No Goats Here, Yet: Herdt's Manifesto

A funny thing happened in my living room the other day. If you want a mental picture of where this happened, scroll or click or whatever over to the piece I did about hot sex kittens on campus; there’s a pic of my living room there. All set? Your mind at ease? Ok.
I deal in out of print and rare cookbooks, and in my living room are several bookcases filled with these things. You may ask, “Edith, have you actually read or cooked out of any of these things?” and to that I can honestly say, “Yes.” I have in fact read a significant majority of these books, and cooked out of a small fraction of them. (I cook, but more than I cook, I read.)
It came to my attention a few weeks back, when we acquired some new furniture, that the cookbooks had gotten miserably out of order. This happens, and you can’t get all a’twitter about it, but it’s really not good. So I spent two days reorganizing the books, making them alphabetical by author, like a good girl. In the process, of course, I laid hands on titles that I’d forgotten about entirely – things that I’d bought with the intention of not only selling later, but reading somewhere in the time that I owned them. One of these titles was a book I got from the estate of a very cranky Manhattanite – a woman who lived her life entirely in very small apartments. The book is called Nitty Gritty Foodbook and it’s by a woman named Sheryl Patterson Herdt.
Herdt’s book was published in 1975 by Praeger (a perfectly normal publisher; I don’t think there’s anything Ten Speed Press circa Early Moosewood about Praeger) and it looks like your typical hippie manifesto. I remember acquiring this book and thinking it looked idiosyncratic and interesting; I remember also assuming that the vast majority of the recipes wouldn’t really be of any interest. (I mean, how many recipes for granola and health shakes does one need?) Somehow, I was moved to take the book off the shelf, sit down on my couch, and read this book.
To my surprise, Nitty Gritty Foodbook is not quite what I thought it was, and I found it completely fascinating. It’s a hippie cookbook, sure, but it’s a lot more than that. It’s the kind of book that could be published today, and, in fact, someone should look into reprinting it. For one thing, the recipes scan as almost entirely up-to-date – all kinds of things in here are actually sort of normal or perhaps, in some circles, fashionable, now; Herdt talks a great deal about goat cheese, for example.
But the book is really about homesteading. It’s about living a back-to-the-earth kind of life. Herdt is talking about living in a way that people write about now. She did it in the era of the Nearings’ books, but slightly differently. Reading this book, I was reminded of the book Maryjane Butters published a couple years back – she talks about how to do everything on your own. You know: you can sew your own clothes, you can build your own toys, you can make your own cheese, you can live a healthy, happy, down-to-earth, in touch with godknowswhatall kind of life. Basically, Herdt wrote Butters’ book, in 1975, minus the aprons. There’s nothing in here about sewing aprons. (I’ve just gone to the Maryjane’s Farm website. She seems to be really big on aprons.)
These ladies, Herdt and Butters, share one thing which I think is really significant: these people are (it almost should go without saying) not Easterners. Butters maintains her farm in Idaho, and Herdt’s farm was in Nebraska (and she speaks of having lived in Colorado for many years). I realize that Nebraska is not strictly speaking “the West” but if you’re living in Connecticut, as I am, then Nebraska is the West. I mean, we’re speaking relatively here. I somehow read Herdt’s entire book and came away from it convinced she was living in Idaho or Oregon, I guess because it just sort of sounds like it, but again – relatively speaking – I wasn’t far off.
It’s not that people back East don’t have feelings like this, or aren’t inspired to live groovily off the land. Some of them do. Yet somehow, they lack the sort of evangelical drive that inspires them to write book pontificating on the subject. (Instead, we write snappy little longwinded essays talking about how other people write evangelically about the joy of making one’s own jam. It seems crazy to me, given the array of Smucker’s at the local store, but then, I’m not a big jam eater.)
Herdt urges even city dwellers to adopt some of her style and technique. She points out that even apartment dwellers can grow herbs on a windowsill (how often I’ve heard this! And how seldom I’ve actually seen anyone do it!). She states that one can provide one’s family with all the food and joy they really need on one acre. “Everything mentioned in Nitty Gritty Foodbook can be done on a one-acre plot, from vegetables and fruit to small livestock.”
