Mapping Terroir Catalog

KINNEY CENTER FOR INTERDISCIPLINARY RENAISSANCE STUDIES

PRESENTS

MAPPING TERROIR: MEMORY & MYTH BY ANDREA CALUORI

A RENAISSANCE OF THE EARTH EXHIBIT

SPRING/SUMMER 2022

ARTIST'S STATEMENT My approach to this project has been influenced by two perspectives: my experience as a farmer and my work as a printmaker.

Exploring the Renaissance Center’s rare book collection of agrarian theory and practical manuals resulted in a search for shared experiences with the farmers of the early modern period. What were the motions and moments that defined a culture of growing? More importantly, what were the relationships between human, animal, plant, and place—the relationships that I believe create terroir? I hoped to reconstruct a personal agrarian narrative based on the books’ contents.

Terroir is defined as ‘expression of place.’ Often used to describe wine, terroir is a reflection of how region, climate, soil, and annual growing conditions translate to the final product in the taster’s glass. It is the nuanced understanding that place, soil amendments, and cultivation practices create distinct character in flavor. This is not only recognized in wine, but in other agricultural products such as cheese, coffee, tea, and vegetables.

This expression of place is not only encapsulated within the landscape’s material conditions, but also in the relationships that define tangible interactions with place. There exists a story narrated through a collection of moments and imagination which informs our relationship with food and taste. These are the quiet moments where the human experience and nature collide and produce flavor. These eight prints are an exploration of how terroir exists not only in the topography of place, but also in the geography of memory and stories.

The work itself includes printed images created from hand-carved linoleum blocks. These images are reflections of the moments I have experienced in the cultivation of food, as well as the shared connections I imagine to have with those English farmers of the 17th and 18th centuries. Perhaps this is where myth comes into play. I can only guess what hidden stories defined their memory of farming based on the practical knowledge printed in their books. I’m not interested in knowing how they used a plow, or what grafting techniques were common, I want to know how it all made them feel, their impressions, their relationships with animals, land, and plants. (When you’re a humanist artist-farmer, that’s the kind of stuff you’re interested in.)

These prints are an attempt to capture a feeling that exists somewhere between memory and myth, that creates a sense of place, that in effect, goes beyond the borders of terroir in mapping out the flavors of our relationship with the personal moments that define taste, past and present.

5 limited edition prints are editions of 50, signed and embossed.

Other prints are unlimited edition, signed and embossed.

John Worlidge, Systema Agricultura, 1681, X4v.

I notice, looking at John Worlidge's Systema Agricultura (1681), that his chapter on animal species provides a small explanation of how each animal gives back to the farm’s household economy. Cheese, wool, honey, transport. Each creature has a purpose. While Worlidge is fairly practical about this point, his tone is one of acknowledgement. In reading his straightforward detail of farm animal work, I imagine all the

ploughmen and horses, goats and dairy women, beekeepers, and orchardists. Did they value those quiet mornings in the milking parlor, harnessing the plough horse in the barn, or the turning of milk into cheese at the hearth? I don’t know for certain, but from the practical knowledge Worlidge provides, I ask myself: what moments lay beneath the surface in the production of food that shape our relationships with animal, plant, and home?

OF HORSES: OLD PARTNERS & PORTRAIT OF WORKING HORSE Prior to mechanized equipment, teams of horses and oxen allowed for expanded tilling, manuring, and cultivating crops. The farmer and the team were inseparable partners in agricultural endeavors.

At our small farm I work with a miniature horse for draft power. With less than an acre to cultivate, a 300lb horse provides plenty of strength to till, manure, and move objects. A good farm horse walks at a slow pace, listens well, and practices patience. In return for good care and kindness, the draft horse or pony gives back to the land through a strong work ethic, composted manure, gentleness on the soil, and a rewarding partnership.

Worlidge writes: “The horse has preheminence above all others being the noblest, strongest, swiftest and most necessary of all the beasts used in this country for the saddle, for the plough and cart, and for the pack” (X4v). This definition of the horse not only mentions its physical capability, but also its character “being the noblest.” Likewise In the Dictionarium Rusticum (1717), the author’s description of the horse emphasizes his character: “valiant…he is most gentle and loving to man” (BB8v).

Working alongside horses in the field creates a distinct bond. The print Of Horses: Old Partners, embodies the story between the old hands that carried the lines and their memory of the horse that gave their strength and heart in the furrow. The two wooden pieces you see are old hames—part of the horse’s harness that fit over the collar and allows for the point of draft. The horse’s working farm harness has not changed for centuries. It is an elegant, simple design that accommodates their ability to pull efficiently. Horsepower is inextricably tied to the cultivation of food—whether it’s mules, donkeys, or draft horses, these creatures are a part of our global agricultural history and its flavor.

I often wonder about all the people and horses that developed working relationships and grew food for their communities and homes. How their sweat dripped into the soil, and their deep sighs in the barn now echo empty in forgotten memories. I taste those moments in our food, the times when I pull the cultivator with my horse. Our friendship grows with the seeds we plant together.

