Copyright October 2003
The
other morning, waking up just after dawn, I had to blink twice. I saw a scene
outside my window that looked like a page from a French picture book. A misty
fog hung over the fields, and, through the early light, I counted 20 of Dad’s
beef cows and calves—every single one of them, since we automatically count
every time we see them—nestled along a swath of the pasture field where Dad had
cut hay the day before. This year has been an especially good one for soft,
moist hay, what with the rain and easy temperatures of this past summer’s
growing season. He had baled most of that field the day before, but had left
that long swath between a pond and the creek when night fell before he could finish.
The
soft hay on the ground was as thick as the beds Dad sometimes makes for the
cows in the barn, and that seemed to be what they had taken it to be. As if not
lying down in it would have been like turning down a present, they posed all
along the length of it down through the field, taking up maybe a quarter of an
acre. They stayed that way all morning, and then through the afternoon, not
grazing as usual but occasionally pulling loose a nibble of the succulent
Timothy or Red Clover. As I would check past the window now and then, they
would be in different locations and in different postures, the younger ones
sometimes lying back playfully like children on a new mattress, but not one of
them ventured off the special hay bed until the tractor and baler arrived in
late afternoon.
The
next day had its own surprises, too. Dad has always said that cows are smarter
than anyone dreams they are, and he has seen them mourn for stillborn calves.
He arrived at the field a couple of hours later than usual because of trouble
with the baler and couldn’t help but chuckle appreciatively. Because of moving
the baler from place to place the day before, he’d left openings in the fences
between the fields. When breakfast was late, a gallant bull had rolled a bale
from the upper field through two openings and through two fields down to the
side of the creek bank. He was just finishing the rolling as Dad arrived to see
the cows gathering around “breakfast in bed.”
As
Dad told me about it, my thoughts drifted back to a day long ago when I was
cooking with my grandmother in this same house, and she’d gone to the window to
see the cows looking like the picture books of her childhood. “Always keep cows
where you can see them out this window,” she had said. At the time I had
thought it was financial advice, but now I could see it was more. She had
taught me a lot about French cooking, though her family was several generations
removed from France, and to this day my favorite French cookbook, La Cuisine de Nicolas, has a chapter
right in the beginning where it talks about the beauty of cows.
The
book I have is in French, though it was originally written in Swedish by
Christina Björk and illustrated by Lena Anderson as LINUS BAKAR OCH LAGAR. It features an actual picture of a champion
Jersey-looking cow named Bella, along with drawing of Nicolas and his friend
Alex visiting a grandmotherly lady named Marthe. The recipes are interspersed
with stories of learning to cook and with a chart of how much milk, butter, and
cheese Bella can produce in a year. The recipes for ice cream and milkshakes
fill a page opposite the directions on just how to make cheese and whipped
cream.
In
these days in the USA, when kids hear the same horrendous warnings against
butter and beef and tea and sugar as they do against hard drugs and, of course,
can’t tell the difference in the warnings, it would do us all good to remember
the European view which our ancestors brought to this country. We should “remember
our roots,” both in heritage and nutrition. Bella, meanwhile, says goodbye to
the chapter in a drawing which resembles “Elsie the Cow,” who is still featured
on the Borden’s label in the USA. The chapter ends with, “Merci pour tout, madame la vache.” As we would say it, “Thanks for
everything, Mrs. Cow.”
No comments:
Post a Comment