Around the end of the horse sprint, there is a general feeling of Please Do Not Look At Me, which I think we all feel. There is a sort of mess all around, and in the mess looms the shame of a certain kind of failure of adhering to the tenets of proper restaurant stewardship, and maybe a lot of us are waiting for a little sneaky quiet to flex our elbows against grime and all that. But it feels A Lot to me. I never meant to, for example, have a Crazy Restaurant. I have mostly worked in places run by folks that believe the world makes sense–at least enough to warrant participating in the order that has been set forth. The thing is, though, the wear and tear and the weather and the nature that gets indoors and the natural disasters and the equipment malfunctions and the general scuffery is altogether mountainous.

If the flowers in the pots that we have employed to afford a little life to the space are doing alright, still they need water and to have their little shriveled petals plucked from time to time, and even still, if all that is under control, the thing is that underneath the plate that goes underneath the pot, there will be a ring of dried up liquid not matter what. If you do not move the pot and wipe under it each day, there will be a ring of dried up liquid and also the plate under the pot will have a certain lurking nature about it as well.

Separately but not unrelated: behind the pots of flowers, there is the part of the bar top that has a little gap between it and the wall, and there are cobwebs. They wax and wane and we clean them away but mostly they are waxing, because it is not possible to banish spiders and they are constantly emitting a certain cotton candy all over the place which then gets a bit dusty and I guess cobby if you have to be precise about the language. The web part is the emission and the cob part is when it gets more complicated. Either way, the more cob it gets and the more the flower pots stay in the same place, the more a certain rooting energy begins to take shape in the room. And that is a normal thing but something Quite Powerful that occurs more and more as the lobster pot of our season comes to a freakish boil, the way it does every year, so unexpectedly and so predictably, every single time: the way that all of a brick-like sudden, formerly strong claws are rendered red and useless and hills swell so tall and staircases lengthen and curl: it all becomes So Much.

I am writing this from the counter in the cafe and I am looking at the bathroom door which has been repeatedly kicked and kicked not out of any specific anger or anything but rather because it is the Human Way to turn a knob and kick I suppose. You just turn the knob and kick the door and in you go to take your shit, I guess. And so I guess we must wash this door, and I want to admit to you that it is easier for me to write about my fears that washing is not enough and we might actually need to repaint it than it is for me to go get a sponge or possibly a paint brush. I am well aware that it feels better in the long run to erase the score of all the kicks. But a person gets to looking at all the other marks and the idea of the task fills up with blood like a tick, becomes heavy, and then falls away to some dark corner of the brain where it will then shrivel and only maybe return as a memory when the joints begin to ache for some mysterious reason that cannot be so plainly deciphered.

The same is true for our poor floor, the fake wooden floor I put down when I first rented the space: the slippery, dark, laminate bullshit that is easy to look past–much, much easier to ignore than the rolled vinyl flooring that was here when I signed the lease. It was trying to masquerade as a sort of bistro tile in black and white squares but it was quite busy and severe and Obviously Synthetic and I could not stomach it because I am quite sensitive. We left the vinyl exposed in the kitchen, much to my chagrin, and it is now covered in burn marks from hot fat spills and such, which makes the floor look as though it is never clean, which would annoy me if I hadn’t stopped thinking of myself as a person with any kind of rules about how to be now that I’ve arrived at this late, apocalyptic stage.

It is hard to think about things as right and wrong when everything is wrong and so many things are right anyway. We are in the business of trying to make things right, and in order to make things right, we are creating some wrongs and enduring wrongs that are consistently being made available to us. Wrongs like not having hot water for two weeks after the recent flood, which meant we had to boil water to properly clean things, and our landlord said we can’t have a discount on our rent simply because of that and the sink began backing up because the residual lard wasn’t staying melted on the way down and everyone had to work late with the bullshit pot-boiled water. Wrongs like having to work around ICE pecking at our staff and having to scrounge up thousands of dollars overnight for legal assistance to protect them. Wrongs like the last business owner installing the incorrect grease duct from the exhaust hood and so sometimes it rains a fudge-like oil in secret parts of the back hallway but sheet metal is expensive and I can just as much afford the fix as I can afford to have out my remaining wisdom teeth times ten.

We are making a mess ourselves, which is OK because we are running around as quickly and honestly and gracefully as possible given the circumstances. There is not really a way around it when we are in the business of making a giant, splashy dump bucket of everyone’s leftover beverages and scraping toast crusts into the trash can and sometimes missing but mostly not. A wrist can stir eggs so swanfully and then suddenly dump eggs all over the burner.

There are honey and butter and crumbs to contend with and sometimes other things like people’s own baby wipes which feels private but which do end up on the plates after anyway, which I think is OK but adds to the drama of our Filth (not as much as when hair is on a plate after, which turns my stomach in a way that renders me a little useless for a while and causes me to question my ability to work with human customers, I am embarrassed to admit. But hair is very personal, I think it really is, I think it should go in your pocket if it falls off in a very obvious way or if not your pocket the floor because that is where the rest of the detritus belongs and it will mix together into a sort of tumbleweed that either blows out the door on its own or will be easy to sweep up later on. And really, I am put out emotionally in a very severe way by the gathering of so much hair on the ends of the broom bristles, too, even though that is the normal place for hair to end up when it is swept off the floor, although I really wish it would just be heavy enough to stay in the dust bin, since that is the strategy of a broom and a dust bin, and then you just tip it out into the trash, which is where detached hair belongs if you are not fortunate enough to leave it outside where a bird can spend days weaving it into its nest to keep its eggs properly snug).

Anyway, back to the floor: the truth is, laminate floors are no match for water, which is a key ingredient in the mopping process–perhaps you are familiar. We have to be extra careful with our mopping so as to preserve the needy, budget prince that is the ground we walk on. In the service area, we have not been so lucky, since refrigerators have leaked all over the goddamn place and we have spilled entire batches of coffee and iced tea and really any other containable liquid we’ve owned. The floor did what it could but really turned into floor soup in certain areas, and now we put little floor mats over top of the patches that otherwise shed a weird fake floor pulp all over the place, and that is what it is (not great). That is a very big Don’t Look At Me when it comes to friends visiting the place, as I know it is my job to fix the floor, but I do not think I can, and every year I assume it will come up entirely, and we will feel like we are wading through fields of furry laminate sheddings, and I will finally have to make sense of my nightmare in which I ask some men (I don’t know why men but that is who came to put the floor down last time) to come move all the furniture and put a new floor down and they tell me But That Will Be Hard (which was uttered about something floor related last time). I do not want to move the low boy refrigerator whose wheels have sunk into the floor in what feels like a permanent way.

I do not want to move anything, I think, because there are so many things to move that I can’t imagine exactly where they would go. I am afraid these men will ask me to move the items, I think. I would rather they would do it instead of me. And really, one of the items is a standing mixer that I never took off the palate after delivery five years ago, because I couldn’t afford a table to put it on and because I didn’t understand how to screw it onto a metal table and also because on the palate it is at just the perfect height that I can climb up onto it and sit on top like a mechanical bull and communicate with the folks working the line whenever I don’t want to put my body in their way. The mixer is on the other side of the low wall that separates the line from the middle space, you see. We don’t have all that much room on the actual ground, so in order to put my body in a better area, sometimes I sit on top of that mixer, and I would not be able to if I put it on a table. So if we re-do the floor, will I have to take the mixer off the palate? I think they might tell me I should, and that irks me.

And truly, I cannot afford a new floor, but one time, my mom got involved in a class action lawsuit against a doctor who was performing her foot surgery but then decided to cut some tendon in her ankle or calf to bill her for more shit and thereby left her with a skinnier one calf than the other, and someone else he had taken on for some light toe removal woke up with no foot, and my mom had told me that if she got any good money out of that suit perhaps she would help me replace the floor in here, but I have not heard anything more about the settlement. Anyway, so goes money. If I had the option of trading my foot for a real wooden floor, I am not sure what I would pick, but if I chose to give up the foot, I would want it in writing that I would not have to be involved in the project of moving the furniture around and that if items broke during the moving of the furniture, I would get the foot reinstated.

All of this and the ice machine chooses to take off every other day in the summertime but really enjoys coming to work during the wintertime, when we are selling lots and lots of hot beverages like coffee and mulled cider. I reckon that it would put us in a better mood generally if I replaced the ice machine and we could stop buying twenty-five pounds of ice every single day. I don’t know, though–I kind of like the way going to the gas station feels like a social event. I don’t know the names of those people who unlock the ice box for me, and they don’t know my name, and I kind of think we like it that way, but I am not sure, and so I am not sure about replacing the ice machine, especially because it will cost me thousands of dollars, and I don’t know where it will fit, and I imagine it will probably also go on the fritz, which is entirely possible, and then where will we truly be.

When I first signed the lease on this space, I did not look up at the ceiling, which is quite an amateur move, and so I did not realize it was a drop ceiling with tiled fluorescent lighting. I am actually pretty surprised that I had not noticed it, because I think most of the times I’ve experienced profound depression have been times I’ve had to spend in spaces with tiled fluorescent lights, like in schools. Anyway, maybe the second time I came in here, when it was already too late, I looked up and saw that I was going to have to Do Something About That. So I purchased some drop ceiling that was pretending to look like a nice ceiling, and I put it up mostly by myself, which was a lot harder than I ever expected it to be.

The thing is, we have a lot of strange angles around the sides, and I had to do a lot of weird cutting to make things fit. What I am getting at is one of the last tiles did not fit correctly, and I was so Over It that I left it dangling, since it’s in a sort of alcove that isn’t obvious to guests unless someone writes a public newsletter explaining where it is for them to go looking. And I always felt that this tile was a symbol of our truth: that this place looks nice but is mainly held together with spit and sheer will, and that we need to remember our humble origins by viewing the tile each day.

It is easy to remember one’s humble origins when you are humbled All The Time and origins become The Way. And so today, the sagging ceiling tile is feeling a lot like one of the girls when it comes to the entire place, and I am wondering what kind of a person I am if I am paralyzed by it all except for in the fingers where I can tap away on a keyboard and be Even Worse than just regular avoidant. My therapist tries to tell me that I am trying to switch modes possibly too often and that it takes energy to shift from one way of work to another, meaning that my current role as an owner is defined by inefficiency. That if you are greedy for hats, you won’t pull them all off as easily as you may have when you were simply a beanie person or that because of all the hat changing your head might be naked more often than not.

It is very possibly time for a refresh, which is poison to my Havisham ears but also gives me a little hope for a clean conscience. The other day, I hosted a private party at Merkin, and I forgot to sweep after, and I forgot to take out the trash, and when I returned from my days off, I was very Humbled by the wilderness that I found in there. I have since taken back the space from ants and smells I did not intend to smell, but things really escalate quite quickly when it’s this warm outside, and sometimes cleaning is not as effective as simply throwing everything away and starting over, which is not an option but sounds quite alluring.

Furthermore, the sky is falling truly, as there is a skylight in my office upstairs here, which, because of the creative way in which it is situated completely flatly on a flat rooftop, has the added quality of allowing rain to enter. I have a bucket there to catch the water, and I have requested that my landlord repair the leak, but during the flood, so much rain fell indoors that the ceiling below disintegrated and caked the floor below with white sludge. I scraped it up and threw it away, the sludge, but the ceiling is still quite gashed and affected. And it contributes to my suspicion that this is a place that cannot be tamed. I’ve long since exited my cocoon of sense as a dirty, winged, chaos agent with an attitude contrary to Should. And that is not the best person in the room to be, perhaps, but it is a person with some things to address.

One good thing is that October will be a scarlet red shit show in this place if we are lucky, and that sort of thing absolves us from whiting out the kicks on the door and all a little longer. And if nothing else, the people who grow things have started to insist upon putting pumpkins on their produce lists, meaning that any day now we will wake up longing to fill up the truck bed with them and all their gourd droogs and that will force us to move and wipe up the dried ass juice of the potted plants. This is a good argument for living in a place with seasons. They usher us out of ourselves and into our eyes and ears, and that is a clean thing. But leave most of it for November, when everyone gets so sad and quiet and there is nothing left to do but answer for the smudges and accept that the fermented thing took on flies and needs to go bye-bye and the days are short enough to allow us just a few conquests at a time, rendering it all mostly possible.

What will we do with the newly abundant air and the freshly clipped curfew. What will we do with the apples. I shudder to put them on the menu, even though I have horsily champed down two in the last day, spilling juice down my chin, making a damn mess, and ugly cutting up another one for my crew. There is a wrong about nicely cutting an apple. It can be done, it is done, I do it even. We all do it, I guess. But it is Not Right. They should be sharded and strange. The energy of the cut should be sort of rusty and desperate yet entirely uncaring. Practical, as in making the thing the size of a mouth and nothing more elaborate than that. The decadent, cidery smell negates order, I think. Apple is the harbinger of death. Apple as little daemon chuckling away at neat slivers. Horsey quarters then, or fifths. Better you just abandon the blade.

I think it’s odious that the eggplant and the apple should cross paths. I think they hate each other. I think they are from warring families. I think it’s all wrong they should drop to the ground at the same time. Become heavy together. One with such drip and the other such thirst. I shudder to think of them in the same room. I shudder to attend their joint birthday party. What would they have for Cake. What would they have for Wine.

I am sorry that for me things would ideally be Clean. I would rather a season of just apples and potatoes. The apple and the earth apple, I would like to have them alone and cleanly with my meat and my cream. There are people who can take it all and let it be good, and I am not one of them. Teeming litters of disparate produce begging for different treatments so much. Wailing for butter here and oil there and heat here and chill there and being so colorful, so so colorful that the throat fills with blood and oil of it. Blood and oil and the ears go full and hot. There are too many colors, you see. Too many many colors all getting in each other’s way like a pit of elbows, elbowing so much.

Spring would be an example of a clean time, because it is Mostly Green and Freshly Wet. This time of the present is dirty, very dirty, and it irks me and riles me up. A week ago I would have said I was fine. The apples caused malevolence in my heart, even sweetly, even as they dripped down my chin. I guess I prefer a slick, oily chin to a sticky one, but we take what comes our way. Yes we do. And I hadn’t even really been sated by peaches yet, which feels equally galling and wrong. And here I am happy anyway with the catastrophic dumping of all the things. And chagrined, maybe. Purple and horrible from it and white hot and venomous. And simultaneously crunching down.

A couple of years ago we were serving apples with cheese on our dinner menu, and somebody left us a negative review, insisting that apples and cheese is a lazy, horseshit snack to put on a menu. I was freshly into apple time in the clean way, I think, and so I was over the nightshades and into the night and really full of juice and clean air and fully forward onto my toes as one becomes when the blueness arrives, and so I felt a little bit pointy about that feedback. But I think the real problem was the slices of apple being so nice and neat and idiotic, I suppose. So clean and deceased, they were. So pristine and bloodless. And so I do not really know I guess how to serve the apples well, unless maybe to serve them whole and with an entire wheel of cheese, which is a real tug in this economy. I return to the feeling of hating to have to charge for these goodnesses.