HAYMAKER'S BOUQUET Whenever I bite into a beautifully crafted goat cheese, I often wonder what the animal was eating or foraging: Did they graze on a hillside? Eat brush by the field’s edge?

Even if animals don’t have the opportunity to be guided by their herdsman out in the open, a meadow’s grasses can be cut and cured in the form of hay. I am fascinated by the different grasses and flowers that comprise the fodder we call hay. Cutting and curing a field’s plants is noted even in many early modern agricultural manuals. All winter long, when nothing grows in abundance, the summer’s field is preserved for animals to eat until the crop returns again in the spring. The memories of cutting grass with scythes and harnessing horses to pitch the hay all become a part of the food that goes to the goats and eventually into the cheese.

This print examines hay not for its nutritional value, but for the individual beauty of each plant: vetch, timothy, clover, fescue, and orchard grass to name a few.

It is in honor of those who make and made hay—people and horses—and the hours spent in the summer sun preserving the season’s nutrition for the colder days ahead.

Looking through the agricultural manuals in the Center’s rare book collection, I found many references to similar plants, such as clover and vetch, discussed as being excellent fodder for livestock. Although hay is no longer cut and cured the same way as it was in the 17th century, its value in food cultivation was understood as a key part of agrarian life.

OF GOATS: NOURISHMENT

According to Worlidge, goat milk is considered one of the most nourishing liquids.

We now know goat milk has a different protein structure to cow milk, rendering it more digestible and gentle on the stomach. I would take this a step further and say goats not only provide nourishment in the form of milk, cheese, and yogurt, but also their personality is so gregarious and lighthearted you can’t help but feel nourished by their joyful character. One of the first domesticated animals in agriculture, goats are easy to care for and enjoy human companionship.

At our farm, we raise French Alpine dairy goats and milk one doe for cheese every year. Rather than separate the goat kids, we let the young caprines nurse from their mother and take what is left for us. Caring for these animals is a year-round job. I have shared the last five years of my life raising two goats that I purchased at seven weeks old.

The first image, Of Goats: Nourishment, is from a photograph I took last Spring after my goat gave birth. It was a beautiful late spring morning, with sun steaming through the window. I came in to feed breakfast and one of the goat kids started nursing while her mother ate.

I felt gratitude for these creatures, who nourish me and their young, who often remind me to stay present and joyful.

Whenever I make cheese from their milk, the flavor feels full of moments just like this one: the morning light, the symphony of chewing, the wagging of little goat tails, the negative degree temperatures, and breaking up ice in water buckets in the winter.

I can’t help but think my cheese is the best tasting because it’s born from these memories.

often leave apples, particularly those of the cider variety, given they are bitter and not sweet.

But there is something so playful about goats, even when they get into something they shouldn’t. Goats are a reminder that we, too, should play. Goats follow joy and curiosity, wherever that may lead them. I imagine that’s where the word "capricious" comes from: a little bit of mischief, a little bit of play. Each bite of my cheese gives me a taste of that.

CAPRICIOUS: MISCHIEF & PLAY

Goats are the ultimate small farm animal and I think even Worlidge agrees with this description. However, they are mischievous and Worlidge advises to not keep them by young trees. This mention inspired the second image: Capricious: Mischief & Play. In an orchard of young apple trees, your goat will destroy them. Apt at climbing, and eager to explore and eat, they will girdle the tree and eat the foliage. I have found, they

OF PLANTS (AND MAGIC): LOVAGE I first toured the Renaissance Center’s kitchen garden in the early fall of 2021 and was delighted to find an abundant amount of lovage growing in the garden.

Lovage is no longer a common plant, but it is a wonderful culinary herb that provides a delicious celery-like flavor to soups, stews, and roasted meats. It is very hardy—I have transplanted a single plant grown from seed three times and it has thrived. Looking it up in John Gerard’s Herbal (1633), I was pleased to see the plant mentioned alongside a handsome woodcut. Gerard only refers to lovage as a culinary herb once. The 17th-century mindset knows that herbs are categorized for characteristics that go beyond a supermarket approach of ‘plant-food-flavor.’

Their 'virtues,' include a dynamic range of health remedies, thereby giving the plant a more substantial and personal character. In herbalist circles, I have found plants to be described as having human-like vitality and presence. The herb has a personality and individual story defined by how it nourishes and heals.

I can’t help but think of Giambattisa Basile’s fairy tale 'La Gatta Cenerentola,' written in the 1600’s, in which a date tree acts as the fairy godmother in the classic children’s tale, 'Cinderella'. Even earlier in the 1300’s, Boccaccio’s Decameron includes a novella of a young woman who plants the head of her murdered lover in the vase of a basil plant. She tends to it and cares for it as if it were her betrothed himself. There exists a tradition and cultural knowledge of plants possessing hidden magic or human virtue. Myth and memory conflate in this print of lovage.

Following the drawing detail in Gerard's Herbal, I added more movement and drama with a strong play between negative and positive space. The herb comes forward as lively and present, with movement and magic. This is to remind the viewer not only is this plant edible, but it is also something otherworldly, powerful, and alive. In charting an understanding of terroir and relationship, stories of plants go hand-in-hand with their remedies and sometimes superstitions, myths and magic. How does this translate to our palate? Does our perception of plants affect how we taste them?

