History is a funny thing. Even when you have somehow skipped a chapter or even if you try to forget all about it or maybe even rewrite it in your head, it always comes back, revealing itself in interesting ways.
You know that saying, “What’s done is done”? When it comes out of my mouth, I’m usually throwing up my hands and saying, welp, there’s nothing we can do about that now, let’s move on. But it’s a truth, too — all the things that happen, large and small, every day, all the time, in the present that inextricably lay the path to our past.
This Harvest issue of Northforker has a lot of that going on — the way history resonates, always, in our present and builds the things we build upon. Like the wonderful, inimitable truth-talker of the food world, Florence Fabricant, the New York Times food columnist and East End resident who (finally!) has written a memoir, Salty, Not Sweet: A Life in the Food World, which hits shelves this month. While the book certainly tells you a lot about Fabricant (do not skip the introduction; it’s priceless from the first line), she also lends her keen eye and five decades of observing and writing about the food world to remind us of things that, perhaps, we’d forgotten or never knew to begin with. You’ll learn about Florence’s pretty cool life, but you’ll also learn a lot about why we eat and drink what we do (and maybe even, how to do it a little better). I got to talk to her about the book and a whole lot more — flip to page 74 for some Flo Fab insight on the past, present and future.
Last year, my in-house history buff, Stephanie Villani, told me about a historic home in Cutchogue simply nicknamed the Old House, because it’s the oldest standing to our local historians’ knowledge and one full of spooky and other secrets about local life from Colonial times on. Shot by Doug Young, from the creepy little voodoo poppets found beneath the floorboards to the clear-eyed acknowledgement of the original owner and his descendants’ slave-keeping ways (yes, in the North, it was more common than you may know) to just seeing how someone lived and functioned at home in the 17th and 18th centuries, Stephanie is a pretty dynamite docent for us on p. 42.
With climbing real estate prices being what they are, old farms don’t often become new farms these days, but for father-daughter team John and Kendall Fabb, they saw an old, neglected swathe of agricultural history in Mattituck and felt the tug of the land. They bought it and reinvigorated it in 2019, and in seven short years (a drop in the bucket in farming) have turned this old piece of Long Island farming past into a thriving live-off-the-land parcel complete with a popular CSA, educational classes and just good ol’ community gathering today. Check out contributor Maria Pietromonaco’s lovely story on p. 58, with some gorgeous images from a new shutterbug on our pages, Justin Aharoni.
Oh, and along those lines? Our very own Eddie Glazarev, editor of the newspaper side of things at Times Review Media Group, dug into the labor of love committed daily by Orient Country Store owners Miriam Foster and Grayson Murphy, who bought the old spot — which has functioned as a neighborhood sundries store since 1830 — when they were just 24 years old. It’s a business that has become as much a neighbor as any human being, and an important stop-in for locals and visitors alike. Photographer Madison Fender really captured the small town with a big-impact vibe of the place. Read all about it on p. 88.
There’s lots more to reap from these pages, too. A pumpkin Basque cheesecake fit for the season (p. 109), a look at the North Fork TV Festival (p. 104), a delicious, wonderful apple-grape mash-up made by the talented Kelly Koch at Woodside Orchards (p. 26) and a whole bunch more to pack into your market bag. Happy Harvest, North Forkers!
