Chapter 7 #2
"And you never boil a broth. Never. A boil emulsifies the fat and makes it cloudy and greasy. You want it just barely trembling, one bubble every few seconds, for four hours."
"Four hours?"
"Four hours, and I'll add water twice."
She put in the cracked leg bones, both hooves from the boiling crock, the neck bones, and a double handful of the deer's own fat trimmings.
"And this." She dropped in a split length of the backbone. "The marrow in here is what makes it stick to your ribs. Marrow's almost pure fat and it's the most calorie dense thing on any animal, and in October we do not throw away one single gram of fat."
Then she took a spoon of ash out of the stove and dropped it in.
Everyone stared.
"Mom."
"Hardwood ash. A teaspoon." Kindra grinned.
"Alkali. It breaks down the connective tissue faster and it pulls more gelatin out of the bone, and it'll take a tough broth to a rich one in half the time. Old trick. My grandmother did it with a pinch of baking soda and there's no baking soda left in Montana."
"Does it taste like ash?"
"Not at a teaspoon in four gallons. At two teaspoons it does and you've ruined it, so don't get clever."
"Second project. Oliver."
"Yes ma'am."
"The meat. And this is where everybody goes wrong." She put the deep pan on the hottest part of the stove and let it sit until it smoked. "Cut two pounds of the shoulder, not the backstrap, into cubes the size of the top of your thumb."
"Why not the backstrap?"
"Because backstrap is tender and lean and it has nothing in it to give. Tender cuts are for fast cooking. A stew wants the tough parts, the shoulder and the shank and the neck, because those are full of connective tissue, and four hours of low heat turns connective tissue into gelatin,
and gelatin is what makes a stew feel like a meal instead of soup."
She was cutting as she talked. "Backstrap in a stew turns into gray string. Shoulder in a stew turns into butter."
"Now. Fat in the pan, and the pan has to be smoking, and you put the meat in in three batches."
"Why three?"
"Because if you crowd it, the meat releases water, and the water drops the pan temperature, and then it steams instead of browning, and you get gray meat and no crust."
She laid the first batch in and it roared.
"Nobody touches it for three minutes. You want it to stick. When it's ready it'll let go on its own."
She turned each piece once and pulled them out dark brown on two sides.
"And now the part that makes it a stew instead of meat in water."
She poured a half cup of water into the screaming empty pan and it went up in a cloud of steam and she scraped the bottom hard with the wooden spoon.
"That brown stuff on the bottom. That's everything. That's a quarter of the flavor in this entire meal, and if you wash that pan instead of scraping it, you've thrown it away." She scraped until the pan was clean and the water was black. "And all of that goes in the pot."
"Third project. Roots. Sofie."
"Me?"
"You're the sand girl."
Sofie went down the cellar ladder with the lamp and came back with carrots and beets and two parsnips packed in damp sand, and she brushed each one off on the doorstep with real solemnity.
"Now. Roots do not go in at the same time," Kindra said. "This is the other place people ruin it."
"Why not?"
"Because a parsnip cooks in twenty minutes and a carrot takes forty and a beet takes an hour and a half. You put them all in at once and you either get raw beets or you get carrot mush."
She lined them up on the board. "Beets first, and separately, in the small pot, because beets bleed and they'll turn the whole stew pink."
"Is pink bad?"
"Pink's not bad. Pink's just not what I'm making today."
She cut the beets and put them in the small pot with a cup of broth.
"Carrots go in the big pot at the two hour mark. Parsnips at three. Onions and garlic at three and a half, because they're already soft and they only need to give up their oils."
Then she took down the braid of wild onion and the garlic from the joist and crushed four cloves under the flat of the knife.
"And the last root goes in at three hours and forty five minutes and it is the best thing in this entire house."
She took a cloth bundle down from behind the flour tin.
"What is it?"
"Biscuitroot. Cous." She unwrapped it. "I dug eleven pounds of this in June on the south slope and dried it and nobody noticed because you were all busy. It's what people ate in this country for four thousand years before anybody grew wheat."
"What's it taste like?"
"Like a potato and a parsnip had an argument." She crumbled a piece. "And it's mostly starch, which is the thing we have the least of, and it thickens. Four ounces of this dried and ground will do what a cup of flour does, and we have no flour."
"Fourth project," she said. "Green. Kenz."
"There's nothing green. It's October."
"There's four green things in October and you know all of them."
McKenzie thought.
"Rose hips."
