Reviews
Palate Press
Deirdre Heekin’s Bitter Alchemy
October 25, 2009 by Meg Houston Maker
Deirdre Heekin smiles a welcome as she hands us each a glass of sparkling Nebbiolo. It’s a glittering Vermont evening in high summer. The sun’s still shining, so the day’s full moon hasn’t yet risen over the rolling fields to our east. We raise a genial toast to her, then carry our glasses from the shelter of this open barn to greet the other guests in the garden.
There’s a group already gathered by the tasting station, lined with the evening’s wines from Tuscany and Campania. Other guests stroll the fledgling vineyard or drape languorously on lawn furniture, savoring this bright moment of our fleeting northern summer.
Deirdre’s husband, Caleb Barber, is at the cooking station, stoking the hardwood fire, furiously toasting bread and grilling eggplant and radicchio for crostini. A slate chalkboard displays the evening’s menu of simple, elegant appetizers contrived to pair with the wines. It’s really just finger food, but no one will leave hungry.
The guests gathered here at Deirdre and Caleb’s home are writers and restaurateurs, publishers and professors, software execs and Aikido sensei. Each has come to enjoy the party in the barn and vineyard the hosts call La Garagista.
The couple runs a tiny, flawlessly authentic Italian restaurant and wine bar in Woodstock, Vermont, Osteria Pane e Salute. Now in its thirteenth year, the restaurant has won acclaim from such publications as Food and Wine, Bon Appétit, and Travel and Leisure. Its Italian “revivalist” menu of traditional regional dishes is complemented by an extensive wine list.
Caleb commands the restaurant’s kitchen. A master chef who trained in Italy, he emphasizes what’s in season, sourcing provisions locally—even from the couple’s own organic gardens—to craft Italian dishes infused with the flavors of Vermont’s landscape.
Deirdre, meanwhile, runs the front of house, graciously serving as host, maître d’, and sommelier. There is only one seating, so your table is yours for the evening, and Deirdre is your spirit guide through the meal, suggesting wines matched to the menu’s regional cuisines.
She has made it her mission to assemble an archive of rare indigenous Italian wines. “When I choose wines for the restaurant,” she says, “I look for regional varietals, so that when we make an heirloom recipe from that region, I can reach for the wine that traditionally complements that dish.”
Read the whole article here.
The Writer's Life
A writer and restaurateur explores the connections between taste and history.
By Jessica Voelker ’00
“Taste is connected to history,” writes Deirdre Heekin ’89 in “Bitter Alchemy,” the third essay in her collection Libation: A Bitter Alchemy (Chelsea Green, 2009). “The history of the table, which is, after all, a narrative history, an oral history. The tongue experiences; the mouth tells a story.” Libation is Heekin’s own history of taste, chronicling the sensory experiences that have shaped her liquid-centric life. Her enviable globe-trotting (offset by a homebody’s sense of terroir; she’s determined to grow wine on her farm in Barnard, Vermont) is forever guided by the deeply textured pleasures of the palate and the connections between taste and memory. A restaurant owner and sommelier, spirits crafter, and Italophile, Heekin is also a seeker of stories: Her essays are vessels through which she shares the insights and people she experiences in pursuit of her passions.
Food and drink writers are prone to Proustian moments, when a taste experience evokes a memory, just as Marcel Proust’s madeleine cake does in Remembrance of Things Past. Heekin’s occurs in “Ode to Campari,” her love song to the Italian apéritif. “I’ve only just realized,” she writes, “that a Campari and soda, or Campari and orange, or a negroni, that powerful elixir made of equal parts Campari, gin, and sweet vermouth . . . have become a kind of personal Madeleine.” Like other culinary-minded works, Libation also includes recipes: for rosolio, a spirit Heekin makes with petals plucked from her rose garden, and pan di spagna, a cake flavored with alkermes, a crimson liqueur colored with ladybug wings. But while other culinary memoirists shy away from the technical and the esoteric, Heekin relishes them, telling us how the microscopic flavor elements in alcohol are called esters and that Thomas Jefferson used the varietal V. vulpine to produce homemade wine. Libation is, like that bitter delicacy Campari, an acquired taste, rewarding slow and thoughtful intake and a genuine interest in what you might call “liquid culture,” the alchemy and history surrounding beverages.
