbone of the chapters, while case studies of particular kitchens by the design panel flesh out the ideas. The case studies include a list of elements and materials. Q&A interviews with these designers are interspersed through the book to take you more deeply into their thinking. Here and there, a nod to green building steers you toward sustainable options, but it’s not a focus of the book.

Whoever assembled the photographs for Kitchens did a ton of homework: the images are comprehensive, well-chosen, and of uniformly high quality. In many cases, multiple views of one kitchen are provided, giving you an overall sense of the room.

In many such design books, the photos are the real raison d’être for the publication. Here, the thoughtful, wide-ranging text by Karen Templer and the editors at Sunset stands on its own merits. Whether you’re building a new home, renovating an older kitchen, or just looking for a few high-power updates to your existing kitchen, Kitchens: A Sunset Design Guide will help you solve your kitchen puzzle. A companion book, Bathrooms: A Sunset Design Guide, offers a similar treatment for the loo.