That may be true in Nebraska, or Idaho, but I just can’t see it in Connecticut. Not where I live.
And certainly the Manhattan lady from whom I got this book did not do any gardening in her one bedroom Chelsea apartment. She also kept no livestock.
Still: Herdt’s book warrants real examination by the fans of Maryjane, and even Martha Stewart. Much of what she writes is really sane and reasonable. (You don’t have to eat crap, for example.) Some of the recipes in here just made my head spin with “has anyone been talking about this?” – like the recipe for fruit leather. Now, I hate fruit leather as I’ve experienced it, those sort of Saran Wrap-y looking things you see in the supermarket. But Herdt has a recipe for fruit leather that seemed eminently reasonable and even sort of appealing to me – and she then made a really fucking aweome point, which is that once you’ve made your homemade fruit leather, you can use it to make fruit pastries, just like you’d make cinnamon buns: you roll out your pastry or biscuit dough like normal, but instead of putting your cinnamon sugar mix on the dough, you lay your nice, rectangular fruit leather on it, and roll it up.
This is genius. I mean, I could definitely get into that. Spreading jam on dough is messy; and what if you only have a tablespoon of the seedless raspberry left, anyhow, because you never buy jam cause you don’t really like it… I mean, do people stockpile jam? I don’t. (I stockpile pasta and canned tomatoes.) But I can imagine stockpiling these homemade fruit leathers, and using them to make sweet rolls. Good for you, Ms. Herdt.
Herdt also urges everyone to keep a goat or two or three – she claims that her family drinks goat’s milk all the time, that they make their own goat cheese, and that goat meat is delightful. (I cannot see the average American family glomming onto this. Sorry; we trendies love goat cheese, but I tried to drink goat’s milk once and nearly choked on it.) I actually know a family in Vermont that keeps goats and while I don’t believe they eat the goats – I think they’re vegetarians – they certainly do consume a lot of goat product. But here’s the thing: everyone I know thinks they’re kind of nuts, and I tend to agree with them.
Herdt’s book contains recipes for things that you would never find even mentioned in most hippie cookbooks of the day: French dressing? Rabbit? (Herdt kept rabbits expressly for use as meat.) She has recipes for wine – very cool – and something she calls Mrs. Sheth’s Ginger Tea, which we would all recognize as chai; I find it amazingly cool that I found a recipe for chai in the most unexpected place. (Did Moosewood talk about chai in the ‘70s? I don’t think so.) She talks about making your own buttermilk, sour cream, and cottage cheese – very relevant subjects now, I believe, with the increasing availability of organic milks but less opportunity to get other organic dairy products (or even just ones that don’t taste like plastic (the only brand I like now is Cabot, which can be distressingly hard to find). Herdt has an amazing and wonderful chapter about baby food which I swear could be reprinted in Cookie magazine or wherever such articles get published now; she believes that there’s no good reason to feed your baby weird jarred stuff with added starches and things when you can just mash up some of whatever fruit is on the kitchen table, or whatever’s on your own lunch plate. This is just reasonable and sane, folks. I know I keep using the word reasonable, but I can’t help it. It’s just the most apt word here. Herdt just knocked my socks off, over and over again.
I thought Nitty Gritty Foodbook was absolutely wonderful. I can’t say that I plan to adopt all its recommendations any time ever but I do plan to try Herdt’s mead recipe (we have some friends who like mead, and there’s a guy who lives down the street from us who manufactures very high quality honey –- local product, my friends, here in New Haven: honey! – so I might as well try my hand at mead). I also plan to recommend her book to anyone who will listen, which includes you, dear reader.
I have not read Maryjane Butters’ book, but I intend to. I expect that I will find it sad and tasteless compared to Sheryll Herdt’s good-humored, nicely-written, and encouraging semi-precious jewel.