Vermonters know Deirdre Heekin as half of the couple behind Pane e Salute, the Woodstock osteria where husband Caleb Barber ’88 cooks up rustic Italian recipes while Heekin helps diners navigate a wine list of the rare Italian varietals that are her life’s obsession. But then, Deirdre Heekin has a lot of obsessions. There is Italy, her “adopted home,” and New Orleans, the city of her birth, which is “her personal Carthage.” When she finally returns there, another obsession is born: She scours the Big Easy for the perfect Sazerac, a cocktail that originated in a French Quarter apothecary. “How did I study literature and film in college, and end up owning a restaurant?” Heekin wonders. “How did I spend so many years studying French and find myself living in Italy? How did I become a writer and also become a serious student of wine?”
What bridges these interests, it becomes clear, is the author’s fascination with the ways in which taste connects people and events over time: A Campari imbibed at an Italian café is recalled while sipping a second on a porch in Vermont—the taste links the locations and experiences, forming a chain that connects the events that make up a lifetime.
Or rather, lifetimes. Of a long-ago vacation that Heekin’s mother and father took before she was born, one they would relive through a nightly belt of Irish whiskey, Heekin writes: “It was here in Skull, with its scent of salt on the air, and the whistle of wind about the houses, that my parents fell in love with Ireland. The taste of the whiskey defined it ever after.” It is at such moments that Heekin—despite her many other interests and vocations—reveals herself to be a storyteller to the core.
Ezine Articles
Book-Reviews/Cookery-Cookbook
Libation, A Bitter Alchemy
By Brenda Hill and Maralyn Hill
Deirdre Heekin wrote the book I wish I had written. I love her book, named "Libation, A Bitter Alchemy." It means to pour, as in an offering. When Deirdre pours me a glass of wine, it feels like a celebration before the fruit reaches my lips.
I was hooked from the first line. Deirdre's book is a voyage into the heart of an artist, reader, writer, world traveler, perfumer, gardener, cook and wine maker.
I have the good fortune to have met her. She is beautiful, from the inside out. Then, I tasted her wine. It is as sublime as she is.
Later, I watched her chef husband, Caleb, prepare the vibrant, bright green, organic wild leeks and dandelion greens. Dining at the big wooden table in their Woodstock, Vermont café was like eating at home, only better.
Within minutes, their fresh home grown produce is transported from their Barnard, Vermont garden to their Italian-New England, trattoria - osteria pane e salute.
Deirdre and Caleb's cafe is the true meaning of farm to fork, grape to table. I hope to return for one more taste of Caleb's cooking and another sip of wine--the perfect marriage. I long to pluck grapes from their farm, taste wine and greens in their cafe and fly to Tuscany, all at the same time.
Read the whole article here.
The New York Times
The Moment
FOOD June 9, 2009, 11:53 am
In the Drink | D.I.Y. Libations
By Jill Santopietro
I spent last weekend taking care of my 5-month-old niece. While exhausting, it was incredible to watch a baby discover things. She was giddy as she ate her third-ever serving of solid food. I wasn’t sure if it was because her Aunt Jill’s fresh pea puree was so good or because she learned that her tongue could do more than get drops from a bottle. For me, it was elating: It made me realize that so rarely do I have a first these days.
That’s why I took such pleasure reading Deirdre Heekin’s new book, “Libation: A Bitter Alchemy” (Chelsea Green), a glimpse into her education in wine, followed by cocktails, perfumes, infusions, liquors and liqueurs, as well as her trials making wine and growing grapes at home. It was as alluring as watching my niece learn to flip onto her belly.
I met Heekin and her husband, Caleb Barber, about six years ago in Vermont, where they run a small trattoria in Woodstock called Osteria Pane e Salute (Italian for “bread and health”). I had heard that they loved Italy and Italian food as fervently as I do: Their first book, re-released this year as “In Late Winter We Ate Pears,” was about moving to Tuscany the day after their wedding to start life as a married couple, and the effect that trip would have on the rest of their lives.
“Libation” is part historical account, part narrative. (Heekin is not afraid to admit that her introduction to alcohol was drinking vodka in college, after a bad experience with Ernest and Julio Gallo’s Hearty Burgundy postponed her curiosity in wine for years.) I was so intrigued by her chapter on the history of absinthe and her theories on why the green fairy was banned for so many years. The stories of vodka, Campari, Peychauds and alkermes are fascinating as well. (Heekin will be reading from the book at several events this week, including one at Astor Center on Thursday.)