Anyway I am freshly dreadful about the mixing of all things, and I am tired and loathsome and loathing too. I would like the apples to be hidden away for one more week. I think all the apple farmers should take them and put them all back. Put them all back into a big crate with a blankie and a nice snug wooden top to keep the light out while they sleep a little more. I would like to have a few for myself before they close the lid though. I would like to tear a few apples limb from limb for my friends, I think. Maybe with a wheel of cheese it would be nice. But can we put a table cloth over our heads so that the eggplants will not see us doing this stuff that it is Too Early to Do. Can we wear a wig and can we sit on each others’ shoulders inside a tall trench coat in order to not be identified in our Seasonally Early Perversion.

I have an apple recipe for August:

Take the first apples of the year which arrive after nearly nine whole entire months like a wrinkled human child. Don’t look at them at all and if you have to eat them do that in a secretive way that is even secret from yourself. Later when September comes your weird little inner accountant can reach its sticky fist back into August and fish out the transgression and slap it where it belongs, away from heat. And that’s that.

The peppers and tomatoes and eggplants show up when it’s all too much, sort of like dearly missed relatives arriving to town exactly when we need a break from hosting. But they’re plump and jovial good-time gals, and they don’t mind entering messy corridors or sleeping on the couch. Maybe sometimes they’re a little inflammatory, but they do the bulk of the work without asking for much in return.

It’s good to get them down off the vines, the nightshades. I think we feel that in the air. The way the bright days are burdened with the weight of the fruits. The aching pull on the plants as the things swell–the when of it all. The tenacious patience and the exhaustion. The internal negotiations of counter-ripening. The hot, damp air, stinky with promise. Wanting to look away from the pot that it may boil but instead becoming the boiled thing. The interminable light, shining on the slowness, making one mad. The prevailing feeling is of being overfilled with blood.

Then the burden shifts at the harvest of the fruits, as the cooks inherit the vines’ wares, and this is a different sort of feeling. Now the energy has form. Form is solid, and solid things are scalable and surmountable, and We Can Climb Up the Seal-Skinned Eggplant. The peppers and tomatoes, too. Slippery, sure, but with proper slope about them. And what climbing we do.

In the yellow days, we don’t need to do too much, which is pleasant, because the brain has had to be sent out to pasture for all it’s witnessed anyway. It has all been too much, you see, and so it is helpful that the nightshades are in agreement on how they’d like to be treated. Really, everyone would just like to bubble away in a pot of hot olive oil and maybe have a clove of garlic or two thrown in there if it’s not too much trouble. That is a very very good thing, the way that each one emerges from the same treatment differently but equally unbuttoned and loosed of tension. These are chin-runners, all of them, and that is a good thing when it comes to making dinner. That is a very good thing. Because really so much has been riding on these itchy fruits for so many months that it causes one great calm to take a velvety bite and to lick one’s chin. There is a sense that the horrors have passed. There is a swaddling kind of energy about it all. A very bonnet-ed sense.

I want to ground all of this by saying that today we made some ratatouille–if we are allowed to call it that (which, on the menu, I did). I don’t actually really understand where ratatouille starts and ends, if I’m being honest. And ok fine I just looked it up again for the eight-hundredth time in my life because I can’t understand the concept of the thing, even though I like it so much. It reminds me of how hard a time I have recognizing people. They keep telling me their names. I keep telling them my name. Nothing changes. Every day is new. The internet continues to assure me that ratatouille is stewed tomatoes and peppers and squash and eggplant, which I get but I still can’t possess as my own information.

I put fennel in ours, OK? And I forgot about the squash thing and I don’t have any squash, because sometimes I can really get it up for squash, but a lot of times I can’t, and I really like it sometimes but I equally find it vile and stupid. Anyway, I didn’t have any squash today and so I don’t really know what we are serving by name, but it involves fennel, eggplant, tomatoes, peppers, and onions, and it’s very good. We cooked everything in a whole lot of olive oil, and then I cheated at the end because I was so deeply weeded this morning that I didn’t know if I was going to have my restaurant revoked, and so I poured in some tomato juice while the whole thing was cooking down, OK? And I cooked it and cooked it just enough, the way you have to do, and I put one nice stem of basil leaves in there, too.

The thing that I like about this treatment of predominantly nightshades is that there is a sort of alchemical transference of liquids between the things, and if we do what we want to do correctly, the total sum of the liquids and oils in the pot bubble down just enough to create something truly slick. A slick, thickish, shiny swamp for the produce to luxuriate in. It has to be just right, the slickness. It has to coat the throat just a little. It has to cause great impact. It cannot be greasy. It cannot be just wet. It has to be truly slick. The reason why is that it holds the vegetables safely in their container. It does not suffocate them or bloat them or cause them any great danger. It keeps them good and even maybe better than that.

Anyway, who cares what this is called. It is a great honor to take the erratic pulse of a blinding season and convert it into plush breath. It is a joy to wear months of chaos and measured tending on one’s chin and shirt. It is healthful to gulp down summer greedily as the nights come just a bit sooner. With the shortening days, more sleep but less time to spend peeling and considering odd shapes. Urgency, then, in preparation. A mind to the contents of the crisper; anxiety only as it calls to nimble action. But with an easy hand and a firm notion about how things will show themselves best.

I am writing you from the end of July. Right in the middle of summer, nearly August, and I’m still feeling afraid of winter. Last one was atrocious. I hope you are holding up OK, but I’m sure you’re hunched over this same laptop–god willing you did not dump liquids or solids or both on it already–writing some doom and gloom newsletter about an imminent closure or contemplating a new get rich quick scheme. I am sure it has been very slow. I am sure you are red at the single two-top in the silent dining room.

Not that I can promise anything, but this past year, April really came to the rescue. It was unusual but it happened. I want you to know it saved our asses, and it’s possible you’ll be back in the saddle any moment now therefore. Maybe not. Who knows. I recognize that usually we have had to wait until July to see any sales. But it might come a little earlier. Who knows.

Anyway, I did not come here to remind you about the horrors and the maybes. I want to tell you there are wonderful things on the way. Maybe you are not willing to wait another ten weeks, but the time will pass.

July came suddenly this year, and we did not have to wait very desperately for tomatoes. They just arrived promptly and professionally that second week in July like they sometimes do, and we ordered them, and they came, and not one farm shorted us that first week. We had a heat wave already, which was brutal and humbling and embarrassing and wet, but it was a wonderful way to be made to show some respect for the weather that came next. It has since been quite beautiful aside from the days when the wild fire smoke traveled south from Canada.

Peppers have already started cropping up at the market, which is odd, because we always feel such accute yearning for spice nowabouts, and this time, longing was not necessary. The abundance already feels too big, and normally that emotion does not arise until September. I already feel spoiled. The splendor is nauseating, I would say. I feel a bit like things are too nice, and that is difficult. I am so afraid of the winter, even all these weeks later, because last one was so hard. I don’t want it. I would like for the government to give us each ten weeks’ pay to go somewhere else.

I am sorry I did not put away more money during the busy season, but just because there is cash flow does not mean there is an adult in the room. After all, when the skies are so tall like this, everything becomes so frustratingly visible and available and it feels impossible not to snatch it all up. To just stuff crumpled dollars into the hands of the stone fruit vendor. To be so happy of it all that I want to simply give it away.

It is hard, I guess, being in this business for reasons of loving food and all, because the money of it is revolting and really kind of antithetical to hosting a good party. On my way back from the market, I shared one of my peaches with someone I passed by, and I guessed that was the same thing as the restaurant just it was outside and free, and I think I liked it more. I am sorry I did not put away any savings yet for the slow season. I know it is the right thing to do. I wanted to serve whole roasted sole instead of skate for a while, and that was expensive. I also bought nice tuna sometimes, and that was also very expensive, and I am here to tell you not to forget how much yield is lost to the bloodline if you think you might buy tuna in the summertime or whenever Dennis says it’s good. It is kind of a good deal but it is not affordable by any means. It is truly delicious, but you never sell out, and you can only make so many things tonnato. I also bought a lot of nice cheese, which I am sorry about too, but it was not an avoidable thing. It is just as important to serve stinky food in the summertime as it is in the winter, and Roquefort has gone up in price quite a bit.

All this is to say, we have been really doing it over here, and people are having fun and smiling and having luxuries in their mouths, which is kind of the whole idea.

Something beautiful that has happened this summer and which could possibly happen again to you is that people have brought us flowers. The flowers are big and bright and alive and eject yellow pollen all over the place, and when people bring them, we just put them in a wine bucket of water because we don’t really have a vase or trust the gravity anyway. I thought maybe people were bringing the flowers because the restaurant or at least definitely the garage was a little bit hideous and dead looking. I was not offended. In fact, it felt like a lucky effect. To be plain, maybe, is to invite adornment and care. Another thing is that these restaurants are very utilitarian and literal, and it feels very nice to have friends drop by to eat with flowers because they know we are busy and would maybe like to gaze upon pretty petals while we go about the day of sandwich making.

It is all very big, the way these things happen. There is a lot of generosity, which is the revolving door we are pushing. It makes me cry, and I want you to know that, because I know you are crying for the sad reasons, but maybe in a few months your tears will pivot in tone. I joked today that we have to go back to skate next week, since our accountants said we only made $192 last month. And it is actually not a joke but rather true about returning to skate but it’s also fine. Deep fried skate with tartar sauce is a very special summer treat. Other than that, I haven’t felt much like trimming costs, because I am scared to arrive at winter without having eaten enough onions and tomatoes and lovely mushrooms or without having caused enough hedonism.

Just the other day, I was gazing at my bicycle, which I sometimes ride to and from work but which has not seen enough use yet this season, and I wondered if I shouldn’t start offering pâté sandwich delivery services and maybe also travelling handjobs. That seemed like a good idea financially, and I know my accountants will get a sort of concerned kick out of it. Sandwich hooking really is more palatable an idea than buying less produce at this time of year. And if I’m honest, I don’t think I would mind it very much anyway even though I normally advise folks to stick to what they’re actually good at. Paid labor sounds quite alluring after the last couple of years slogging at what has essentially felt like a non profit. I have nice bags on my bicycle that seem good enough for storing mustard and cornichons and bread and pâté and also of course hand sanitizer and gloves. It’s the only thing for it, maybe, for being greedy for tomatoes and knowing full well that with every invoice, I am burying you, my future self, a little deeper in the mud. I wonder how far down you really are by now.

If I don’t go through with starting that side hustle and you are therefore corrossive on the insides with debt, I am sorry. But this is what we live for, the tomatoes and the flowers and the chanterelles and the whole fish fried in butter on the stove and the luck of serving familiar faces in the restaurant. It’s why we got into this mess. I would argue it’s best not to scheme too much this winter. Just be patient and dream about sun and the happy derrangement that arrives on budding trees. And if you do have to shut down the whole entire thing, at least we did things right.

Yours in optimism and also failure,

Shaina

Everybody thinks chickens are stupid. Everyone is always asking me, are there truly millions of chickens in the world, or is there one single master chicken controlling the minds and actions and flesh of a de-centralized army of dinosaur birds? People are always shouting that pigs are as smart as dogs and so should not be eaten but chickens are stupid and should be. People are always saying that the smarter an animal is, the more it’s like us, and the less we should eat it. People are afraid that eating smart animals is a slippery slope to cannibalism. People are always shouting KILL THE CHICKENS BECAUSE THEY ARE DUMB. KILL THE CHICKENS BECAUSE THEY ARE SCALY AND FEATHERED AND BEAKED AND MILD TASTING BUT ALSO JUICY.

Chickens are way freakier and far smarter than most people really understand. First of all, their flavor is actually way fucking intense, but nobody notices it, because we are all made up of about fifty percent chicken meat (this is substantiated on the WHO website actually). It’s largely impossible to separate our own flesh from that of the chicken bird. We have had too much. We cannot separate our own odor from that of the chicken. We cannot detect the reality of the experience.

One time, however, I did. One of my chickens named Kazoo got attacked by an opossum. When I scooped her up to take her inside, she was very badly injured. I was overwhelmed by her smell: the smell of chicken meat. Even though I’d processed chickens before, I still had never experienced a living chicken that smelled so very much like chicken. I saw her raw flesh where the wound was, and it also looked like chicken, which is actually because it was. It is strange to smell warm, raw chicken, because everyone is always shouting to PUT RAW CHICKEN IN THE FRIDGE. Everyone knows that warm, raw chicken equals salmonella. Everyone does not hang out with warm, raw chicken. But lo and behold, I did hang out with warm, raw chicken, and it turns out that chicken is chicken, and it smells like chicken. Mild? Not at all.

It is strange, the way that we have collectively accepted the phenomenon of captive dinosaurs everywhere. It is weird that all of our food is dinosaurs this, dinosaurs that. Printed out dinosaurs cut up on a caesar salad. Printed out dinosaur breasts. Dinosaurs on every menu.

I almost never serve chicken at the restaurant, because it harms me to join in on the conspiracy of one printed out dinosaur being the overwhelmingly safe choice to eat. I like chicken a whole lot, but I like friction more. I like when choosing is about joy instead of fear, and Chicken Entrée feels like the order of an anxious soul: one that needs so much to eat an anonymous, pale bird that won’t cause any physical —or, even worse—emotional feeling.

There is very much irony in the lifestyles of Chicken Entrée and Add Chicken. A bird that lives so dangerously should become the safe choice?

Chickens are hedonistic creatures. I have ten of them at home, and they love to gather at the large, dry, dirt patch in our yard to take baths and nap. They roll all around in the dust to clean their feathers, and they rest their heads on one another’s butts. They stretch out their scaly legs and flex their long toes. When they are content and warm and clean, they tup tup tup their little beaks, and their eyelids slowly roll up for sleep. They close their bottom eyelids instead of the top ones, which I particularly like. They hunt bugs and frogs and run around, greedily trying to steal each others’ catch. They are absolute cunts. They aren’t polite. They yearn for the very best bite.

Chickens don’t play it safe. Chickens do not look for the meekest menu item. The day after half the flock gets eaten, the other chickens will fly out of their protective enclosure to continue pursuing the best possible day, the best possible food. They will run like hell and fight for their lives when faced with predators, but they won’t forego an exquisite meal in favor of protecting themselves from danger.

I think that spirit is worth honoring a bit more than we tend to do.

When I serve chicken, I want to serve Chicken. I want it all. I want the stink of good chicken meat and the juice and the cartilage and the offal. I want to give the bird a really good showing for its sacrifice. I don’t care to serve a throwaway dish that’s only on offer for tepid eaters that think chicken can be picked up from the bank. So we rarely serve chicken. But when we do, we make it a big deal.

Right now, at Cafe Mutton, we are serving a chicken thing, and I really love it. It is, unshockingly, a terrine. We take whole chickens and braise them in chicken and pork stock for hours, until the meat is falling off the bone. Then, we pick the carcasses clean, shred the meat, mix it with a bunch of chopped up herbs, cram it into a loaf pan, and pour the rich, gelatinous stock over it before setting it in the fridge.

We serve pork terrines all the time, but there is something special about the chicken terrine. It is incredibly flavorful, like our other charcuterie, but it is in good balance with the abundant, fresh herbs and rich, jellied stock. Cold chicken is a delightful thing. Cold chicken in the summer is even better.