"That's fruit, but yes. What else?"
"Nettle, but it's dead."
"Dried nettle's better than fresh for this. Top shelf." Kindra pointed. "What else?"
"Juniper berries."
"Six of them, crushed, no more, they'll take over. What's the fourth?"
McKenzie's eyes went to the joist.
"Yarrow?"
"Not yarrow, yarrow's bitter as sin. The fourth is the one nobody remembers."
Kindra reached up. "Spruce tips. I froze four cups in September and they've been in the cold crock since. They go in at the very end, off the heat, three minutes before it's served, and they'll give you every bit of vitamin C that six people need for a week."
"Does scurvy still happen?"
"Scurvy happens to people who eat meat and starch all winter and think they're fine, and it starts in January, and it starts with your gums and it ends with the old wounds opening back up. Yes it still happens. It's going to happen to somebody in this valley this winter and it isn't going to be us."
At six the broth came off the bone and Kindra strained it through cloth into the crock and then poured it back into the big pot, and then she skimmed.
She skimmed for eleven minutes, pulling the fat off the top with a shallow spoon into a separate cup, and she did not throw any of it away.
"That's a cup and a half of clear rendered fat and it goes in the tallow crock for soap and lamps," she said. "The stew doesn't need it and we do."
At seven she put the meat in with all its scrapings.
At half past seven the carrots.
At eight the parsnips and the onion and the garlic and the crushed juniper.
At a quarter past eight the ground biscuitroot went in as a slurry with cold broth, whisked in slow, because dumping dry starch into hot liquid makes lumps and Kindra Thorn had made that mistake in 2012 and never once since.
The whole thing thickened in four minutes and went from a liquid to something that held the track of the spoon.
At half past eight she pulled the beets from the small pot and folded them in, and the stew went a deep brown red.
At twenty to nine she took it off the heat entirely and stirred in the spruce tips and a double handful of dried nettle and put the lid on.
"Three minutes. Nobody touch it."
"What's the three minutes for?"
"Heat kills the vitamins in the greens. Off the heat, lid on, the residual heat is enough to soften them and not enough to destroy what's in them."
She stood over the pot with her arms crossed.
"Every vegetable anybody's mother ever boiled to death in this country, that's where all the good in it went. Into the water and then down the sink."
"We don't have a sink."
"That's the only good thing about any of this."
Sofie said, "Can I time it?"
"Bug, that's exactly your job."
Sofie said the alphabet three times, slowly, with her hands behind her back, and at the end she nodded once.
"Now," she said.
It was the best thing any of them had eaten in six months.
Nobody talked for four minutes. Actually four minutes: McKenzie counted, because that was what McKenzie was like.
The meat came apart on the spoon. The broth was thick enough to hold a spoon upright for a second before it toppled.
There was fat and salt and something almost sweet under it from the roots, and the spruce tips gave it a high clean bite at the back of the mouth that made your eyes water in a good way.
"Mom," Oliver said finally.
"Mm."
"This is the best thing that's ever happened."
"I know."
"No, like ever. In history."
"Eat it slow. There's no seconds until everybody's had firsts."
Tom ate two bowls and sat back and looked at his family around a table with a lamp on it in the middle of the worst autumn in the history of the world.
"Say grace," he said.
"We don't say grace," McKenzie said.
"We're going to tonight."
Nobody argued.
"For Chip Charter," Tom said. "For Tyler and Christina Clubman and for Mate and Quentin. And for whoever's still out there tonight that we don't know about."
"Amen," Kindra said.
"Amen," said Sofie, who did not know what it meant and said it with total conviction.
At ten, Kindra banked the fire and Tom checked the bar and the kids went up, and for one hour the Thorn cabin was the best place in Montana.
At eleven fifteen, Shyla lifted her head.
Tom was up instantly, but the dog did not go to the door.
She went to the window on the east wall, the one that faced the draw, the one that faced up, toward the stand, toward the rocks, toward the place they had spent three weeks building as the one safe thing they had.
And she growled.
Tom did not move for four seconds.
Four seconds, because every drill they had built for three weeks pointed in one direction, and that direction was up the draw, and the dog was looking up the draw.
"Kindra."
"I see her."
"Everybody stay exactly where they are."
He went to the east window and eased the shutter a quarter inch and put his eye to it.
Nothing. Black timber, blue snow, the pale scar of the draw climbing away between the trees.
Shyla's growl went on, low and continuous, and then it stopped, and she sat down.
She sat down.