Inspired by both my niece’s and Heekin’s discoveries, I was ready to make a few of my own. In the third chapter of Heekin’s book she writes about her first taste of rosolio, the rose-infused liqueur. Rose liqueur? I’ve tried limoncello and mandarin liqueurs, but never rose-petal. So I went to the farmer’s market, bought a dozen dark roses from a vendor who claims he doesn’t spray with chemicals and returned home with the highest-proof vodka I could find — in New York that’s 160 proof; you have to go to Jersey for 190-proof — Devil’s Springs, to make rosolio. It was easier than I imagined. I plucked the petals, weighed them and tossed them into a large Ball jar with the vodka. Within minutes, the clear alcohol soaked up the petals’ red dye. Wow, how cool. Then I tossed the grated rinds of 12 lemons into another jar with a bottle of 160-proof vodka and watched the liquid turn bright yellow in minutes. This would become limoncello. I tucked the jars in a corner near my couch to rest in the darkness for two weeks. Tomorrow I’ll add simple syrup (sugar and water), then wait two more weeks. Perhaps I’ve caught a bug. Next up, homemade bitters.
Read the whole article here.
foodbuzz
Book Review - "Libation" by Deirdre Heeken
Deirdre Heeken wrote the book I wish I had written. I love her book, named "Libation." It means to pour, as in an offering. When Deirdre pours me a glass of wine, it feels like a celebration before the fruit reaches my lips.
I was hooked from the first line. Deirdre's book is a voyage into the heart of an artist, reader, writer, world traveler, perfumer, gardener, cook and wine maker.
I have the good fortune to have met her. She is beautiful, from the inside out. Then, I tasted her wine. It is as sublime as she is.
Later, I watched her chef husband, Caleb, prepare the vibrant, bright green, organic wild leeks and dandelion greens. Dining at the big wooden table in their Woodstock, Vermont cafe was like eating at home, only better.
Within minutes, their fresh home grown produce is transported from their Barnard, Vermont garden to their Italian-New England, trattoria - osteria pane e salute.
Deirdre and Caleb's cafe is the true meaning of farm to fork, grape to table. I hope to return for one more taste of Caleb's cooking and another sip of wine--the perfect marriage. I long to pluck grapes from their farm, taste wine and greens in their cafe and fly to Tuscany, all at the same time.
I did not want to leave Woodstock, Vermont. As I boarded my flight from Burlington to Sarasota, Florida, I opened Deirdre's newest book and started to read. Later, I did not even notice that we had landed. I had read it, word for word, and began again.
I want to tell Deirdre that this is one of the best books about travel, wine and LOVE that I have ever read.
As a former book reviewer for a national magazine and a literary magazine, I have found it easy to discuss the content of books. I cannot describe "Libation" and do it justice. I only urge you to read it and then buy it for everyone you know who shares a passion for bread and wine, beauty, nature and life.
You can purchase "Libation" on Amazon or the publisher, Chelsea Green's website.
Crunchy Chicken
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Drink your roses - make rosolio
I'm reading another book by the same author from whom I got the Asparagi alla Milanese recipe. This one is called, Libation: A Bitter Alchemy and, no surprises here, it's about the origins of different drinks, written in a series of essays.
And wouldn't you know it, before you even hit page 50, there's already a recipe I want to try out using my roses. You see, I've already made rose jam and rose potpourri and I'm hankering to try something new. So, when I ran across the recipe for making rosolio, an Italian liqueur made with rose petals, I knew I wanted to give it a whirl. My brother is the master of making his own lemon liqueur, limoncello, and I've always wanted to try doing it. I've never had rosolio, but it sounds rather tempting and, most importantly, super easy to do. There are other recipes online for making rosolio, but this one sounds way more tasty to me.
Here's the instructions from the book (p. 37):
Pick roses at the hottest point of the day - red roses, for they will impart more color and flavor to the alcohol. (If you do not have your own rose garden, I recommend procuring your roses from a friend or a local grower so that you can be certain that the blooms have not been treated with any chemicals.)
Separate the petals from the flower. Trim the white edge at the base with a knife or scissors. Weigh out 1.75 ounces petals, then steep the petals in a jar of 190 proof (95 percent) pure grain alcohol with a vanilla bean in a large canning jar. Close the jar and set aside in a dark place for two weeks. After two weeks, strain the liquid, removing the rose petals and vanilla bean.
Prepare a simple syrup by dissolving 1 pound sugar and 3.25 cups water. Add the simple syrup to the alcohol, return the mixture to the jar, and store for another two weeks. At the end of those two weeks, filter and bottle. After your first tasting, more simple syrup can be added if desired to cut the hotness of the alcohol and suit your taste.
If you get cracking now, you'll have enough rosolio to give away for holiday gifts this year!
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