We serve the jellied chicken over very garlicky, herby mayonnaise and set a little hard boiled egg on the plate next to it. It feels right that the chicken has sort of brought its own condiment to the dish. This is another thing about chickens. They are considerate in that way, always showing up with gifts. Sometimes, we put a couple of small tomatoes or cucumbers on the plate. Today, we are adding a cold, boiled leek. Jellied chicken is a humble dish but also a very special treat. One that can’t be printed out or picked up at the bank.

Cold, Jellied Chicken

makes a full pullman pan of terrine (lol); cut recipe in three if you are a normal human

• 3 chickens, about 3# each (if you’re local to Columbia County, I recommend sourcing from Kinderhook Farm, Yundwell Pastured Poultry, or Stone Point Farm)

• 4 qt pig head and/or foot stock

• 4 qt chicken stock

• Salt

• 1 pt chopped herbs (we use tarragon, parsley, and chives, but dill is also a fun one for this)

• Gelatin if needed

Braise the chickens in stock for two or three hours. Make sure they are covered with liquid until tender. If you need, use more stock. Add some salt in the beginning, but don’t fully season the stock, as it needs to reduce.

Remove the chickens and boil down the remaining stock to one and a half quarts. Season with salt.

Take all the meat off the chickens and shred it a bit but not so much that there aren’t nice pieces. Toss the chicken with herbs and salt. If you braised the hearts and gizzards with the birds, chop them up and add them in.

If your stock was not at all gelatinous to begin with, you might need to strengthen it by adding gelatin. The correct ratio is 12 sheets to a quart for a nice, firm slice, so you can use that info to correct the set of your own stock. For example, if you used strong trotter stock, don’t add gelatin. But if your stock was weak or thin, maybe add some sheets, you know? Anyway, test out the gel by chilling some stock before finishing the recipe, because you don’t want to have to melt down the whole terrine to fix it the next day. If you are using powdered gelatin, look up the conversion, because I don’t know what it is (but I am rooting for you).

Pack the chicken into a plastic-lined terrine or pullman pan. Pour the liquid over it, and press it down to make sure there is stock up to the top of the terrine. Place another pan on top or a piece of cardboard cut to size and put something with a little heft on top to weigh it down. Chill in the fridge.

The next day, slice it up and eat it like I said before, maybe with a hard egg or some vegetables or on a sandwich but definitely with the herbed mayo. Oh and also maybe some anchovies if you a freak.

Herbed Mayonnaise

• 5 egg yolks

• 3 cloves garlic, minced or microplaned

• 3 lemons, zested and juiced

• Salt

• 1 pt neutral oil

• 1 c olive oil

• 1 c parsley leaves

• ½ c picked tarragon

• ½ c picked mint

In a food processor, combine lemon juice and zest with garlic, egg yolks, and salt. Stream in the oil until thick and nice (add more oil if not thick and nice), and then add in the herbs and blend until you achieve a pale green color with some flecks of herb. Taste and adjust. Good job.

OK BYE.

And now tomatoes are here. The first or second week of July, by most standards, is when we are allowed to lose our minds fully to summer. When we are allowed to get googly-eyed and giddy at fruit and forget about the miserly little gasps of Spring rolling in slow. There is no longer the concern of having two happy dishes on a menu surrounded by plates of pasty, reliable potatoes. There is now juice. Something for the mouth to water toward.

What flies below the radar for many of us, as tomatoes charismatically hold the court of summer, are onions. Before and during tomatoes’ arrival, scallions and shallots and onions of all kinds grow fat in the dirt and emerge rotund and gleaming and siren-like. As farmers lay a portion of their allium crop out to cure, they also bring the fresh stuff around. And sure, there is appreciation. But enough?

This week, I received a crate of fat, stick-straight scallions, a crate of round, cream-colored Ailsa Craig onions with wide, ropy tops, and a crate of torpedo shallots as long as zucchini, whose lengths were most impressive for the way they so stretched the pink gradient: magenta to pale blush from bottom to top.

Fresh onions’ sweetness can be furthered by cooking–slowly roasting in the oven or grilling–and there’s little more decadent than the nectar that emerges from such treatment. A fearsome contender in the game of juices to drip down the chin, to be sure.

But what of the raw onion?

Of course, the little slices we allot for our sandwiches and salads pull their weight. Without them, where would we truly be? Lost between pillowy slices of white bread or washed away in tides of slick oil and vinegar, perhaps. So easy to overlook the quiet power of these stinky bulbs.

So often our approach to serving and eating food–and to living–is to dose out power in manageable increments. When a thing is strong, we immediately fear its entirety. This is very true of our approach to raw alliums. Consider the fear of one’s breath. Most avoid eating raw alliums in quantity to spare those around them. We would rather not have dragon breath. We would rather not show signs of having done something. Something like eating. And oh what eating!

Here at Cafe Mutton, we serve particularly rich food. Especially when it comes to meat–if you’re having it, it’s probably something quite fatty, and if it’s not, it’s probably served over a generous pool of aïoli to cure its leanness. I don’t know if I would rest on the old adage, “fat equals flavor,” but I would argue that fat equals emotion. There is not a particularly easy way to feel nothing when sporting a properly begreased chin. There is not a particularly easy way to remain boring and loveless when gnawing on a blubbery bone.

In the same way I cock my head at the blanket statement, “fat equals flavor,” I consider the concept of balance in all things quite suspicious. With the advent of food media, it seems that the home cook has been led to believe that balance is key. Of course, balance is something we seek to achieve in restaurant kitchens as well, but I call major bullshit on making every single dish “balanced.” And maybe that’s because we visualize balance as scales: a little of this must be countered with a little of that. That is balance, sure, but that is a static sort of balance.

If we must invoke balance, it may help to think of it as managing winds. It is true, certainly, that we don’t want the boat of our dear selves to completely capsize over the course of dinner. But we don’t have to heel quite so high out of the water just because one plate doesn’t have Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat. Those things (and many more than just those four) can come from the rest of the table.

Don’t forget, for example, that there is wine. Or, possibly, someone is having a daiquiri. Or a martini. These drinks provide pleasant pain in good measure and can protect us from excessive lard. There may be a salad. We may employ our precious lemons to hold us tight through the duration of the greasy shoulder chop. The thing is, though, raw alliums do excellent work keeping us from flipping upside down in our precarious dinner boat. They are fierce and fiery and stinky and mean. They Can Handle It. They are so reliably rude (and perhaps more exciting than citrus), that I often can’t believe they’re left in the pantry.

Eat an onion. You don’t have to cook the freaking thing. Just eat it. Even more than affording yourself a delicious and lively experience, you will give off a sort of unwell vibe that will filter out bad kinds of company. Dragon breath does not end at a stench. It’s a way of being. Rather than fear it, why not harness it?

When I was a teenager, I got a scholarship to attend a craft camp in Hungary for the summer, after which I and the other teens were divided up among host families so that we could experience normal Hungarian life for a few weeks. I won’t get into the camp situation, because it was Not What I Expected and We Did Not Ultimately Weave Baskets At All. But my host family situation was different.

Hungarian people don’t really cook vegetables aside from cucumber salad and pickled cabbage or vegetable soup, which was a little frightening for me at the time. Fridays, my host siblings would take me to their friends’ ramshackle little weekend cottages with bare furnishings. We’d stay until Sunday, drinking too much pálinka, and I would basically sit around having no idea what was being said. We didn’t speak each other’s language, even though it eventually became apparent to me that their parents had taken me in to help them improve their minimal English over summer break from school.

On one particularly lively evening, I sat out front of the cottage by a crate of onions, and I peeled one and ate it, since I was shitfaced and anorexic and unsure of what else I could reasonably eat. That afforded me a sort of freak reputation with the host siblings and their friends, which was not a bad thing, because nobody knew the point of me and I wasn’t particularly cool or fun. But beyond a lovely party trick, the onion was also delicious and grounding.

Eating onions whole may not be for everyone. It probably should be, but we are not realistically living in the book Holes, and we have jobs, and America is Not Going Well, meaning that most people don’t have the capacity to add this seemingly superfluous habit to their roster of activities. But there are ways to dip in a toe or a possibly a foot.

For example, you could cut up many raw onions or just even one and serve it alongside your meal instead of fussing around about incorporating an acidic component. You could have little dishes around the table with beautiful long scallions to chew on. If you know your dinner guests, maybe leave the onions in large wedges to break up and pass around. The petaling and passing feels communal and nice and leaves no room for defectors. There is no room for fear of stinking one’s hands. The stinking of the hands is part of the whole. It is not against but in cahoots with Fat in the pursuit of feeling something. Neither takes away from the other. They build.

I am not writing this absolutely unnecessary newsletter in order to let you know that onions exist or to try to say that we should sidebar tomatoes this season or spit at cucumbers. It is entirely possible to have it all. I am simply dropping in to insist that we don’t shrink away from those beastly ingredients which make our eyes water and our nose hairs curl. They are here to help, for god sakes! They are here to bail us out of the jail of balance on the plate. Or, possibly, from bland reputations and alcohol poisoning. I mean, have you noticed that onions are born with a handle on them? We take the cue from corn–what’s so different?

While we won’t be serving a whole raw onion at Cafe Mutton this holiday season, as my pulpy heart can’t bear the imminent rejection, you can certainly expect to leave here with some confident breath and a pep in your step. Next time you’re serving something particularly heavy, keep your onions nearby and an open mind. You just might feel something.

Dense, resolute pork shoulders and chops sit solidly at the bottom of the cooler, while containers of fennel, pea shoots, kale, and collards overflow on the shelves above.  Flamboyant, superfluous, healthy, bright, messy, fragrant, wilting, checking their ticking watches, tapping their tender feet.  “We are busy!” I want to shout at them.  Pork parts don’t care what we do; they wait for us–we are, all of us, ready to get braising whenever we goddamn feel like.  We aren’t worried about it.  We are cold.  We are not going anywhere.  Mold is not really in our conversation.  We are cool like that.  We are not dramatic.

Meanwhile, odd berries, pea pods, leaves, and fronds jump ridiculously down into the dark corners of the reach-in, pulling at the edges of my anxiety and poking at my perpetually half-filled lungs.  They languish out of spite.  They wrinkle as if mooning.  They split as if to spit.  

To be put to task by the gorgeous, green inanimatia is a spine-straightening thing, though, as it puts one right in the world.  We aren’t, after all, so reliable out here in the land of the had-been-long-ago-parented, and it’s not so bad to be nagged by nasturtium or kvetched at by kale for the lesser half of the year.  It’s not so bad to be reminded of morals; to go to bed shampooed and combed; to floss.  

To be a meat slinger is to cling to the exhausting wreckingball pendulum of avoidance and attack, making daily visits to piles of pig, nodding the head, pricking up the nose, thinking on tomorrow, siding with stink, making covenants with corpses, and, sometimes, god.  There are big days.  There are evenings of perspiration, becoming slick with the wet, sticky air of simmering skin.  Clean and dirty days for shoes.  There are other times when all is silent in the fridge, and a person can look away.  The meat, after all, isn’t feeling like it either.  It is watching the game.  It is watching Ninety Day Fiancé.  It is doing laundry. 

The mirror of June becomes important.  We say, Oh, OK.  The stove that we long to turn off in favor of the groaning air conditioning instead must stay on.  Every day.  All burners.  The air becomes garlic.  We must shrink the items.  We must urge them to give up their water; to give us their souls.  We are Ursula.  We are Flotsam and Jetsam.  It will be our choice who wilts and when.  We will churn up some music with tens of long-handled spoons.  We will reach them all the way down the stock pots, arguing against sticking jam, insisting that scorching is not on the agenda.  

And we will forget and walk away and humiliate the idea of who we are.  There will lamely be strawberry agrodolce, or some other actually kind of delicious bull-fucking-shit, when we lose the debate against the pot bottom.  It will be OK even when we know we are bad of it.  At least, we will say, we have smalled the onion tops and made broth of the mushroom and fennel scraps and desiccated the herbs.  We have, because we are good boys, taken the rubber bands off the bunched items, and because we are bad boys, we threw them away instead of making a responsible rubber band ball.  

The five gallon pot of greens simmers down to one.  Teeth have less work to do if we are willing to boil and boil, and either everyone will want to consume the heavenly marsh or no one will: the greens can last forever or for no time at all.  The entire town comes down with Popeye arms, maybe, dragging around pulsing biceps, or maybe only we do.  Ham bones bob in the near-sludge of it all.  Tasting for salt.  Tasting for vinegar.  Begreasing the chin.  Besticking the lips.  

I understand that summer is a time of salads, but it is mildly possible that I can’t live like that.  It is, after all, scary to watch the operatic decline of the crops whose emergency contact has become my own self.  Control is a pot, a pot is a boil, summer is boiling, summer is a pot, summer is control.  To control is to diminish, summer is diminish, to make the things around us short enough to stand on.  To squash things down.  To cram them into the mouth.  Digesting what would otherwise float away, would otherwise rot, would otherwise shame our guardianship.  

Even still.  The pots are few and the vegetables numerous.  Even the longest days are short, and the stove has just six burners.  Control is fiction; fire is finite.  To really be alive around here in the month of June is to lose the battle daily but to be kept upright by it.  What other thing laughs so heartily at our scraped knees and elbows?   Continues to scrape them?  

We compare bug bites in our down time and stuff boxes of popsicles into the already overflowing chest freezers. Who is on what dose of doxy. Circling the bite with sharpie like we’re on the show “The Pitt.” Watching the red escape the marker corral. Trying not to make a big deal. “It’s probably fine.” “Maybe we should amputate.” Someone found mushrooms at their spot the other day. Someone went for their first swim. “I thought it was Lyme but it’s Anaplasmosis.” The fear of the lone star tick, mortal enemy of our meat store. Running to the store for twenty-five pounds of ice every day because I have almost never bet on our success when purchasing equipment. Putting umbrellas on the staff punch to make our demise feel festive.

When we get our first strawberries, walking past them is shocking every time. They’re so sweet that I almost feel guilty for having them. When they start to get juicy and need to go on time-out in the refrigerator, they cause everything to smell weird and rotten for some reason, striking fear into my heart each time I open the door, forgetting what month we’re in. The winter time has been odorless and stale. Now we must distinguish between rot and delight or at least locate the wrinkle between those opposing eyebrows on the face of the season.

Mold is here. White mold, blue mold, the long, hairy type with the grey tips. Black mold, sometimes, which is the big bad kind that we all know means Throw Away Immediately And Ideally Don’t Even Make Eye Contact. The other day, I sort of bastardly ordered peaches even though it felt too soon, and I told myself I was alright for it because we are not about to have a good stone fruit season up here. What arrived from the south was underripe but came of age in a week’s time. We launched them on society in crowns of grated pecorino. I tried to repeat my greed the following week, but the peaches went from hard to moldy in three days. Each peach had one good side and one side with a deep, moldy hole. I wanted to cut off the good parts, but really there were none. I considered that perhaps my anxiety about the orchards of New York was distracting me from strawberries. I ordered extra to soothe my nerves. They did not mold.

Tomatoes will be here soon, too. When I know tomatoes are coming, I think of mold before I think of joy. I think of them splitting, unable to contain their juice, and the fuzz that gathers in those cracks. I think of reaching into the crate to grab one and recoiling with unexpected juicy fingers. It is all very stressful. It is all very nice. It is good to feel something.

