Wally Graeber
Two women in a farmers' market booth with eggs.
Nadia Alber of Ducks in a Row Family Farm, left, and Odessa Piper.
Though she lives in Boston now, restaurant icon Odessa Piper remains a quintessential Madisonian of a certain type: one of those “seekers” who found her way here in search of meaning, mission and connection to the land. Also, for the inspiration of like-minded souls.
It’s made for a long and twisting journey that saw Piper, a high school dropout, learn from her parents how to forage for mushrooms and greens in the New England woods. She went on to live for nearly two years in a New Hampshire commune, and then join the “Back To The Land” migration of the 1960s and ‘70s to work at a Wisconsin farm in the Kickapoo River Valley. Next stop was apprenticing at The Ovens of Brittany bakery in Madison under the charismatic theosophy adherent Joanna Guthrie, who owned the Kickapoo farm. In 1976 Piper opened her own restaurant, the much honored L’Etoile, in a pioneering effort to put locally sourced food at the heart of a restaurant’s menu.
Piper, who is 70, succeeded in her quest. Marvelously so. Along with Alice Waters of Chez Panisse fame in Berkeley, Piper is celebrated as a founder of the “farm to table” movement that economically bonds small farmers, smart eaters and local restaurants in a common pursuit of a regional cuisine.
Even better, when Piper burned out after 29 years of spinning plates and balancing the books, she found the perfect L’Etoile buyer in her chef Tory Miller, whose co-owner is Dianne Christensen. They have, as a pleased Piper puts it, taken L’Etoile to the next level.
Amy Trubek, in her perceptive book on the local food movement, The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey Into Terroir, perfectly captures Piper’s genius: “Piper was an agrarian utopian when she thought about her food, but along the way her taste of Wisconsin became part of a modern market-driven business.”
No better example can be found than the Saturday Dane County Farmers’ Market on the Capitol Square, where local chefs join local foodies in the early morning hours to do their own foraging before the gawkers and tourists arrive later. Upwards of 20,000 people will show up on a summery morning, according to market manager Jamie Bugel.
Back in the day, Piper would finish her crack-of-dawn baking (her signature morning bun was of culinary legend). Then she would meet with her chefs and tour the market for goods that could be added to that night’s menu.
Four decades later, on a mid-May visit to the Madison market, Piper was once again checking in with her vendors. Of course, it was pure craziness to walk the market at 10:30 a.m. (It was packed to the proverbial gills.) But she saw so many of her old friends — Nadia Alber of Ducks In A Row Family Farm of Arena, pepper mavens Ted and Joan Ballweg of Savory Accents of Verona, cheesemaker Willi Lehner of Mount Horeb, among others. For a passionate food lover like Piper, this was heaven.
But it was her introduction to Shirley Young, a federally certified organic farmer from Randolph, that lit her up the most. When Piper asked her what the essence of organic farming was, Young’s eyes got wide. She hesitated for a moment and then plunged into a detailed discourse on Korean Natural Farming — a low-cost alternative to pricey chemical fertilizers and pesticides that relies on composting and fermentation of garden waste to enhance the soil. Young runs a successful vegetable farm on a mere five acres of land.
Piper couldn’t have been happier to hear this. That’s why she was in Madison — to talk about the “reenchantment of food” at the International Forum on Consciousness, which is held annually at the Promega Corp. campus in Fitchburg. “I was connected to the sacredness of life through nature from childhood,” she says in an interview. “I never dropped it.”
Piper unspooled her story to a rapt audience at the forum, including the sad end of Joanna Guthrie, whose embrace of Eastern mysticism captivated her young Ovens colleagues but became tangled in a debilitating mental illness.
“When she was in full form, Joanna was a grounded visionary,” says Piper. “She got a farm and a restaurant, and she put them together. That’s grounded.”
There is something of that balance in Piper herself. She sees the future as both a glass half empty and a glass half full. Like many organic farming advocates, she is disturbed that regulators are green-lighting organic status to hydroponic and similar soil-free growing systems that have no connection to the traditional definition of organic.
“It’s the old mantra,” says Piper: “Healthy soil. Healthy plants. Healthy people. Healthy planet.”
From her wide-angle view, things are getting ever worse. Piper can run down the litany of looming social, economic and environmental catastrophes that threaten the world. Yet there is a thread of optimism shining through the darkness.
“I feel like I’ve gotten a new lease on life,” she says. “I think it’s because I’m closer to leaving than to arriving. It really has given me a lot of focus. We can turn things around.”
To that end, she’s writing a book. (To be titled either The Re-enchantment Of Food or Back To The Land, Again.) And she’s contributing her talents to select groups, including Taliesin Preservation in Spring Green and to a neighborhood “scratch” bakery in Boston.
“What I want to do with the rest of my life is not get big or get out,” she says, mocking U.S Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz’s famous admonishment to farmers in the 1970s. “I want to get small, and I want to get real. I see so many helpful things we can be doing.”
In this category, she would put her work with the Savanna Institute, which is promoting a more resilient Midwestern agriculture based on “agroforestry” systems of perennial trees, crops and livestock. Piper is helping them find product applications for aronia berries, black currants, elderberries and hazelnuts.
“Back when I needed the kind of help I can give people now, I couldn’t afford it,” she says with a laugh. Then adds: “I’m in the giving-back time of my life,” which considering Piper’s history is not a surprise.
Five decades of fresh
Cover of the Dane County Farmers' Market Cookbook showing garlic cloves.
L’Etoile founder Odessa Piper is one of the animating figures in the newly released Dane County Farmers’ Market Cookbook. Authored by A-list food writer Terese Allen, the book celebrates the 50th anniversary of the market and includes stories and dishes from vendors, shoppers and chefs organized around the theme of “Local foods, global flavors.” Piper provided recipes for Amish-inspired apple cider syrup and for using anise hyssop as an alternative for basil and mint.
Tory Miller, her L’Etoile successor, writes in the forward that Piper’s reputation in New York City culinary circles is a big reason why he as a young chef moved to Madison to cook. Piper will return to Madison in the fall to talk to the Downtown Rotary about the cookbook and the farmers’ market.
The book’s launch party is Saturday, July 8, when the annual Art Fair On The Square bumps the market to Breese Stevens Field, 917 E. Mifflin St. Allen and participating vendors will sign books from 9 a.m. to noon. The book will be available for purchase at subsequent farmers’ markets.
It can also be pre-ordered for pick-up at the launch via dane-county-farmers-market.square.site, or for shipment via the publisher, Little Creek Press.