SUGARING MOON I can easily recall my first season making maple syrup.

I tapped four sugar maples and produced one quart of syrup on a crude set-up of lasagna trays and an open fire.

Four years later, we now put in forty taps and make syrup on a hobby-sized evaporator, making five gallons of syrup in a season. It’s a laborious process that places the farmer somewhere in between winter and spring, occupying that transitional time of year when the snow still lingers but crocuses and snowdrops are blossoming. From the transition comes the sweetness: maple sugar. Before the boiling begins, the sugarmaker must go out into the woods and find a maple grove. Drill holes into the tree and tap spouts into the wood.

Buckets hang below to collect the sap as it drips steadily once the temperatures rise during the day and cool back down below freezing at night.

Maple syrup is a great example of our region’s terroir. It is a tree that only grows in this part of the world and further north. I even think the syrup I make in a small batch on my tiny evaporator tastes better than syrup I have made on a larger rig.

Why is that? The process is the same, except that when I’m boiling outside, sometimes it’s snowing, sometimes it’s warm. Every so often friends stop by to talk and share the labor. Maple syrup has a way of bringing people together after a bitter season. I often wonder if my homemade syrup is infused with that sense of togetherness…those shared experiences that define its character, its terroir.

John Evelyn, Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest-Trees, 1679, L1v.

For me, it’s the moments in the woods that always leave an impression. You recognize the trees’ presence as unique beings and witness their vitality through the flow of sap. Shortly after the maple season is the birch season.

While it takes larger quantities of birch sap to make syrup, it can be done and some farmers are experimenting with it. Sweet birch and sugar maple are often found growing together in North American forests.

OF TREES: SWEETNESS Given that sugar maples don’t grow in England, I was not looking for examples of tree tapping or syrup making in the Center’s collection. However, when I looked through the sections on trees in various books I became intrigued by the mention of sap collection from birch trees. The method employed by farmers of the past were ones I'd never heard of before. They would cut small branches and tie bottles to collect the running sap. Can you imagine such a sight, glistening in the sun?

Vinetum Britannicum: or, a Treatise of Cider (1676) refers to the sap as ‘Blood of Trees.’ At first I found it morbid, but is it really? Sap is the tree’s way of sending food to its branches, to its buds, to its future leaves and future seeds. It’s a lifegiving force. Sap and its sweetness are a reminder of new life, and the incredible vitality present in trees. I even found the mention of flavor as being important. In some ways, the passage "of birch-wine" is a wonderful example of how we think of terroir. Where is the tree located? What parts of Europe have birch? The sap extracted from the branches is in the tree longer, and therefore creates a more distinguished, birch-like flavor, as opposed to extracting from the trunk (as we do with sugar maple). I found it fascinating to see an example of food cultivation not just for sustenance but also for pleasing the palate.

Cultivating flavor and taste requires the presence of human collaboration. So I return again to my original curiosity about the moments and the stories that define our relationship with food and how it tastes.

This print was designed with the birch tree’s bark in mind as well as the feeling one gets walking in the woods, coming face-to-face with different leaves, branches, and bark. The bark’s knots in this image suggest the appearance of an eye looking back at you. It’s a reverent acknowledgement of the working relationship between trees and humans; a gratitude for how the birch and the maple offer sweetness at a time when it’s appreciated and needed. The production of maple syrup begins in the woods with the trees. All of the moments in the cold, placing our hands on the bark, drilling holes, hammering spouts, sometimes in unison with the male woodpecker, create a symphony of experiences that eventually find their way into the syrup.

Of Process

Photo credit: Davìda Carta

Printmaking lends itself well to the discussion of growing food. I often liken the tactile carving process as being similar to working soil with your hands. In both instances, I approach my blank surfaces the same way: I want to carve out something beautiful, something that speaks to others and that moves my viewer.

I portray memories and recollections from my immediate environment and daily life.

The contrasts between positive and negative space help recreate the drama and intensity that occupy even the small moments in my life.

In our micro-farming at home to feed ourselves, it is very much the same intensity I seek out in the plainest of vegetables, the quietest of flowers, the simplest of cheeses.

I use older methods, like a horse, because a tractor seems impractical and I love a working relationship with animals. It’s slower, but so is printmaking. Line by line, slow and steady, just like cultivating a small plot, just like seeding by hand.

As a printmaker, I value working in contrasts of light and dark. It makes sense to me. Most of my images are like weathered photographs in my mind. Stills I have kept and then translate to a block. Terroir is like that. It captures everything that went into that bite, that initial taste, like a photograph. What was the first piece of art that kept you staring? What was that first bite of something that made you actually think about and savor the flavor?

I would guess that ineffable feeling comes from the same place.

RENAISSANCE OF THE EARTH The Renaissance of the Earth is a series of interdisciplinary research collaborations, undergraduate and graduate courses, hands-on workshops, conferences, and arts programming that consider how the early modern past helps us reshape our environmental future.

Historians and agricultural students work hand-in-hand with geoscientists and arts and literature students to transform a kitchen garden into a template for research and a rare book library into an archive for the imagination.