We are in the business of feelings. I don’t know how many people remember that. Because we are also in a time when the idea is to feel nothing. There are solutions for all discomforts and solutions for joy too. You can kind of almost get anything you want anywhere you go, and so there is no friction. Things are streamlined and easy and everything is an app and AI does people’s jobs and their homework and so overall, we are rolling along a very shiny bowling lane and we are also hitting none of the pins. But summer is The Big Feeler because we are not strong enough to make it stop.

Cafe Mutton has the worst air conditioning in Hudson. I am not allowed to feel good about that, because we aren’t a scrappy little counter service spot like we used to be, and it is a little awkward when everything, including ourselves and the guests and the glassware and the refrigerators are pouring with sweat and condensation. But there is purification in it. There is something holy about heat, about standing it. About getting past the bad part and entering the realm of Being Wet. Merkin has no AC at all and I am allowed to be proud of it because it is scrappy and we undercharge for the quality of wine that we’re serving and everything is ugly and so nobody wants better for themselves. I have discussed this with a number of guests and friends and have all but proven so.

It is OK to feel something. It is OK to be in summer. To sweat over a bottle of freezing cold wine with friends is a true thing. To eat a gigantic, brimming bowl of spicy, greasy, gnarly, gnashing, and thrashing soup in such a heat is somehow a way to take some control. To refuse available corsets of oppression. There is something about ugliness. There is something about disgust. The way hair sticks to the back of the neck. The smell of bodies. A restaurant becomes a less civilized thing and in doing so becomes civilization. Everyone standing around in their messes of insistent organs. So much blood in one room. Sitting in a chair after someone leaves and feeling revolted by the heat they left behind. Wanting to chase them down the street to give it back. But most importantly wanting to chase them to begin with.

Oysters taste far more miraculous when the back of your shirt is wet with the breath of your own body. It is annoying to hold a teary, slippery beer can, but the genius of it is that it is noticeable as opposed to forgettable, and memories are hard to come by anymore. If, for example, the beer nearly slides out of your hand, you are grateful when you catch it. To nearly lose something makes the thing important. To nearly err and then to not by the skin of our teeth affords us little confidences in our own deftness and cunning. This is some of the season’s magic. The taking away and the giving back.

Summer teems like a boiling infection. During service, we are panting, red-faced, and it is funny and also not funny. It is a game. To open the fridge is to wish we never knew cold to begin with. To wish we were eggs, all lined up in their flats, slumbering at thirty nine fahrenheit, knowing nothing of heat. There is no room for the volume of summer’s produce in our little reach-in, and we don’t have a walk-in. Forty-eight quarts of greens boil down to ten, satisfying the storage puzzle but also filling the room completely with the evaporated souls of the deceased. The toll for storage space is more sweat.

The thought of last winter still lingers at the top of mind. In two months’ time, maybe, people will have forgotten that pain as the heat becomes reliable, which is to say boring, which is to say oppressive and ripe for rejection. We’ll tire of late nights, and the body will cotton on to the wine of it all, splitting those logs with waning enthusiasm. The flies will become too much, way too much, and we will begin to ask ourselves as we always do: am I dead? We will become eager for the chilly days that end their buzzing a good while–the days that insist we are far more than decomposing flesh. Because how bad is a short day if it means a little quiet? A little certainty in one’s vitality?

But for now, heat and strong-brewed emotions. Cooling breezes, puddling ice, dehydration, exhaustion, laying the vile body down to be still with no sheets on, towering weeds, ambient chatter of crushes, taunting mold, fungus, vultures devouring entrails on the roads, peeling shitty floors, broken down equipment, wild flowers, berries, swollen drawers that refuse to open, giant ice cream cones that flow rudely down the wrist, mosquitos, not knowing how to feel when a firefly gets trapped inside the house. Living.

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My grandfather introduced me to scrapple when I was a kid.  The ritual of breakfast at my grandparents’ house on Block Island, Rhode Island, was a quintessential part of our family’s time together out there. In the mornings, we would set up this funny little saucepan that was fitted with perforated egg cups for unskilled poaching and load up the toaster with bread.  Depending on how many of us there were, we used either the plain white plates or the heavy, yellow, octagonal ones, or the ones with the bass design, or all of them.  The coffee was Folgers and it was black and thick.  There was bacon and butter and a lot of crumbs on the blue and white striped table cloth.  Sometimes we made soft boiled eggs instead of poached and sat them up in tall, milk glass egg cups.  

From time to time, my grandpa would have some scrapple to fry up for himself in addition to his eggs and toast.  As best I can recall, I didn’t really understand what scrapple was, and not a lot of other family members were clamoring to eat it.  It retained an air of mystery.  Like so many things my grandpa did, it just seemed like it was His Thing.  An idiosyncrasy.  A legend in process.  Other things he did included: shaking salt over his plate with extreme zeal; carving the roast; sopping up meat juices with a bread sponge; announcing happy hour; making a good manhattan; scaling fish we caught in the pond out back on a small board and hosing the scales onto the lawn; leaving rank buckets of skate that were destined to become lobster bait out in the sun to ripen.  

My grandpa was a fairly adventurous person, and although he passed away when I was a teen, I knew him to have a strong stomach at the table and in life.  He was a sailor, a fisherman, and in his later years, a pilot.  While my grandma did the majority of the cooking, he liked to tinker in the kitchen from time to time.  My mom always talks about his pursuit of making the perfect baked rice pudding, which never worked out, because he never par-cooked the rice.  

He loved to talk about Hungarian food, and we all grew up hearing him talk about these pastries called “pogatchels.”  He brought them up again and again, and we grew to hold this vague, family fantasy about the mythical porky biscuits that nobody could ever find anywhere–before smart phones might have allowed us to solve the mystery in seconds.  Eventually, when I went to Hungary, I realized he was talking about pogácsa, a savory, flaky pastry that can include cheese or bacon or other additions.  But even before I got to the bottom of his lore, we were happy to let “pogatchels” live rent free in our minds, simply because he was so excited to talk about them.  

My grandpa grew up in New Jersey.   Even though scrapple is a Pennsylvania Dutch thing, New Jersey diners sometimes serve it, and grocery stores stock it in surrounding states.  I don’t know when or how my grandpa was introduced to scrapple, but he loved it enough to seek it out whenever he could.  

Buying scrapple at the store usually involves the frozen meat aisle, and every scrapple is a little different.  Some scrapples are made with a little bit of buckwheat flour, some are strictly cornmeal-based, and then there is midwestern goetta, which is scrapple adjacent but made with oats.  

I chose to make a corn-only scrapple when I was developing recipes for Cafe Mutton.  The first recipe I tried for scrapple was from Hank Shaw’s Hunter, Angler, Gardener website, a resource I have relied upon since my teenhood.  After making a few different adjustments to my initial trials, I landed on a scrapple recipe that has served us very well.  

Scrapple production at Cafe Mutton is a days-long project, starting with cooking pig heads overnight, removing the meat, and straining off the resulting stock.  We then whisk the cornmeal into the pork stock and cook it until it reaches the right thickness, return the meat to that porridge, season the mixture, and then pour it into loaf pans to chill overnight.  

Our early batches of scrapple sometimes came out too wet, meaning that as soon as we began frying a slice, it would just melt into a sputtering puddle.  Those days were not fun, but we could just melt those batches back down and add more corn.  Then there were days when the scrapple was too corn-y and had a bit of a cake-y consistency.  Riding the balance was key.  Most of the time, we got it right, and scrapple became one of the restaurant’s early hits.

Nowadays, at Cafe Mutton, we cook and debone pig heads and feet every week.  We make a lot of different things with those sticky, unctuous meats, and last week, we recently found ourselves a little overstocked on both–a rarity.  And so, it became time to bring scrapple back to the menu.  After years of serving all manner of hot and cold terrines, I returned to our recipe with some new thoughts.  Namely, that we would incorporate some coarse cornmeal into our mixture for some added crunch, and that we would use some trotter stock and meat for a stronger set and more dramatic crust.  I did not want to fix something that was never broken to begin with–I just wanted a perfect batch.

Just like in years past, I stood over my pot of mush with some trepidation, stirring for a small eternity, sweating–because it is always the hottest day when you take on such boil-y projects–and leaving in the middle of the process to go buy more cornmeal, because I didn’t want to have a bad tomorrow of the thing.  The result was a better scrapple than we have ever served at the cafe.  And we made a lot.

Recently, my grandmother passed away after years of living in that Block Island house on her own, and I am afraid I don’t know what’s going to become of the place where we spent so many summers cooking breakfast.  Where we grew up catching fish, watching my grandma paint, watching my grandpa shake salt on his food so very zealously, smelling rotting skate in buckets by the driveway.  Maybe that was a family recipe: learning how evil a skate can smell when it is too old; knowing now that when I serve skate, the leftovers must be immediately cooked for later use, ideally in chowder.

It can be complicated to take a family tradition and transpose it into restaurant production.  Exposing a holy thing to the stresses of a business can allow for a happy memory to become tainted or for a beloved food to become a burden.  I would be lying if I said I didn’t leave scrapple off the menu for a while to let some of the stank of Mutton’s harder days dissipate.  But now, as we enter our sixth year of business feeling strong, and as I find myself seeking connection to the family and place that is so important to my identity with renewed urgency, I am excited to bring this dish back to our tables.

I won’t leave a recipe for scrapple here, but as I have done in the past, I would rather encourage the wisdom of scrapple–its scrappiness–to influence your approach to cooking at home.  If you want to enjoy a delicious and economical meal, consider experimenting with cooking savory porridges, setting them in the fridge, and frying them later on.  You don’t need any fancy equipment: a pot, a container, and a frying pan (ideally something fairly nonstick).  

Make some stock; cook some milled grains or corn in it.  Mix in meats, cheese, mushrooms, herbs, vegetables, or whatever.  Cool it, slice it, and sear it–serve it with some eggs.  Serve it with nothing, some hot sauce, some maple syrup, some honey, some butter.  This is a great outlet for (naturally) leftover scraps.  If you’re anything like my grandpa, your family will talk about your weird breakfast loaf for many generations to come.  And who knows–maybe it’ll end up on someone’s restaurant menu.

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Food highlights from my travels included:

Orlando

• The Thirsty Gator (a dive bar located in a strip mall–gator-themed everything, gulf oysters, beer, and a kitchen serving bar food somehow without the use of a fryer)

• Parksdale Farm Market in Plant City (serving all things strawberry, although their famous strawberry shortcake was “not in season” even though there were strawberries everywhere, meaning cake is not in season, which I actually feel is very Mutton coded. You can sit in a giant strawberry chair in the back if you want and take pictures; you can buy those coasters that say things about drinking wine with your besties; you can buy an alligator claw on a stick to poke your family members with on long car rides).

  

• The Rainforest Cafe in Disney Springs (very shocking, lots of animatronics, pretend rain storm, piña coladas, my mom did NOT get the avocado that was supposed to come on her fish tacos)

Catskills

• Brushland Eating House (duh, it rules)

Austin

• LoLo (the wine bar where I popped up–great wine, delightful snacks–shoutout to that dang nduja toast with white anchovies, you filthy, swashbuckling animals)

• Nixta (mexican/persian tacos and “ar-modelos” )

• Fish Shop (a newer restaurant that feels like it’s been open for years because the food and vibes are polished–I ate so much I can’t remember what all we had, but they made a genius schnitzel from a cutlet spread with seafood farce, which was breaded and fried and then dressed with a cabbage and herb salad. It was insane; I really fucked with that)

• Matt’s El Rancho (we mainlined queso and margaritas; at the bottom of the menu, there was a line that said “add quail” as if putting a little bird on any menu item is completely normal, which, I suppose, it should probably be.

  

• Seven Spice (a Chinese restaurant where I drunkenly walked into the kitchen to find out how they were cutting the chicken gizzards so thinly and they just pointed to a deli slicer and I was like wait what because I was worried about their fingies but then I started imagining like what if they set the gizzards as a giant terrine and then slice it on the slicer and then heat it up and the slices fall apart and it looks like someone just stood there perfectly slicing gizzards all the live-long day)

Anyway, that is kind of what I’ve been up to aside from cooking at Mutton and Merkin lately. I hope that if you find yourself out in the world that perhaps you will drop by some of the aforementioned spots and have a great time. It is worth noting that the Rainforest Cafe in question is possibly the biggest one I’ve ever seen or the biggest one there is.

As soon as my plane home from Texas landed last week, we got to preparing to celebrate the Cafe’s fifth anniversary. We had a bunch of people to the restaurant for a party we called “The Meat Gala,” and we all got dressed up, rolled out a red carpet, served a ton of food–much of which was set in aspic–and drank wine into the wee hours of the morning.

I could use the space in this newsletter to write about the sappy slurry of emotions that have been sloshing around in me since Mutton turned five. But I did my little speech the other night while serving forty people cheese soufflé, and that feels like enough mush for the present moment. It’s especially hard to translate waving a long spoon in the air onto the page. Instead, I thought I would make a little list of things I/we have experienced here at the cafe these last five years.

We have:

• Conjured a following for scrapple in the town (which we will soon bring back…)

• Survived our first couple of months using an electric, home-style stove because it was what was left behind in our space and we couldn’t afford anything more at the time

• Hoarded containers of lamb eyeballs in the freezer every time we braised lamb heads until we had enough and then breaded and fried them and put them on the menu as popcorn lamb eyes (big hit!)

• Set our fire alarm off for a very long time after thinking a fog machine would complete our Halloween brunch vibe

• Survived most of our first year without a dish machine

• Cumulatively cooked and deboned thousands of pounds of pig feet

• Made a 140 lb man entirely out of bologna, using a shirt form as the torso mold and dish gloves as the hand molds, got him tatted, and then served him to our guests

• Closed early because of period cramps

• Moved our bathroom door from inside the kitchen to inside the dining room, making our lives slightly less social in the back of house but also generally improving ticket times

• Served an omelet to someone who thought there weren’t any eggs in the omelet because it was so smooth and shiny that they thought it was simply just cheese

• Made our earliest batches of bologna in a tiny Waring food processor

• Had a dog shit on the floor and instead of saying something or picking it up, its owners just got up and zoomed off in a teeny tiny fiat 500 like villains in a cartoon

• Gotten people to accept a cocktail known as the Poo Driver into their hearts

• Closed early because it was nice out

• Hosted two renfaire parties in the space

• Had a wedding inside the restaurant (hi Grace and Rose :) )

• Used the same, single-sided printer for five years, meaning that a portion of every single day was dedicated to turning over pages and baby-birding them back into the printer to do the other side

• Waited patiently for Doja Cat to come in sometime (hopefully soon)

• Seen the price of butter double and then go back down

• Seen the price of olive oil double and not go back down

• Paid as much as twenty bucks for a box of gloves during the pandemic

• Cooked quail testicles, which everyone said looked kind of big for a quail

• Not had a work laptop until just the other day lol

• Served luxurious, five-hour Sunday lunches that outlasted sunlight in the winter months

• Witnessed several babies take down entire slabs of pâté on their own (why do babies love liver so much?)

