In Good Taste
From the Garden
Growing up in New Jersey, chef and food writer Becky Selengut learned the original meaning of “eating local”—from her grandmother’s half-acre garden where even the backyard sun is a vital ingredient. Selengut proves that when it comes to fresh, organic ingredients, less is more

When I was in third grade, I had a very practical notion of what “eating local” meant. It was the act of stepping out the back door of my grandmother’s New Jersey house into her half-acre garden and outracing my brothers to the raspberry bushes. After 20 minutes of intense foraging, the three of us stood there, sticky faces berry-red, our little green containers nearly empty. My grandmother (known to all in my family as “Gummy”) supervised; she pointed out that at the end of the day, the goal was to harvest more than we consumed. We thought this to be a complete misunderstanding of the task at hand and went back to our important work, dodging the ginormous bumblebees to reach that perfect, plump berry tucked just out of reach, then showing it off to each other before popping it into our mouths.

Eating local meant watching my grandfather—bare chested but for curly gray hair, wearing his little blue shorts—holding the precious gem of a perfect New Jersey–grown tomato in his right hand, while shaking some salt out of a shaker with his left. He’d tease my grandmother and ask her why she couldn’t grow a salt bush next to the tomatoes to save him a trip to the kitchen. Papa—as we called him—would eat the whole tomato like an apple, and I’d watch, fascinated. As a budding young chef, I learned from an early age that the very best recipes don’t exist on paper but are captured in those precious in-between moments, sneaking raspberries and tasting the alchemy of a vine-ripened tomato meeting salt.

Recipes in our house were rarely written down because there was no need. We couldn’t forget how to pick a perfect cucumber, slice it thin and bathe it in sweetened vinegar; if there was fresh dill in the garden, we chopped it fine and scattered it over the top. Or not. The freshest food tastes perfectly of itself and hardly needs adornment. It’s often the most intuitive cooks who know to do the very least to the very best ingredients. One trend that I welcome with open arms is the conscious setting aside of a chef’s ego so that the food itself takes the spotlight.

Gummy knew this instinctively. Spread on the lunch table were thick-sliced tomatoes, maybe a bit of soft cheese, her pickled cucumbers, some smoked fish from the famous Katz’s deli in New York City, and bowls of fresh fruit and cream. At the end of a summer lunch, she would hand me a sprig of curly parsley: “nature’s breath freshener,” she called it.

When I called her recently to get her rhubarb-strawberry compote recipe, she said simply:  “lots of rhubarb, lots of strawberries, lots of sugar.” Every season was reflected in the changing compotes served at Gummy’s table. Only one thing remained constant, and that was the

My grandmother never took credit for the depth of flavors from her garden’s offerings; she owed it all to the compost.
topping: a healthy dollop of full-fat Breakstone’s sour cream. Early in summer, the compote was always made with rhubarb (“but never use the leaves, darling,” she warned on the phone, “they’re poisonous!”). In July, the blueberries made an appearance.

My grandmother never took credit for the depth of flavors from her garden’s offerings. She owed it all to the compost. “Beckala,” she would say to me in her thick New York Jewish accent, “compost is better than gold, more precious than diamonds.” I mulled the concept over only briefly while looking for earthworms and burying the eggshells into the compost pile. At the same time, her seriousness and passion left an imprint on my impressionable young mind. On those summer evenings, I massaged her arthritic hands, giving extra love to the knuckles gnarled from years spent working her garden.

She hung up her cooking apron back in the 1980s—exhausted after cooking most of the meals for our family for decades. On that fated last night in her kitchen, she made Papa a lavish, multicourse dinner. He had no idea what the occasion was and worried he had forgotten their anniversary. Turns out he hadn’t forgotten anything. The dinner—known in our family as the original “Last Supper”—was her grand finale. “All I make now,” she told us, “are reservations!”

Her gardening gloves, however, still find their way onto her hands every morning. At the youthful age of 96, she continues to work in the dirt. These days, she lives with my aunt and uncle outside Charleston, South Carolina. “I planted the peas this week!” she tells me, after giving me the full weather report. When she left New Jersey, her biggest regret was leaving the pile of black gold behind the shed; she worried that the new owners wouldn’t appreciate how precious it was. Before the house was sold, I scooped up a few quarts and brought it back with me to the garden I tend in Seattle. I told her it would be like sourdough starter or friendship bread—what was started in the Garden State would grow in the Emerald City.

The most deeply satisfying recipes come from humble, simple beginnings in the garden. My grandmother taught me that every seed that gets dug into the earth, every herb and vegetable, should get a blessing with a sprinkle of water: “Live long and be well,” we say. 

Becky Selengut is a Seattle-based private chef and cooking instructor. She is the founder of SeasonalCornucopia.com, an educational Web site that celebrates the foods of the Pacific Northwest, and co-author of the Washington Local and Seasonal Cookbook (Lone Pine Publishing).