38 animal, vegetable, miracleboiled eggs, and experimental vinaigrettes. Next down the line we found
black walnuts, painstakingly shelled out by hand. Walnut is a common
wild tree here, but almost nobody goes to the trouble to shell them—
nowhere but at the farmers’ market would you fi nd local nuts like these.
The vendor offered us a sample, and we were surprised by the resinous
sweetness. They would be good in our oatmeal and a spectacular addition
to Steven’s whole- grain bread.
Each of our purchases so far was in the one- to three- dollar range ex-
cept the nuts, which were seven a pound—but a pound goes a long way. I
frankly felt guilty getting so much good fresh stuff for so little money,
from people who obviously took pains to bring it here. I pushed on to the
end, where Lula sold assorted jams and honey. We were well fi xed for
these already, given to us by friends or made ourselves last fall. Lula’s
three children shivered on the ground, bundled in blankets. I scanned the
table harder, unwilling to walk away from those kids without plunking
down some bucks.
That’s where I spotted the rhubarb. Big crimson bundles of it, all full
of itself there on the table, loaded with vitamin C and tarty sweetness and
just about screaming, “Hey, look at me, I’m fruit!” I bought all she had,
three bundles at three dollars apiece: my splurge of the day.
Rhubarb isn’t technically fruit, it’s an overgrown leaf petiole, but it’s a
fi ne April stand- in. Later at home when we looked in Alice Waters’s Chez
Panisse Fruit for some good recipes, we found Alice agreed with us on this
point. “Rhubarb,” she writes, “is the vegetable bridge between the tree
fruits of winter and summer.” That poetic injunction sent us diving into
the chest freezer, retrieving the last package of our frozen Yellow Trans-
parent apple slices from last summer. For dinner guests we threw together
an apple- rhubarb cobbler to ring out the old year and ring in the new.
Rhubarb, the April fruit. I’m a monkey’s uncle.
If not for our family’s local- food pledge to roust us out of our routine,
I’m sure we would not have bothered going down to the market on that
miserable morning. Most of us are creatures so comforted by habit, it can
take something on the order of religion to invoke new, more conscious
behaviors—however glad we may be afterward that we went to the trou-
ble. Tradition, vows, something like religion was working for us now, in