• Opened a garage bar as a prank but then it was real and it’s still open and its name is Merkin

• Had our mop bucket mysteriously and temporarily stolen under the cover of night but nothing else ever at all knock on wood and also *that we know of*

Our adventure has been an underfunded, scrappy, exciting, frustrating, scary, amazing, hilarious, gratifying, delicious, vulnerable, sad, and wholly incredible one so far. I feel so aged from these last five years. My attention span is shot; I am completely traumatized; I am really fast at cooking; I am exhausted by the ebb and flow of business and the gutting slowness of the interminable winter each year. I am overwhelmed by and full of gratitude for all of the incredible produce and meat our farmer friends raise–all the miraculous things we get to use in the kitchen and pour into glasses. I am genuinely amazed by the people I get to work with here every day. I learn so much every day from everyone around me. I never thought this restaurant would make it past a year, and now we are five–we have a new business, too, and the best team we have ever had. I am so deeply grateful that we can keep adding to our list of experiences within and without these walls. Here’s to another five years!

But I had a lot of dull knives this past week. And if you’re a home cook reading this, I am sure you have your share of dull knives, too. Maybe, like me, you’ve been running around doing a bunch of other shit you’re responsible for, or, also like me, you felt you deserved a break and went mini golfing instead. Maybe you, too, considered the cooking you’d need to do this week but then got drunk and ate one too many mushrooms and had scary dreams and then rinsed and repeated the day after that. Maybe you also had a lot of laundry to fold and emails to answer and phone calls to make and menus to write and meetings to have and deadlines to make and doors to open and balloons to inflate and this and that and these and those. Maybe the weeds had consumed you, say.

Maybe you considered the ease with which you could potentially slice through an onion if you would just sharpen the thing but what you did instead was nothing. Maybe you hit the honing steel again and again and again to no major avail. Maybe you bruised the parsley. Maybe the garlic chives laughed in your face.

I am not a very big fan of the trend toward effortless everything. I appreciate very much the idea that folks in the modern world are more overworked than ever and have less time to cook or do other life tasks–and that trying to incorporate cooking in a less burdensome way is a good thing. But I do think there is a difference between thoughtlessness and ease. More specifically, I believe it is important to wrestle with recipes of various levels of complexity or involvement in order to cook well and live well. To always approach cooking at the point of least friction (forgive me) is to miss out on the practice of attention and care. That being said, we all hit the wall sometimes or go through periods in which our capacity is lower than usual. For me, this week, until I sort of grabbed my pigtails, screaming, and phoned a very skilled knife sharpening friend for help, I could hardly claim to own a knife, other than one flamboyant refurbished scimitar that has little business getting involved with basic prep.

I do believe we can still make great food with abundant attention when we are limited and stretched and in the weeds; however, I think we need to let our limitations guide us rather than trying to produce the same dishes with our hands tied behind our backs. Or, in this case, with no knives. I have no issue with the heavenly mandate, “store-bought is fine.” It applies to a lot of things, and it removes the guilt from cooking while busy. But I am also here to offer that homemade is fine–and can be profound in its simplicity.

This week, we served a soup that required only one dull pairing knife in its execution–and better that it be dull for the task of garlic peeling so as to preserve one’s thumb. While it required the least knife work of any soup we’ve served in recent months, this one probably received the highest praise. And that may be due to its appropriately simple, soothing nature at a rainy and soft time of year–but perhaps, also, it was because the soup was so plain that it required as much attention as we could afford to give it.

Most everyone is familiar with egg drop soup in one form or another–it’s a soup that presents differently across various cuisines. But the basics are the same: drop some beaten egg in hot broth, simmer briefly, and call it a day. Beyond that, there are myriad additions to make or whims to follow in its preparation.

The leading lady of our soup this week was whole garlic cloves. I have to admit that over the last five years, as I’ve become progressively more weeded by the week, I have often chosen to skip the step of chopping garlic for soups and stews altogether. I run into the kitchen, start in on a cup of coffee, dump a bucket of congealed pork stock into a pot, and chase it with a quart of [freshly] peeled garlic (miss me with that pre-peeled stuff–sorry ‘bout it). Even if we haven’t gotten to peeling the day before, it’s not that hard to quickly denude a few heads. But there has been nary a more liberating feeling than kerplunking an entire quart of garlic cloves into a pot and just letting it rip. Such has become my custom.

Sure, some will argue that the cloves break down into the cooking liquid and that it doesn’t matter either way. But not me. I like it when I see the garlic cloves bobbing in the soup. It makes me feel like I’m serving medicine. The velvety texture of a boiled garlic clove is not something we get to have enough. Maybe I’m clawing at the nostalgia of having grown up in the nineties, when everyone was jizzing themselves about serving a whole head of roasted garlic. Maybe I’ve got my mind on vampires, as our work in hospitality is predicated on inviting people in the door. I don’t know.

What I do know is that my knifeless soup owes almost its entire character to the overabundance of whole, boiled garlic cloves. And a little bit to the inclusions of egg, herbs, cheese, and pepper. And a lot a bit to the attention we pay the seasoning, which is always important but even more so when hardly anything is going on in the bowl in question.

No Knife Soup

This is not a recipe but rather a method, because you can do a lot with no sharp at all. The one thing you maybe can’t do is not hate yourself just a little.

Stock: even Ina says you should make your own. If it helps you at all, we often only use bones and a paltry amount of vegetable or herb scrap in ours. If you don’t have mirepoix shenanigans, you’re just fine in my book.

Aromatics/additions: obviously, I am stanning whole cloves of garlic, who need hardly hold the hand of another scented vegetable or root. But other shit that’s good is pretty much anything. A knob of ginger, some cabbage leaves, some small onions, a cheese rind, a mushroom or three…this is where you take a hard look at your life and see what can be torn into the broth. I think it’s best to choose items that will get soft or be easy to fish out if they’re only going in to infuse.

Egg: beat up some eggs! You can add other seasonings of your choice, but I don’t (other than salt)

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Finishing things: fresh torn herbs go a long way in a cozy broth. We use parsley and dill, but you can do whatever you want. Cheese on top is optional but transcendent–you can either use a hard cheese for intense flavor or a soft, gooey cheese (but I think soft cheese is sort of even better when you throw in some stale bread first). Pepper? I am one of these annoying people who doesn’t understand the ubiquitous nature of black pepper in food, but I do happen to think it adds life to very garlicky and very simple broth. Especially hardens my bones during this rainy season we’re in.

Mostly, this is a soup of tasting and adjusting and using your intuition. The only true guidance I would offer is that the texture of the egg drop depends on the level of boiling happening in your soup when you add in the egg. A hard boil will yield a sort of wild, puffy, souffléd consistency, while you will get very milky, subtle curds if the soup is not simmering at all when you drop egg. I like to go for a confident simmer–and then I reduce the heat when the wispy curds appear.

If you also have no knives but wish to eat something soulful and good during these chilly, green, rainy, spring days, I would recommend making yourself a batch of broth, grabbing a dozen good eggs, and having this method in your back pocket for gratifying and impressive breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. To yield to your capacity can be a source of inspiration rather than source of stress. Maybe next week, you or someone else will tend to your neglected utensils. But for now, soup.

The produce is actually coming. It really is. But with the sweet anticipation comes an aftertaste of trepidation. After all, it can be a bit of a responsibility to not embarrass the vegetables when they finally finish their arduous voyage to us. There are plenty of us who think less and do more, and that is possibly a better way to live. But there are also those among us who fear that we may dress a thing badly and send it off to the plush red carpet of our guests’ tongues only to be read for filth.

True, there is one easy and correct answer for these green spring vegetables: peas, asparagus, leafy greens, fiddleheads, spring onions, etc. Just boil them in well-seasoned water and top them with a thick pat of butter.

A boiled vegetable, green or otherwise, is a beautiful thing. Yet I know that anyone who grew up in a household where the person cooking took the boiling too far may disagree. I have heard horror stories of green beans and brussels sprouts brought to gruesome ends in a pressure cooker. But I would say, as a collective, due to the era of abundant food magazines, websites, and now social media, people have become aware of the dangers of boiling too much.

As someone who really enjoys a bite that doesn’t bite back, I have a fondness for occasionally eating hammered produce. But then there is something so youthful, optimistic, and frankly chic about a perfect blanch. The dark, hydrating green color that emerges from an ice bath is undeniably arresting. The brain feels healthy just from the sight of the thing. The gut briefly and maybe gullibly feels considered. I digress: all of this is just to say that the spectrum of vegetables cooked in hot, salty water is vast, and the proper cookedness is determined by the teeth of the cook, and, ideally, the consumer.

And so, the question becomes how to show these boiled things best when a pat of butter feels too simple or has been visited too many times in a week?

I have been a hollandaise bitch for a long time. I hope you are, too, because what other kind of bitch is there to be when the days start off chilly, end chilly, and glaze us in warm sun during the hours in between? A sauce that meets us with equal brightness and warmth–and which is able to protect us from the edges of the day–is just the thing for spring. And, perfectly, it is an ideal match for the aforementioned boiled vegetable.

But what for those of you who are tired of things you’ve done before or crave a little bit of adventure? How best to meet a perfect thing on the outskirts of itself? Many of us are familiar with a couple of hollandaise derivatives–sauces that spring forth from the hollandaise formula but include different seasonings or substitutions. Perhaps most popular is béarnaise, which relies on reduced vinegar for its acid rather than lemon juice and includes shallots and tarragon. Though this sauce is often used for fish or meat, it is an excellent vegetable sauce as well.

Learning about mother sauces like hollandaise and all of their offspring, such as béarnaise, is a good idea. But even more useful is gaining an understanding of what the hell is going on when we make a thing so that we become free from the shackles of recipes and last-minute trips to the grocery store. Don’t get me wrong: the classics are classic for a reason. We need to cling to these pillars of cuisine so that we don’t swim too far away, I think. Having lived through the restaurant scene of the early aughts and having remained alive into the present day, I have witnessed plenty of “takes on,” “plays on,” and “interpretations,” that have not made me feel good about creative freedom. That being said, I think Miss Frizzle insisted best that we “take chances, make mistakes, and get messy,” in this life. Maybe it is ok to skin our knees in the pursuit of dinner.

The other day, we were planning the menu for dinner service, and I wanted to serve hot asparagus, because the weather had become suddenly quite cold. Normally, I am a boiled heap of asparagus guy, and we serve it with a pat of butter on top that weighs about three ounces. But I wanted to do something a little cozier still. I wanted the asparagus to sit under a little sauce blankie, I guess.

We have been sitting on jars of vegemite since our early days at the cafe, back when we used to serve fettuccine with cheddar and vegemite sauce. Maybe one day we will bring that dish back, but I am not quite prepared to go there just yet. It is delicious yet also reminds me a bit shamefully of being in my twenties. Fettuccine aside, vegemite is lovely, and I considered how well it would do with the glorious stank of asparagus. I considered how well the salty, savory, funky paste would do stirred into a batch of hollandaise sauce or something adjacent.

I think it’s safe to say that vegemite is a polarizing condiment. To the uninitiated, it is a mysterious and intimidating sludge known for its specific, overpowering flavor. To the vegemite-educated, it is often beloved for its specific, overpowering flavor. For sure, vegemite is intense, but there is a choice as to how much vegemite a person puts on or in their food, which I think is a crucial part of understanding what has long been the scorned woman of the international food aisle.

Vegemite is a byproduct of beer making–it is made from processed brewer’s yeast mixed with malt extract and some vegetable extracts. It is nearly black in color, smooth, and dense. An easy way to grasp the nuance of the flavor of vegemite is to temper its intensity a little by either diluting it with some water or tasting a careful amount of it on a piece of buttered toast. The flavor is salty, yes, but it is also incredibly complex, malty, and savory–sort of like a mixture of beer and worcestershire sauce.

And so, the other day, when I decided to give it a whirl as an ingredient in my sauce, I considered what might echo its bready, toasty flavors best. Rather than making the sauce with just butter, I decided to include some brown butte, too.

Everyone makes hollandaise a little differently, but the way I make it is the way I was trained to for the brunch line at Prune, back in the day. There is no clarified butter; there is no streaming in the fat; there is no bain marie. There is just a pot of rapidly boiling butter, your elbow grease, the luckiest whisk in the restaurant, some egg yolks and lemon juice, and a little cayenne.

The success of this method relies entirely upon the confidence of the cook and is a great party trick. You bring the butter up to an angry boil; meanwhile, you whisk your lemon juice and yolks together in a bowl, and then right before it feels like the butter might start to brown, you dump that shit into the yolk mixture in three confident additions, whisking like a motherfucker. You then exhale and season with the salt and cayenne. The ratio I use is eight yolks to a pound of butter and somewhere around three quarters of a cup of lemon juice. Obviously, this makes about a pint and a half of sauce, so you can reduce accordingly if you’re making this at home.

Here comes the part about creativity: the hollandaise emulsion relies on bringing together a liquid and a fat with egg yolks as the binder. We use the same concept when we make dressings and mayonnaise. The lecithin in the egg yolks allows us to disperse fat droplets into the liquid, creating an emulsion with two ingredients that would otherwise stay separated. You don’t need me to tell you this, because there are a million cookbooks saying so, and there is On Food and Cooking and Molecular Gastronomy and also that dude J. Kenji López-Alt. I do not need to tell you about this shit. But I can at least tell you how to fuck around a little bit.

So you need the yolks or some kind of equally effective emulsifier. But otherwise, you really just need some kind of wet thing and some kind of fat thing. Wet things can be acids like citrus or vinegar, but they can also be stocks, vegetable juices, or alcohols. Fat things can be oils, butters of varying brownness, or animal fats. You just need to choose one thing from column a and one thing from column b. You can use any number of herbs or spices in your emulsified sauce. You can try many different combinations, embarrassing generations of chefs and your own family, as you get bolder.

I suggest trying not to get too stupid about the whole thing but to use this technique to make sauces that complement the flavors of the item you are saucing. In the case of the asparagus, the vegemite served to add a level of savory complexity, which worked well with the bizarre, idiosyncratic flavor of asparagus. It didn’t hurt that the inclusions of vegemite and brown butter yielded a rich, brown sauce, which, when poured over the asparagus, had a very nineteen-fifties aesthetic effect.

I hope you will use this information for good and evil but ideally the right kinds of each. Below is the recipe for asparagus with vegemite sauce. I hope you will either make it or come by the cafe next week to eat it, since we will be serving it again! One of our servers remarked that the sauce tasted sort of reminiscent of welsh rarebit, which was accurate and also highly excellent news.

Asparagus with Vegemite Sauce

4 egg yolks

¼-⅓ c lemon juice

6 oz butter

4 oz brown butter, liquid consistency (if you have cold brown butter, melt it first)

2 T vegemite

Salt to taste

1# asparagus

Pot of salty water

Bring the butter to a boil.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the yolks and lemon juice.

In two confident additions (because this is a smaller batch; more additions for larger batches), beat the boiling butter into the yolk mixture.

The sauce should be thick-ish and glossy. Whisk in the brown butter and the vegemite. Season to taste with salt. Store in a warm place but not a hot place until you are ready to serve. Better yet, be ready to serve it asap.

If the sauce seems thin but not broken, whisk it over a very low flame to finish cooking out the sauce and thicken it.

If the sauce looks separated, get a couple yolks and a little water or lemon juice in a quart container or small container with high sides, and stream the broken sauce into it using an immersion blender, which is your number one boy when it comes to fixing a broken sauce or dressing. Adjust the seasoning after fixing.

