FERN’s Friday Feed: Life, death, and sourdough starter
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
‘A piece of Joe that could live on’
Taste
“Joe, my friend of three decades, suddenly died at 57. … After the first night of shiva, Joe’s sister took me into his apartment, which was next to her own. Joe had lived there in New York City with his mother, in her Lincoln Square apartment, through the COVID-19 pandemic. He was still there after his mother died, while he was figuring out how to finally sort out his life now that he wasn’t caring for her,” writes Alice Feiring. “But in his final days, he was still sleeping in a sleeping bag on the floor, amid the compiled clutter that some have called artistic hoarding. Together, we … took in Joe’s Joeness—his camping gear, his cute backpacker Martin guitar, his still-open MacBook Air, surrounded by a mini waterfall of books …. ‘What would you like of his?’ Joe’s sister asked me. There was really just one thing. ‘His sourdough starter.’ … We walked into the narrow, galley-style kitchen. The putty-colored slurry sat on the middle shelf of a nearly empty fridge. I lifted the lid and saw a thin layer of clear liquid, the hooch, on the surface. This is the buildup of alcohol, the product of fermentation that appears when a starter hasn’t been fed for a while. But it smelled sweetly vinegared. A snap of carbon dioxide flicked at my nose. This was a piece of Joe that could live on. I carried it carefully downtown on the subway.”
The early-round KO of Muhammad Ali’s Champburger
Defector
“It was Dec. 16, 1968, and Muhammad Ali was headed to jail. Ali had been pulled over the previous year and subsequently convicted of driving without a license. He paid his $270 fine, but skipped out on the 10-day jail sentence until then. He didn’t seem too upset about it. ‘Going to jail may be good for me,’ Ali told the press before entering prison. ‘I’ve never suffered. I’ve never been confined or experienced the loneliness and suffering of some of my fellow blacks. … Also, I might have to do time for that Army thing, and this might be good conditioning.’ But it was more than just ‘that Army thing’—a five-year sentence for draft evasion, which Ali was appealing—that led him to begin serving his sentence on this particular day,” writes Dan McQuade. “Ali’s stint in a Miami jail was also part of a promotion for his new hamburger joint, Champburger, which was set to open its first location at the end of the the month. ‘To his credit,’ the Miami Herald’s Ray Crawford wrote, ‘he admitted he was looking for publicity.” Indeed, Ali was quite direct: ‘My main reason for coming here is to open our new Champburger headquarters here.’”
The real cost of backyard eggs
The Atlantic
“[T]he price of eggs is predicted to climb 41 percent higher this year; already, in January, it rose to a record high of $4.95 per dozen grade-A eggs. So some Americans are considering what seems like a simple solution: raising chickens themselves. Backyard-chicken forums have been buzzing about chick shortages at local farm stores and hatcheries. And on Saturday, Brooke Rollins, the new secretary of agriculture, said in a Fox & Friends interview that raising backyard chickens is an ‘awesome’ solution to high egg prices. (She has chickens herself, she said.) Anyone who starts a flock because they’ve been dreaming about backyard chickens pecking in the yard will likely be happy with their choice,” writes Tove Danovich. “Those who do it to save money will probably regret it. Backyard hens are wonderful to keep, but they lay the most expensive eggs you’ll ever buy.”
The grannies who saved Albanian cuisine
BBC
“Today, Albanian grannies like Pajenga are teaching multiple generations in one of Europe’s youngest-aged countries how to cook age-old dishes. That’s because the Balkan nation has suffered not one, but two bouts of culinary amnesia over the past 80 years. First,” writes Tristan Rutherford, “from 1946 to 1991, Albania was ruled by hardline communists who effectively sealed the small, mountainous nation off from the outside world …. During this period, cookbooks were burnt, imports were prohibited, foreign travel was banned, food was collectivised and shortages were widespread. … Second, in the violent build-up and aftermath of communism’s collapse in the 1990s, 710,000 citizens – 20% of the population – fled Albania from 1989 to 2001 in search of work in other countries. Over time, Pajenga said that many of these emigrants forgot their grandmothers’ recipes as they adapted to new countries and cultures. … [B]y the early 21st Century, many Albanians at home and abroad had forgotten how to prepare traditional Albanian cuisine – except for women of a certain age.”
How gardens bridge cultures for my Indian-Appalachian family
Gravy
“In the first Spring after my parents moved to Cross Lanes, West Virginia, in 1974, just a few short years after immigrating to the United States from India, my dad’s boss, Dr. Richard Sexton, showed up in the backyard one Saturday with a rototiller. By way of explanation, he said something to the effect of, You live in West Virginia now—you have to have a garden. Then he proceeded to till up half of our one-acre backyard. Over the course of that spring and summer,” writes Neema Avashia, “he showed my mom and dad, former residents of dry and dusty Gujarati towns (and thus novice gardeners), how to plant rows of peppers and eggplant and tomatoes and corn. How to nurture seeds and sprouts until they bore fruit. Dr. Sexton knew that my parents were outliers back then in southern West Virginia: Brown-skinned immigrants with accented English that made it clear they didn’t share the generations-deep Appalachian roots of their White neighbors. The garden, I think, was his effort to help them build a bridge. To show their new neighbors that, in spite of clear differences, they sought to belong.”