hudson grown

Hugh hard at work putting tomatoes through a food mill.

Thanks to blankets of water falling from the sky — the fallout of some hurricane brushing past the east coast — we almost never found the house. I was ready to give up — wired and anxious. Two days prior, I’d found myself without a 9 to 5 job for the first time in my adult life and was feeling like I’d washed up from a shipwreck, confused and grieving. Paul and I had driven an hour up the Taconic to find a farm — the dark was falling as fast as the rain. Cell phones weren’t working, directions seemed suddenly too vague. And then we saw the Volkswagen, s buttercream-colored house and our friend Anne smiling in the driveway.

Hugh Williams and Hanna Bail of Threshold Farm live in the village of Philmont, less than a mile from the acreage where they have a barn, cows on pasture and a 600-tree pear and apple orchard.  Our mutual friend, Anne Dailey, invited us up to the orchard so Paul could take pictures of heirloom apple varieties for her Edible Hudson Valley article, but also just to come experience a slice of Columbia County farm life.

Anne, left, and a new arrival at the barn, right.

Hugh and Hanna had just come in from the evening milking.  The last glow of sun was leaving the cloudy sky and the kitchen beckoned. After picking out onions and peppers from crates of produce in the garage, Anne and I began chopping. The simple rhythm, the comforting smells, soothed my nerves, as did a glass of biodynamic red.

It was a Saturday night, the work was lighter than other days, but the work still had to be done. After dinner of Threshold beef sausage, onions and peppers, gradually, the kitchen became a hum of conversation, laughter and labor: the four of us were joined by their two young children, a couple young men who help work the Threshold land as well as Hanna’s cousins visiting from Germany. 

Everyone had something to do: hard winter wheat to be ground for a batch sourdough bread, crates of tomatoes stacked high in the foyer waiting to be turned into sauce.  It became a kind of ballet of chopping, grinding, sifting, weighing, cranking the food mill. With every hour I became more grounded, less stunned by the seemingly cataclysmic change in my life. What was in my hands right now was all that mattered: chop, grind, sift.

The countertop grain mill.

There isn’t a lot that is Martha Stewart pretty about a small farmer’s life, though there is a lot of richness that is quite beautiful. The 1800’s farmhouse kitchen looked nothing like the romanticized magazine-version you so often see. It smelled faintly of fermenting sauerkraut and the scrap bucket kept for the pigs under the sink. Most of the mud and muck are missing from our popular imagery of farmers and what they do. It was the perfect antidote to my desk job in Manhattan, up to my elbows in imperfect tomatoes and compost scraps.

After falling asleep happily exhausted, we breakfasted on homemade sourdough toast, raw milk cheese and homemade strawberry preserves.  Sunday was a blur of pizza making (sourdough crust) using the wood-fired oven Hugh and Hanna recently built, and making several apple pies — Hanna’s German cousins wanted to try real American apple pie. Using heirloom cox orange pippins, hand ground wheat flour and sweetened with cider syrup, those pies were the most American I’ve ever made.

We left Threshold Sunday evening with milk straight from the morning milk run, a belly full of wood-oven pizza and a freshly baked sourdough boule and mini apple pie to go. These were tangible fruits of our labor. I felt like I had rejoined the human race.