Boil the asparagus in salty water for four minutes. Make sure your water is actually salty, because you only have the four minutes of contact with the asparagus to get the salt into and onto it, and that is not that much time. I do not fuck around with shocking asparagus, as it is already anxious enough. Preferably, serve it right away under a nice, warm blankie of the vegemite sauce.

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Working in restaurants typically means missing out on family and friends who gather on weekends–or being expected to never miss work for anything.  While I certainly don’t believe that work always comes first, it often does by default.  When I was freshly out of college, I had plans with a then long distance girlfriend to visit on my days off from work.  At some point, the chef changed my schedule, and I let him know that I already had plans on my newly scheduled days.  He told me that cooking equaled sacrifice, and while he eventually caved and let me keep my schedule that week, he made me feel like I had no right to expect to maintain personal relationships while working in a kitchen.  That chef was nicer than he sounds in this story, and I ended up having a good rapport with him, but he is dead now from a heart attack, which he had at the age of forty-five.  I sometimes wonder whether this was the sacrifice of which he spoke.

These days, it feels like the expectation of the industry is changing.  I know that when I opened Cafe Mutton, I wanted to keep it real and make sure that the restaurant didn’t get in the way of life events too much.  But regardless, being open on the weekends means working on the weekends, and that has meant that I have missed a lot.  Even though I have tried to keep things in perspective–we have typically closed for holidays to ensure we get time with our families and friends–time moves fast. 

Right now, I am in Orlando, Florida.  Yesterday, my family gathered for a memorial service for my Nana, who passed away a year ago.  The day before that, we were in Sarasota, visiting my gramps, who has been living with Alzheimer’s for years and who I hadn’t seen since he entered a memory care facility a few years ago.

I found out my Nana passed away while I was prepping for a pop-up in Michigan last spring.  There was nothing I could really do except for cook the dinner.  My sister came to the event, which made it a little easier, but it felt so weird and surreal.  This is the industry–the strange experience of knowing that someone will not be brought back if you walk away from the line.  That serving or not serving someone their dinner will not afford us a time machine for the phone call that didn’t happen.  I hadn’t taken the time to call my Nana for Mother’s Day.  She died a few days later, just before her ninetieth birthday.  During my time in the midwest with my sister, we bought some nail decals to put on in honor of Nana, since she used to bring those to our house and put them on us when we were kids.  But we didn’t really get the chance to celebrate her memory until just now.

A couple of weeks ago, my other grandma passed.  I had fewer regrets about my later involvement with her, as my team had run the restaurant without me a month prior so that I could attend her ninety-fifth birthday party.  I stepped out of the kitchen to call her when I learned she was nearing the end, after she took her first dose of morphine.  I was expecting more labored energy, but she just got on the line and went, “so, how’s business!”  Business, business.  Everybody knows that business is number one.  I told her how it was.  She hoped she could see me again.  

I did not go to her bedside that weekend, because I felt I had been with her recently enough in the way it counted most.  I hope that was true, but maybe I can’t know.  After our call, I went back in and finished up the day with the crew.  My mom texted me after she passed to say that my grandma had been so enthused by the Merkin project that she set aside a couple of paintings she owned of nude women with their bushes on full display to give to me.  I thought that was really funny.  I wouldn’t have had the courage to explain the whole thing to her.  

My whole family has always been really understanding of The Business, The Business–patient with my work schedule and supportive of my career goals.  But lately, I have started to feel pretty lonely and isolated from my family after so many years of the very wide berth I have been given.  I have two sisters and a brother, and our house was always kind of bustling and lively when we were growing up.  We all visited family together somewhat regularly, even if not all the time.  Unfortunately, between the increasingly common nature of American grind culture and the degrading economy, I think my parents have wanted to give us all a lot of time and space to focus on our work.  They don’t want to get in the way of our respective futures–but I don’t want them to erase themselves from the future in the face of our stupid jobs, most laughably of all is mine: pretty much just constantly making a sandwich.  

Over the years, I have had to re-train my parents to understand that I want to be invited to things, even if I might not be able to make it.  They don’t want to burden me with obligations or invitations that might get in the way of my work, but I am hoping to get them to understand that I want to continue to be a family.  That perhaps after disappearing for four-ish years, I am ready to surface and re-join the fold.  

The past few days have been so grounding and healing, but it’s not easy to see how much everyone has changed in five years.  Everyone is older.  We are all the same except for gravity, maybe. I worry about my parents and their grief.  I worry they won’t let us support them back.  

My gramps apparently doesn’t remember us, but when we saw him yesterday, he seemed like the same mischievous jokester that he was when he knew our names.  Before his cognitive decline, he used to give my wife, Bettina, a hard time just to be funny.  He always would say stuff like, “I don’t really know about this one.” When we went to visit him, he pointed at her, looked at her super suspiciously, and made some kind of silly comment like he would have in the past.  We sang to him, and he pretended to conduct our chorus, kind of like Snoopy.  He said he was happy.  

Right now, I am writing this newsletter in the corner at our Airbnb in Orlando, trying to tell all of you how much it means to me to be able to get out of the restaurant and how important it is to weave myself back into my family, while my dad shows my gramps’s watches and tchotchkes to my siblings to see if anyone would like one, and I am facing away.  I am a workaholic.  There is a fraudulent nature to this piece.  Or this is just the way that I am, and I have found a way to have both.  Nothing is perfect, and I am here, and what I am trying to say is that is a very special thing.  

It was from New Jersey, which is ok to say about asparagus but not people. It was fat. It was stinky and good and lovely. At the restaurant, we blanched it in very salty water and served it cold, dressed in a simple white wine vinaigrette, on top of a pile of sheep ricotta, doused in some brown butter and then crowned with shaved bottarga. When I got home, I ate some boiled with butter.

It is astonishing that we get to eat this weird vegetable. It is equally astonishing that so many people like it, considering its assertive, meaty, sort of rank aroma. It is one of those rare things that is grossly perfect but also branded well in the public eye: asparagus is the vegetable of spring. It has become ubiquitous enough–nay, abused, if we’re honest–that it lacks the try-hardness of ramps, making it less cool, less insistent, less tainted. It is the green thing that signals the safety of spring. Asparagus may as well be the finish line for winter–the thing you see, mirage-like on the horizon, as you bare down and squint through the last icy wind, cheeks raw but unfeeling in the wake of false springs and last-last snows and then the next snows that come after that.

And it’s ok for asparagus to be a mirage, because, as we established already, it is so symbolically important but simultaneously a throw-away vegetable. A thing to get it up for so desperately but also to carelessly stab into an ice cream scoop of mash on a banquet plate-up line. Has there ever been a vegetable so hornily awaited and blatantly disrespected as the asparagus? Has any vegetable ever been so egoless and professional, showing up to perform again and again at any old ratchet venue, unembarrassed on the buffet as the people stumble-scream I Will Always Love You?

Following this train of thought, we could consider that asparagus, maybe, has more in common with Whitney Houston and Dolly Parton than other produce: it is an icon, a businesswoman, a legend, an enigma, and a very hard working diva. Our familiarity with the repertoire and range of the asparagus does not weaken its power: it only strengthens it.

Or is the asparagus a racing horse, always ridden hard and then put away wet? Oh steed to ungrateful masters. Oh racer for drunken fools. The horse is no prospector, champs down on stainless bit over gold or silver. Asparagus, though, crunches no consolation apple or sugar cube in the stable. Rather, bridled with rubber bands, it is a sore prisoner. A bound up saint, not retaliating but reflecting the horrors of its confinement back to its captors. Behaving perfectly. Infinite of cheek and round to spin them forth. The next one, the next one, the next. Absorbing the little slaps. Absorbing us. Reminding us of its sacrifice only tomorrow on harsh whiffs of piss, sort of polite rebuke, really.

My seasonal affair with asparagus normally lasts as long as I can show the asparagus best. As soon as I see yesterday’s stuff laying in the soggy gutter of its blanching water runoff, in an unlined hotel pan, or, equally grievously, on a sopping, salty towel in an ugly, white fish tub, my fervor wanes. The asparagus cannot re-green itself to me, as it fades to a kermit color and admits unsightly bends in its once-erect spine. At that point, I have killed god, as we tend to do, and it becomes time to enter the sloppy inferno of summer’s bounty.

But for now, I have just seen something good and straight and sturdy and dark, slick and handsome with its smart skin. I will snap it diligently; I will tip my head back and pelican it down, stalk by meaty stalk. I will prescribe it as best taken plain but then hypocritically serve it with a bunch of other bullshit; I will smell it on thick clouds of steam and dream of it at night and eat cold spears of it, coated in congealed butter right out of the fridge when I wake, and I will make a fool of it too. I will saint this thing and shame it in the same month; I will shove it down, scrape its knees, and kiss them, too.

But it’s too early to know my game, and I am freshly in it. I am tending this first case of asparagus well; I am in awe and relief and full of benedictions. My eyes are clear to it and my hair is washed at it and I am solid of composition. I can rest my little head and hang up my hat on its self-contained magic, letting the strange beast of burden shoulder the yoke of flavor complex a little while. I will dab its brow. I will sing my pointy oxen little weird tunes of thanks. I will not tell them of my nearing treachery and my wobbling spine. You will not tell them how metaphorized they have been made to be already–you had better keep my secret, that I cannot just let a thing be a thing, even one as weird and specific and wretched and ideal and gnashing and thrashing and immaculate as The Asparagus. We Will Have A Nice Time.

Once again, the week has gotten away from me. When considering what to put in the newsletter this week, I guess I felt I was coming up short. In a sense, no news is good news: we are humming along over here, with neither major tragedies to speak of nor crazy tales to tell.

We are getting a little bit busier, which is always exciting; most of us small business owners in Hudson have been holding our breath for this for months. And make no mistake, the breath will remain held. April, May, and June up here are transitional months: there are pops of excitement; people exit their caves, grumpy, hungry, and horny for rosé. Often these little rushes can be false starts, but I think we all hope that this year will be different.

Certainly, if you haven’t read our newsletter about the slow season, go ahead and familiarize yourself with how fucked we have all been out here in Hudson. A couple of local businesses have started GoFundMe campaigns that you should check out and support if you can–those that immediately come to mind are Raven and Boar, Red Dot, and Little Rico. I am sure there are more–this winter has truly taken few prisoners, and many of us could use support right now.

Anyway, I won’t go back into the details of the specific mire into which we are all sinking. I’ve aired my grievances with regards to capitalism in the here and now. I will tell you a few other little ditties instead.

Our recently launched weekday dinner services have been going great, and we are having so much fun seeing them grow a little more each week. It’s been cool and a little reminiscent of our early days to have slightly quieter dinners where we get more opportunity to chat with all our guests.

We also have expanded our wine list quite a bit, and I think we have a really cool lineup of stuff right now–and so many of our wines work well with the entire menu. If anyone is reading this and gives a shit and won’t hate me for what I’m about to say, I think you should come drink the skin contact malvasia from Emilia Romagna that we have on by the glass right now. It smells like flowers, tastes like orange marmalade, and has such a fun but yielding strictness from six months on skins. Before you X out of this newsletter because you hate me for wasting your eyesight and brainspace by stanning orange wine like a pre-pandemic era psychopath, I just want to say that if you keep reading this, you will learn about upcoming events.

We will be celebrating our fifth birthday in a couple of months–our real birthday is May twelfth, but we are waiting to celebrate until the twenty-fifth so that we can put together a proper extravaganza. We are throwing a giant party, called The Meat Gala. This will essentially be a wild cocktail party with an emphasis on attire, followed by a big, family-style feast. We will have snacks and drinks in the garage during the cocktail party, and then the dinner in the cafe space around the corner will be about three courses and include wine for those who want to have it. Reservations are available on resy.com.

We have also opened the books for our Sunday Long Lunch in the garage for the months of April and May. Long Lunch continues to be a singular, slow, luxurious, and convivial dining situation. If you’re interested in eating a shared five-course meal with a small group of strangers, this is for you. While it is a set menu with a set price, the value is really excellent, and we are operating that service without gratuity. Erego, what you pay for on Resy is the very final price. Join us! It’s a lot of fun.

Other things to come: on April 11th, I will be joining Efrén Hernandez and Vinny Gilberti at Troutbeck in Amenia to cook at an event called “Gather at the Hudson Valley Table.” You can find tickets online, and it will be really cool. I won’t spoil the whole menu, but you can bet your bottom dollar that I will be making borscht with the odious beets that mock us with their abundance before spring produce arrives. I will also be making pig head terrines, so if you want that stuff, get over to that event!

Also, in mid-May, I will be cooking some food at Lolo wine bar in Austin, TX. Yay! It is going to be so fun, partially because food and wine are awesome, but also because doing events with friends rules. I just might break out my cowboy boots for that, but please let me know if you think that would be weird. If any of you live in Austin, follow Lolo for details!

Otherwise, we are just up to our weird little days over here. Our crew is the best it’s ever been, and I am so excited to see what heights we reach as a team this spring and summer. Come through and grab some brunch tomorrow! You’ll be hosted and cooked for by the most talented and angelic of angels.

Cheers,

Shaina

“What kind of cuisine do you serve at Cafe Mutton?”

“What’s your favorite dish to make?”

“Hey, girl! How’s everything going with the bakery?”

“Fuck, marry, kill: the three ghosts in “A Christmas Carol?””

I struggle to answer all of these questions (kill Christmas present for sure though), but the charcuterie one feels like something that I actually find myself pondering unprompted. Because while I love charcuterie–both the making and the eating of it–it feels like a category of food production that takes a lot of work to make and sometimes receives a disproportionately tepid response from consumers. I wrestle often with the giant why: why do I constantly choose to make my life more difficult than it needs to be? What is so repellent about ease? What feels so important about continuing to uphold a cooking tradition that feels less essential to our culture’s diet than it may have in the past?

I didn’t grow up in a family that ate a ton of pork. As I recall, we were more of a beef, chicken, and salmon household. Although my mom, who is a great cook and loves trying new recipes, made some really great pork dishes, my dad was never that fond of pork–especially ham. It, to this day, is difficult to get him to clarify whether this is a taste thing or something that stemmed from his Jewish upbringing. He was not raised kosher and never objected to having any particular foods in the house, but perhaps there was just enough ambient concern about the cleanliness of pigs in his earlier life to cause some quiet unease. And what is more relatable than accidentally holding on to culturally imposed shame around one’s activities? To be a pork fiend, as it were, is not, perhaps, to simply feel clean and free about it. But I digress.

Whatever the origin of his pork side eye was, it did not make its way into my own psyche, and pork has become the meat that I cook most frequently and most abundantly. I wasn’t always like this: while I have always been drawn to meat, I did not get into pork and all its applications in charcuterie until I was in my twenties. And while I made pâtés, terrines, and sausages at home, I didn’t get the chance to truly go all in on my exploration of them until I opened Cafe Mutton.

Pork, of course, is not the only meat for charcuterie exploration, as there exist such things as all-beef franks and whatnot, but ultimately, there is little denying the perfection that is lard when it comes to charcuter-ing. Its melting point and structure are such that lard creates the most velvety effect in cold meat preparations without leaving them too mealy or too hard (if this is hard to conjure, mentally, imagine the cold fat cap on a steak vs the cold fat cap on a pork chop. Two completely different textures).

