food
Tasting Home and Away A new Vermont cookbook takes local ingredients global B Y A L I CE L EVI T T JEB WALLACE-BRODEUR
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ome dishes are built ingredient by ingredient. Others are constructed brick by brick. Last week, retired chef Bob Titterton, 58, took the warm weather as an opportunity to don his barn boots and build a mangal by the pond on the sprawling Elmore property that he shares with his wife, dog and a pair of exceptionally vocal cats. The cookbook author and food blogger built a glowing bed of coals between two short towers of bricks to slow-roast tender skewers of lamb known as shashlik.
THE CHEF EVEN COOKS WITH WILD CATTAILS WHEN THEY’RE IN SEASON. SEVENDAYSVT.COM
HE SAYS THEY TASTE LIKE CUCUMBERS.
SEVEN DAYS
03.21-12-03.28.12
The makeshift rotisserie and the dish are central-Asian inventions that Titterton learned about on a trip to the Soviet Union with other Johnson State College students in 1975. It may seem a bit exotic for inclusion in his latest project, The Vermont Home Cookbook. But Titterton’s shashlik recipe, learned in Dushanbe, is in there, as is one for accompanying Tajik-style flatbread. The recipes in the book — more than 150 — encompass a world’s worth of dinners, drawing in part on the author’s experiences growing up in a diverse New Jersey mill town. In the red-meat section alone, meatballs with porcini and prosciutto share space with chimichurri
36 FOOD
Bob Titterton
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steaks and sauerbraten. So why call it a “Vermont” cookbook? Because the recipes can all be prepared with local ingredients, and Titterton tells his readers which are best. On his blog, he’ll even share where to find them. Take today’s shashlik: The cubes of butterflied lamb leg that he marinated overnight came from Winding Brook Farm, just down the road in Morrisville. Titterton’s Tajik feast also includes pickled cucumbers, cherry peppers and green beans, all grown at home. The chef even cooks with wild cattails when they’re in season. He says they taste like cucumbers. The book reads like an encyclopedia of preparations for uniquely Vermont foods, many based on international recipes, others wholly original. It opens with a carefully compiled key to the uses of native apple species, many of which Titterton grows on his property. Once readers have established that Chenango Strawberries are best eaten out of hand or as sauce and that Stayman Winesaps are more appropriate for baking or cider, they can move on to learning about maple, beer and local cheeses. Like many Vermonters, the author is particularly effusive about Maplebrook Farm burrata and local clothbound cheddars. Titterson got his culinary training at Johnson & Wales University and last cooked professionally in the 1980s, when he was cochef at the Ten Acres Lodge in Stowe alongside Jack Pickett, now owner of Frida’s Taqueria and Grill. Retired from his subsequent job as a middle school social studies teacher, Titterton is a man with a mission. He wants to teach Vermont to cook. The author released The Vermont TASTING HOME AND AWAY
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