Since opening the cafe, I have crawled deeper and deeper into the charcuterie rabbit hole. When we opened our doors, we were only producing country pâté, bologna, and salami. Since that time, we have made and served many, many different emulsified sausages, terrines, mortadella, pork loaves, dry cured sausages, bloodwursts, and liver mousses. It has been an endlessly fascinating thing to puzzle together techniques and approaches to old, traditional charcuterie recipes in order to find new possibilities. Even still, the nerding is occasionally one-sided.

In October, a few of my friends and I put together an event that we called, “Meaty, Drunky Party Time.” Sohail and Sara Zandi of Brushland Eating House hosted it; Sohail and I cooked; and our friend, Jonathan Gray of Selection Massale, curated and served the wine. The whole idea of the dinner, shockingly, was to serve a lot of meat and wine and have a great party.

We put out a huge spread of charcuterie and oysters in the beginning; then we roasted and carved game birds; then we sent out family style entrées. While we were slicing all the cold sausages to put out during the snack hour, Sohail said something like, ‘don’t you feel like making bologna and mortadella and stuff is so much work and nobody cares about it that much?’ And I agreed. There is something so alluring to the chef about achieving a perfectly silky, tightly bound emulsified meat product, but for many guests, the thing is just a cold slice of delicately seasoned meat–far less emotionally activating than a juicy, hot steak with butter melting all over it; far less breathtaking than a bubbly, melty, cheesy item.

At Cafe Mutton, I think about this all the time. Why spend hours producing charcuterie that underperforms as a menu item when it takes ten minutes to make a batch of crêpe batter that consistently outsells any other item on the menu? Why sell a cold, square, plain looking pâté sandwich when a gooey, cheesy omelet is thrice as popular?

At the moment, charcuterie is a highly technical category of food that tenaciously endures in our society that cherishes convenience above so much else. We are living in a time when people simultaneously value the idea of artisan goods and spend their money on efficient, factory-produced items instead. Fast food, fast casual, fast fashion. And with the economy as fucked as it is, it’s no surprise that the majority of folks would also like these fast and easy items to be inexpensive. Even still, however shrinking it may be, there is a market for charcuterie made by human people.

Making charcuterie by hand is laborious–there is the farming first; then there is the slaughter. There is the primary butchering of the animal. These first steps are not ones we do ourselves at the cafe, as we do not have a farm, a slaughterhouse, or even a walk-in refrigerator–and so we do not have rooms to rent to entire pig carcasses. We begin with large cuts like shoulders, heads, and legs and take it from there.

Next, the meat needs to be cut up. The meat and fat need to be ground. Depending on the product, the meat may need to be further chopped up or blended and then stuffed and poached or trayed up and baked: there is a lot of temperature control that needs to happen during all of these steps. There is a lot of necessary precision when it comes to scaling out large batches of these items. Charcuterie takes a lot of planning and focus, and in order to get good results, a substantial batch of any one item could take days to produce–or, in the case of the dry cured stuff, months.

The idea of spending days fucking around with scaling, grinding, mixing, temping, cooking, chilling, pressing, and checking meats might not seem super alluring to the chef who knows they can easily buy steaks to cook that evening and sell through all of them at a nice price. But there are many here among us who are drawn to the arduous and patient process of perfecting meat products. If not for their popularity, certainly for the simple, lonely glory of it. That, perhaps, and an energetic connection to a bygone world of tradition, utility, and thriftiness.

Early charcuterie production was a means to an end. Cutting up meat scraps and cooking them in the intestines of the animal was a way to make the most food out of a beast–and, in the case of cured meats and sausages, a way to make the meat last as long as possible without much access to cold storage. It is still economical and responsible to use scraps and off cuts of meat to make charcuterie, even if freezers and refrigerators are readily available to us now. But because making charcuterie is a category of cooking that relies so heavily on centuries of accumulated knowledge and technique, producing it now feels like a powerful way to honor those early cooking traditions and connect with something deeper in the kitchen than a tiktok recipe.

There are so many old recipes for sausage and pâté that are fascinating to look through–poring over an old charcuterie book is not only an incredible way to get a glimpse into kitchens of yore and learn foundational technique; it’s also a unique opportunity to understand how relatively easy it is for us to make these items in a modern kitchen. Our culture is so preoccupied with convenience, speed, and ease that we often forget that even laborious projects we take on in the kitchen today are nothing compared to what they entailed even one hundred years ago. So even though producing these items is still a fair undertaking in a modern kitchen, we don’t have to confine ourselves to the five ingredient, ten minute recipe. Making charcuterie is a great way to reject the isolating convenience of modern cooking culture and truly connect with ancient, gratifying practices.

Meanwhile (and sort of ironically), there is a lot of charcuterie that affords us convenience and symbolizes the industrialization of our society and cultural leaning toward efficiency. Bologna, one of the meats we produce here at Cafe Mutton, comes from the old world, but its modern connotation is industrial. It is hard not to think of Oscar Mayer, of Lunchables, of eating a cold sandwich with your legs dangling off a giant metal piece of a bridge you are building in New York City. Deli meats like that are staples of modern, portable foods like sandwiches. The types of foods that travel well during busy days trying not to fall off the ferris wheel of capitalism.

Though similar, bologna does not carry remotely the type of clout that Italian mortadella does. The name bologna alone is soft and chinless and strange. Where mortadella sounds like something lovely to put out at a party, bologna evokes unshaven dudes, standing in the kitchen in their underwear, hunched over a small TV (not that this is a bad vibe, of course, but you get me). Probably most people, if asked, would describe bologna as a meat of robust mystery–mysterious provenance and substance–that should probably not be solved. Probably most people, if asked, would imagine bologna served in a lunch box before they’d imagine seeing it on a plate.

Some bologna recipes are incredibly close to those for mortadella. Bologna is most often made with beef, while mortadella does not contain beef; regardless, they are basically just first cousins with very different hobbies and friends. Both are meats that are blended with ice and added fat to create an emulsified paste that is then stuffed into a casing and poached or steamed until fully cooked. They are just gigantic sausages, and we often eat them cold.

Something I like so much about deli meats like bologna and mortadella is that they relate so wonderfully to the aesthetic of animation. For a person who clings to the traditional, the hand made, the wooden, the iron, the inconvenient, I have a surprising fondness for the aesthetic of the imaginary–the bright, the smooth, the colorful–the artificial, the cartoon. My affinity for visual artifice might be a symptom of the world’s chaos: holding hands with the style of cartoon gives me a sense of safety–a sense that if this food could be seen in a mid-century cartoon, it isn’t real and can’t hurt me. Or, perhaps, if this restaurant is a mid-century cartoon, it is not real and so even if we get hurt, we will resurrect in the next frame and keep chasing after the thing that we want.

Emulsified sausages are the ultimate bridge between the worlds of craft and animation: to make them by hand takes skill and attention; to serve them takes humor and a fondness for strange shades of pink (I am as of yet unable to avoid nitrates, as serving grey bologna would take not only the wind out of my sails but also the hull off my ship and the water out of my ocean). To make charcuterie at Cafe Mutton is, for me, to have the power to marry the old world and the imaginary world in a way that feels clean and right and just.

To make charcuterie is purpose-giving, too, as it gives one forward momentum to have to wait until tomorrow to check the set on a jellied meat terrine. At an event I did last year in LA with chef Jeremy Fox, I remember him commenting that the only reason to go to bed at night was so that you can wake up and cut into your terrine to see its cross section. My wife was there cooking with us and looked over at me, astonished that someone other than me in the room had my specific mental illness. But I know there are many more of us out there, and I invite you to join us: charcuterie can make any morning Christmas morning if you let it.

But more than a gift under the proverbial tree of a new day, charcuterie (and garde manger, perhaps more broadly) is a measuring stick against which we are able to quantify our goodness. It is a religion of sorts. The consommé clarifies to a perfect, crystal-clear gold. The back fat garnish doesn’t fall out of the mortadella on the deli slicer. The gentle curl of the pig ear cartilage appears to smile at you from the cross section of the head cheese. The hard boiled egg is dead-center in the meat pie, and its yolk is bright yellow and proud. These are the ways we know we are OK–we slimy, grumpy, messed up scallywags of the kitchen persuasion: these are the feats we make which afford us our little tickets to heaven.

Because, somehow, it is not easy to be good in this work. There are those who will disagree, but after a lot of time at this, I will say what I will say. It is easy to be poor and tired and sad and lonely and dirty and overwhelmed and addicted. But a nice aspic works wonders for the ego: it is purification of the soul of the highest order. And I think that matters more and more as we age in the kitchen.

Assuming age has anything to do with hierarchy, one loses various training wheels and bosses and checks and balances in the kitchen as one progresses, and at a certain point, there is a sense that there is no longer an adult present in the room. In a society that truly is more attracted to freedom from choice than to freedom of choice, charcuterie shows up on the scene offering both: why not play ridiculously, live deliciously, and also prove a sort of dedication to the rules: at least the rules of alchemy, physics, and salt?

An aging chef who feels afraid and metaphorically parentless can find safety in a kitchen where unruly pastes of meat stuff neatly into the pale stockings of beef appendix or pig intestines. In a mad and purposeless world, a chef can find solace in pricking the little air bubbles out of sausages. When our fridge is chock full of well marbled, pink terrines, curly pork sausages, silky liver mousses, and dark, rich black puddings, I feel like all of my sordid, messy energy has been transmuted into light. I feel like order has been made. And even if those weird meats don’t have the front man energy of a roast, they provide me a job and a joke in one. And if efficiency is the sought thing these days, this is my own way of having it.

Friends,

This is an update newsletter, so no major theatrics or recipes or cooking methods. But a state of affairs, perhaps, as this newsletter is weekly, and the week is nearly over, and there has been little to say. So here is the news with us:

Retails items:

Charcuterie, including pâté, bologna, and sausages, are available to purchase for take-home! We are also selling our pullman sandwich bread, shortbread cookies, and butterscotch by the jar. All of these items are available for pre-order on our site, but you can also just come on down and see what’s available.

New Hours (Weds-Fri 5-9 dinner and Sat/Sun 10-3 brunch):

Thank you to everyone who has joined us for our new dinner hours! We are really enjoying being open in the evenings on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and we are glad to know that it makes us available to more of you. I know it is more widely acceptable to drink wine at night, too, and that is a good thing for many of us.

Long Lunches:

Long lunch, a four-hour, family style, five-ish course meal, is happening most Sundays! Check our resy page for tickets, and come make friends with strangers.

Hudson:

This is still the town in which we are located–a town known for its history of doing stuff to whale oil and whatnot. There are rumors that the Metro North might start running up this way soon, as an alternative to the Amtrak. Whale oil is not currently available in this town.

Courtney Love:

She is working very hard to keep singing out of our speakers each day. If you see her, buy her some lozenges.

The Weird Little Circle of Rocks in the Middle of the Tiling of Our Bathroom Floor:

Still plugging up the hole left in the floor when we moved our toilet to the other side of the bathroom a couple years ago. The rock in the center of the circle is in charge, but if you listen closely as you pee, you might here whispers of mutiny.

Cheese:

Darn is it good food.

The Rihanna Record We Bought on Ebay and my Corduroy Busytown Hat With the Pig Driving the Pickle:

Has anyone seen them?

That’s all, folks. More excitement next week.

Cheers,

Shaina

Feet, or, more adorably, “trotters,” provide endless joy and even some practical solutions in our kitchen at Cafe Mutton. We sometimes serve them as a main dish; other times, they sing background vocals; the stock from cooking them, which is completely solid when cold, adds body to soups or acts as a glue for terrines or enhancement in pâtés or mousses.

Their flavor is a little unusual, but it is also mild. Trotter newbies might prefer incorporating them into a more flavorful dish, where they can focus on getting used to the texture first, but there are those among us who will take them plain.

A couple of months ago, I had trotters in Paris at restaurant Amarante, where the chef served them deboned and seared in a pan, such that their sticky juices created a pale, lacy, and crispy jacket, which gave way to a molten, unctuous layer of soft skin and tissue beneath. Served simply with a green salad, the dish was a perfect celebration of the pig’s foot both in texture and flavor.

I served bread and garlic soup at a lunch a few days ago. To make the broth, I simmered a few quarts of stock left from braising pig heads with a small chicken and an entire quart of garlic cloves. Just before serving, I removed the chicken for later consumption, dropped some stale bread into the boiling broth, and added in a few big handfuls of chopped up, deboned pig’s feet. I served the soup, presenting it simply as “bread and garlic soup,” not mentioning the feet, as they were playing a small role in the entire production. But about ten minutes later, a guest summoned me to ask what kind of mushrooms were in the soup. I went over and explained that there weren’t any mushrooms–that perhaps what she was looking at were the whole, melting cloves of garlic. But, ‘no,’ this guest protested, ‘there is something else–this thing–what is this?’

‘Ah,’ I had replied, realizing she was pointing to the trotter meat. ‘It is not a mushroom but something very similar. It’s just that it’s pig feet.’ Fortunately, this guest was amused and just glad to solve the mystery rather than appalled. For some, even the idea of just a little bit of foot can ruin lunch.

Of course, part of the allure of using odd cuts of meat is knowing that we are taking some small steps to counteract waste in a society that still doesn’t make use of whole animals. But it’s not just dutiful bottom-feeding that brings trotters into our repertoire. They’re a wonderfully versatile ingredient and can unlock a next level of flavor and texture for restaurant cooks and home cooks alike.

It can feel a little intimidating to cook feet for the first time. A lot of folks who didn’t grow up eating trotters are put off conceptually or simply confused about where to begin, as the cut is unlike many others. But I am here to tell you that trotter cookery is actually quite easy. I’m sure that there are already plenty of other articles and recipes out there that will include more information than this one, but my desire is more so to point out how approachable–and fun–cooking feet can be.

At Mutton, we generally do one thing first when preparing pig feet. First, we cook them in a very dumb and easy way. *We get our pig feet split, which is not super important to our end result, but it does make our process a little easier. If you can only find whole feet, you can do exactly what we do anyway; you just might not end up with perfectly intact skin at the end.*

So: we arrange our split pig feet in a hotel pan, which could just as easily be a deep casserole in a home kitchen–as you will likely be cooking five pieces and not fifty–and then we cover them with water. They can be a little crowded in the pan, but we want to make sure they’re not packed like sardines. Then we cover them with foil, and then we cook them in a regular-ass, standard oven at three hundred degrees for about ten to twelve hours. This is the perfect type of project to start early in the morning and let go all day.

When the feet are done, they are silky and soft and very tender to the touch. We let them cool just until we can handle them, and then we take them out of the liquid and put them on trays to cool a little more. We don’t want to burn ourselves, but we don’t want to chill them completely, as they will be impossible to debone when cold. Then we take out all the bones. Deboning the feet is a little labor-intensive, but in this era of fidget spinners and Candy Crush (idk if people do those things still, but you get me), this is a great way to stay stimulated.

There are a couple of larger bones to take out, and then there are lots of tiny, pea-sized bones in the toe area. We do our best to keep any tissue and skin intact as we remove the bones, such that each half-foot basically becomes a soft sheet, about five by two or three inches. We lay our foot sheets out on parchment paper in single layers (stacking is fine), and then we cool them. That’s it.

This processing project leaves us with a world of possibilities, as we have not seasoned the trotters or the stock, and both now exist as pure, gelatinous potential.

If we want to make fried trotter terrine, we season the trotters with salt while hot and pack them in a container before chilling, slicing, breading, and frying them. Those are excellent with tartar sauce, but many sauces would make great alternatives. Fried trotter terrine also makes a ridiculously good sandwich.

If we want to serve the trotters cold in a salad (where they can show off their less popular but no less exciting boing-y texture), we chill them and then slice them very thinly and toss them with crunchy vegetables like radishes or celery or cucumbers. These salads like a nice, bright dressing and do very well with lots of herbs and chilis, too. If we are really on one, we might even throw some sliced, cold beef tongue into the mix.

If we want to make a cold pig foot terrine, we season the trotters and layer them in a mold with lots of herbs and either some chopped up cornichons and/or chopped, blanched carrots and/or whole grain mustard. We “cover” the layered trotter with just enough trotter stock to set it but not so much that the thing is half jelly. That is a personal preference. Due to the way that trotters can set up a little more aggressively than head meat, I typically like to serve cold trotter terrines sliced a little more thinly.

If we want to serve them in a soup, we will chop them up and throw them in, as I mentioned before in the bread and garlic soup story. I also really love to use them in stews with lots of dried chorizo, which we make ourselves but you can also buy. Stewing the feet and chorizo with lots of onion and garlic, some of the reserved trotter stock, and tangy, Spanish sidra is an incredible way to not lose your head to winter. Throw in some crusty bread and aioli, and you might have even found a way to make some friends. Potatoes are optional but not a bad addition. If you happen to have some cooked octopus, chop it up and throw it in there as well. If you don’t, then don’t. Have you ever heard of parsley? Also not a bad idea.

It is important to remember that the possibilities are quite endless. Trotters are a great teacher when it comes to the lesson of transferable techniques. Don’t get bogged down in one preparation. Try many things.

Try many things, too, with the stock left over from cooking the trotters. It has a very mild flavor and does not provide as much familiar depth of flavor as a base for a soup as chicken stock might, but with the addition of aromatics or other meats or bones, it makes the most unctuous, sticky, lip-glossing broths you will ever have. Similarly, if you are making a pan sauce and have some trotter stock on hand, adding in a few spoonfuls while reducing can make a world of difference.

We add a portion of trotter stock to our country pâté recipe, because when the pâté chills, the cold trotter stock acts as an extra layer of reinforcement, allowing our pâté to slice cleanly and solidly without us needing to add too much bread to it, which can sometimes make the thing a little stodgy. I also like to add some to liver mousses or terrines, especially ones I plan on slicing, because it makes them firm up in a way that allows for perfect slicing while retaining a delicate and almost mysterious flexibility.

Trotter stock is a friend to all, as it allows you to prepare two dishes in one, even when you haven’t expected to. When you’re done eating your trotter broth-based soup, you can store it in a decorative pail for making sandcastles at the beach and tip it out as a fancy, turreted terrine the next day, much to the dismay and delight of your loved ones. You can make little knights and horses out of olives and pickles to garnish it, if you want to really stir up some concern vis-à-vis your well being, too. Serve with toast.

You can entertain your children or selves by bouncing cold bits of trotter stock on the counter. You can make savory jello jigglers, either as a gift or a prank, depending on where you are bringing them. I haven’t tried it yet, but I am pretty sure you could probably also fix a chair by using trotter stock as wood glue.

The most basic and lazy way to incorporate feet into your diet is to at least throw one or two into the stock pot if you ever make your own stock. When you strain the stock, you can stand around in your underwear, reading the paper or whatever you do, and fish out the bits of foot skin and put them on some buttered toast before discarding it with the rest of your flotsam.

Having absolutely annihilated my soapbox last week, I cannot stomp too heavily upon it today, as I am waiting for a new one in the mail. But I will very quickly point out that all stock made from animal bones is “bone broth.” And stock made from pig feet is actually bone and skin broth. I have long been tired of the Wellness of it all, as folks seem quick to cleave Wellness Foods from greater Food, even when Wellness is right here at you local farm store or Asian grocery–or hiding over there in Babe’s loafers. The call is coming from inside the house, friends. You can eat delicious things; your hair and skin can glow; your joints can glide in silence. You can have it all. You do not need to buy creepy, anonymous bone broth from a far away land. Broth is not corporate. Broth is not from the pharmacy.

Anyway:

I do hope that in whispering these simple, angelic, and devilish truths into your eyeballs in this newsletter, I have made you unafraid to go out and buy some feet and put them in a pot. If you do, please send along news of your success.

Cheers,

Shaina

The money aspect is rattling, certainly. Our business credit card has been maxed out for a month, and I am not going to bring it up to my accountants, because it feels like we have an unspoken agreement that maybe one of us will pay a little when we can, but if we don’t say anything, we won’t have to be sad. It feels like every time I might pay it, it snows a lot, and then nobody goes out to eat, and then rent is due and then payroll is due and then we need to buy more butter and pork.

Winter is always quiet around here, but this one, already peppered with sub-zero temperatures that kept people home, has also brought multiple snowstorms on would-be-busy weekends and the national shutdown on a Friday, too.

We can’t control the weather, and living and working up here means dealing with whatever gets thrown our way. But knowing that doesn’t make the reality of it any less challenging. As food business owners in a smaller community, many of us feel responsible for showing up to serve food when weather is bad. But we also have to consider the safety of our staffs and selves. Sometimes, we are able to show up, and nobody comes out. Some days, we can’t get to the restaurant, and that’s a wrap for the day.

Just last week, my silly little lightweight pickup truck spun off the road on some ice, and I had all of about three to five seconds to consider how fucked I would be if I didn’t have a car for work, had to spend any money on damages, or got injured. Said truck was, in fact, a replacement for an SUV I totaled in twenty-twenty-three in a separate icy road incident that involved a quite intimate meeting with a telephone pole. And so really, the idea of death became so much less terrifying, as my truck slid helplessly over the double yellow and toward trees, since it was the second-least-stressful potential outcome to what actually happened, which is that my car and I escaped without a scratch and simply had to wait around in a snowbank until a hot guy with a better truck offered to stop and pull me out.

But weather isn’t the only thing that’s impacted business this winter. With regard to the national shutdown, I want to share some thoughts that might not sit well with everyone. Before I start, let me begin by saying Fuck ICE. And also:

Small, independent restaurants in the US are staffed by immigrants. Period. The idea that boycotting us right alongside major corporations that support ICE in order to protest ICE is flat out ignorant. Withholding spending from businesses who employ folks that are at risk because of ICE–businesses that are already spending their own money, time, and energy on fundraising and taking measures to support at-risk individuals–causes more harm than good.

Instead of boycotting businesses that employ immigrants and support the community, we should be spending (ideally cash) at those businesses to ensure that they can stay strong and don’t run out of gas before the fight even starts. I had someone reach out to me and ask if I was going to charge them our standard cancellation fee for canceling at the last minute the day of the shutdown, because their friend suddenly wanted to show support. I didn’t charge them, of course. But I felt really not great about the idea that so many of us business owners have been working to keep our crews and community members safe, only to be left holding the bag when others want to perform solidarity for a day.

On the one hand, the misguided response to the shutdown was a really great sign that people are trying to stand up to fascism in the country. On the other hand, it would be a lot better if folks were able to see that they can make a difference on a local level and how that action grows into nationwide change. It’s hard not to feel like this is what the government wants: for these single-day spending freezes to weaken the little guys, while large corporations that have the funds to come back from a day of loss survive. I know a lot of people have said that “it’s just one day” or thought that businesses like ours should have closed that day. But we need to pay our staff, and we simply do not have the funds to cover payroll without bringing in any revenue.

I realize that all this might sound like a lot of dramatization for just a few missed days of work over the winter, but three to five days of missed weekend services in a couple of already slow months actually makes a large impact on us. In our case, one service during the weekend can make up thirty to fifty percent of our week’s sales.

Now, it may come as a shock to no one that I did not get into this line of work for the money. Restaurants are famously not profitable, even though one of my accountants claims that the studies that famously said so did not adjust for how many randos open restaurants for fun and have no idea what they are doing. But maybe these studies did not also account for pandemics and sudden descents of nations into fascism and sudden tariffs and ozempic and social media as a replacement for real life and and and. Anyway, luckily, I was not privy to the asterisk on those studies until it was too late, so I never expected to be able to make much money on this work.

Either way, there was one thing I did allow myself to want when going into the restaurant industry, and that was to be immersed in conviviality and community. I love cooking, and there is nothing like watching ingredients transform in a pot or watching bread rise in the oven. But witnessing all that alchemy in the kitchen doesn’t really matter if the dining room is quiet and awkward and empty.

Hudson is a strange town for owning a food business. A lot of people live here, and it wants to be locals-first, but so much of our business comes from the city. I know I try to make decisions that serve our town rather than just weekenders–we are open during the week; we do what we can to keep our prices reasonable; we try to maintain an environment that is casual and welcoming and appropriate for more frequent visits than special occasions; and we buy all our major supplies from nearby farms. But it’s not like it used to be in here, for a lot of reasons.

Back in Cafe Mutton’s Overhyped Era, when we wound up on a lot of lists and had lines down the street before opening, people were so overjoyed to wait in line for an hour or longer just to sit down and wait yet another forty-five minutes to an hour for pretty good food slung out of a severely stretched kitchen. The line from outside snaked around dining room tables all the way to the register where we took orders at the counter, such that people trying to have a meal invariably had someone’s ass on their shoulder or were being watched to see when they were getting up so that someone else could snag their table.

We got popular for our list of “No’s,” which we had printed on tote bags and which acted sort of like an FAQ of menu items and services we didn’t have. So much did even the people who wanted the orange juice or avocados or a latte clamor to those tote bags, and so readily did all those folks wait around all day to sit briefly over a plate of crêpes.

As we have streamlined our systems, offering reservations and killing the lines, making it so that folks who are able to frequent our business no longer need to get back up and wait in line again to order a second glass of wine, business has strangely tapered off. Is the lesson here that people dislike comfort and only appreciate curation when it’s presented rudely? Or that all things, including vibes, need branded packaging? Or that you don’t have to be from out of town to fall moth to the tempting glow of The Line Out the Door? I do not know. There are plenty of other reasons to consider, both to do with us and irrelevant to what we are doing. The answer may be none of them. The answer may be all of them.

We don’t have the tote bag anymore. We’ve kind of moved on from that era, in the same way that an adult might move on from wearing the statement t-shirts that got them through teenhood. We have said who we are. We have grown into ourselves. We might be less proselytic about it, but I, for one, am no less angsty.

But I miss having a busy dining room. I miss feeling like this business would probably endure. I am sort of grossed out by how often I encounter people who tell me that my “food is amazing” and that the cafe is “the best restaurant in Hudson” but who have also never set foot in this building.

I had this funny idea a couple weeks ago to bring back our pecan sticky buns, which were on the menu when we first opened, and which people used to really love. The reason we stopped making them to begin with is because we weren’t selling out as often, and they are very expensive to produce. Each bun alone has a dollar’s worth of honey in it. But I thought that maybe incorporating a little bit of Old Mutton into our menu might help to drum up some excitement and draw people in.

After all, we all become slaves to the selves we debut, and that is a strange thing. I once watched this interview with Liz Phair, wherein she was like, ‘I pretty much just work for the old Liz Phair’ and how because of her earlier music’s wild success, she was just like running around, singing “Why Can’t I,” all the time instead of being able to perform new stuff. And I know that it’s unusual for a next act to stand up to the first, but sometimes it feels like people really just don’t accept change. I am sure this is tied to our naturally flawed human memory, which insists upon “bygone better days,” but that makes it quite hard to run an ever-changing business.

Having run the sticky buns again for a couple of weeks now, I can say with confidence that it is laughable how little anyone cares about them. *And it’s ok that some of us do.* By the way folks have complained about their departure, you would think we’d do pretty well bringing them back. But there is just something very dark about them all of a sudden. As soon as they come out of the oven, they seem so hopeful and glorious. And then, not much later, they remind me of a corpse. As they sit, they get more flat and less glossy, and both real and metaphorical flies find their way to them, even in the coldest weather. The mortician shrugs, looks away: there is nothing she can do.

I brought a box of them to family the other day–I packed up six and carried them through airport security and on and off a plane, into an uber and finally onto the kitchen counter of a loved one. The box was beaten and torn. The buns smelled excellent through the flimsy and dilapidated cardboard. And yet, the things could not be given away. My nephew hated them. My mother-in-law apparently ate some while I was asleep. They festered on the counter. She gave some to her landlord’s mother. I sure as shit didn’t want any. Ray Tousey’s bees shuddered in their combs. The trash can peered up at them and then at the clock. Perhaps, as corpses go, the sticky bun symbolizes the corpse of an era that needs not be resurrected. But then again, having spoken of selective memory, I would take an era of busy tables and ravenous customers. Bettina says to be patient, but it’s far more in my nature to bitch, moan, and overanalyze instead.

Perhaps people just don’t eat much (or just much of what we’re peddling) anymore but really like the idea of what we are doing. That’s how it feels when we upload photos of dishes to instagram and receive hundreds or thousands of likes but subsequently sell only three or four of said item before eating the rest ourselves. I don’t mind being well fed, but I often wonder what would happen if we just closed and didn’t say anything but kept running our social media as if nothing happened. I sort of don’t think anyone would notice, now that having an appetite has all but been rendered obsolete by weight loss drugs anyway. I wonder if the old adage, “you eat with your eyes first” will soon simply end at the word “eyes”.

I don’t like it very much, the place at which we’ve arrived. This restaurant really feels like a varicose vein or maybe its contents. Blood just sitting around, being in a body but useless. Feeling certain the body needs it, but no, the heart does not summon it. It insists upon itself, as if bulging and throbbing might get anyone’s attention, but actually, the strained effort is more unsightly and only makes folks turn away. It is weird. And more than sad, it is truly boring.

I hope you understand that I do not say all of this to attract pity–I just think it’s important to share the reality of our business with all of you. I don’t want the restaurant to fail, partly because I do not wish to work for someone else ever again, but I also wouldn’t take it personally if it tanked. I know we have had a hell of a run in our first five years, and I am really proud of that. I really want to continue on, but that is not always a choice I can make simply because I want to. The reason I share all of this cringe-arella, Dear Diary shit is because I know we are not the only ones going through all of this. This winter has been tough as hell around here, and I don’t really know if things are going to get much easier any time soon, especially for those of us who don’t have outside investors or independently wealthy owners.

If you are a Hudson local (or local to anyplace, for those of you who follow us from afar), I would urge you to go out and patronize or even just visit some small businesses that you like. Doing so does not have to be a major investment. You can buy something small or just grab a coffee or a drink. You can even just go in and say hello, just to show that you are still there. You could go into a restaurant and say, “Oh, I’m just looking,” and that might be a kind of OK joke. As I mentioned earlier in this truly annoying piece, money is a stressful part of the small business equation, but it is not everything. Simply being able to do our jobs a little bit gives us purpose and helps us to hang in there until better days come. There is no hospitality without guests to serve, and even more cornily, there is no hello without someone to say it to.