Transformation (Nettle tart)

Shaking off the sediment of my grief

We bury our grief. Literally, bury it, with a shovel and dirt. My grief for my mother and her mother is buried in a cemetery in Miami, flat Jewish tombstones near a pink stucco wall. Even with therapy, grief generally stays buried. After 40 years, I’m doing something different with mine.

It stings a little, like brushing your skin against nettles.

I sought out nettles earlier this spring, asking my favorite forager-farmer Sarah Lucas if she had access to any. She picked me a huge bag. I made Renée Erickson’s nettle-lentil salad, except I didn’t have lentils, so I used tepary beans from Arizona instead. I found more nettles at Halal Pastures, a new vendor at our farmers’ market, and yet more at Deep Roots Farm at the Tarrytown market just north of me. I had no shortage of nettles.

In her recipe, Erickson calls for picking off the leaves of the raw nettles one by one using gloves, but I like a different method. I plunge them in a huge bowl of water and use tongs to protect myself, carefully agitating the nettles until the soil falls to the bottom of the bowl. I change the water and repeat until little sediment remains. Then I cook them, stems and all, in grapeseed oil and a little water for steam. When the leaves darken and wilt, I stop cooking and let them cool, then transfer them to a cutting board to chop and remove the woody stems. I squeeze out excess water, blue-green residue like algae staining my hands and board.

With the nettles safe to handle now, I make a choice. The lentil salad again? No, I have a memory of a Suzanne Goin recipe, a swiss chard tart, crisp and beautifully green. I fuse the salad and the tart recipes into their own thing, a nettle tart layered with goat cheese and crème fraîche and lemon zest and currants soaked in amaro and sherry vinegar, all together bitter and savory and complex and sweet. A tribute to both women and a choice to make something new out of two recipes I love.

The occasion for the tart is a gathering of the women in my mother’s family who are still alive and able to travel to my house on a Saturday in May for lunch and tea. I’ve been planning this gathering for months, in collaboration with my mother’s cousin Abbie, who connected me with all the relatives I hadn’t seen in decades or hadn’t yet met at all. I call it the “Siegel Sisters Reunion.” 

Inviting these women to my home is a big deal for me. To make the affirmative decision to do it is a transformation from the choicelessness of losing my mother when I was four. I am deciding to invest in the relationships that remind me of her and invite new ones, to shake off the sediment of my grief and let it become something else. 

I roast eggplant, chop it in my grandfather’s bowl like I’ve been told he used to do. My aunt Denise arrives early and helps me finish the tart. We sit in the garden as my cousins arrive, catching up and enjoying the day. My son takes photos, and without me saying a word, my husband Caleb takes the helm in the kitchen, supervising the chicken I cooked with dates and olives and preserved lemon, the simple asparagus more purple than green. I am completely present with my relatives as these loving men support me.

We sit at the table laid with my grandmother’s china and linen napkins and flowers my friend Sandra arranged. It is lux and light and joyful. I take my cousin Mari, who I’m meeting for the first time, out to jump on our neighbor’s trampoline. The day has that fine relaxed quality to it, yet still flies by. Caleb serves the rhubarb cake he made, and we linger over mint tea. When it’s time to go, each woman takes a moment to leave a message – a memory or a blessing, Abbie’s idea – on the “story phone” Caleb built out of a rotary phone to record community voices at our farmers’ market last summer.

After the party, Caleb and I listen to the recordings in his basement studio as he edits out the crackles and sows the files together. Our voices, reverberating from our bodies into this phone and out his speakers, transformed into a chorus, a song that’s new to the world. I email a link to the recordings and photos and a contact list so any of the women can host another gathering in the future. I feel completion. I have the power to change my story, to transform it through love and art and intention and effort and presence.

“How was your weekend?” I ask my friend Amy when I pass her house on a walk the next day. “Good, I did some gardening, but these nettles are everywhere and driving me crazy,” she says. “I’ll take them,” I say. I smile later as I see a bouquet of wily nettles she has left in my mailbox, dirty roots and all.

Recipe as feeling: Transformation (Nettle tart)

Accept the gift.

Protect yourself.

Make a choice.

Layer with love.

Actual recipe

Nettle tart with goat cheese and currants

This recipe is inspired by Renée Erickson’s nettle-lentil salad from A Boat, A Whale, & A Walrus and Suzanne Goin’s swiss chard tart from Sunday Suppers at Lucques. I combined the flavors from the salad with the technique of the tart into this savory-sweet nourishing dish.

Serves 6-8

INGREDIENTS:
1 box frozen puff pastry (preferably all-butter like DuFour)
1 raw egg mixed with 1 tbs. Water
Grapeseed oil
2 bunches of nettles, about 8 cups raw
2 shallots, peeled and sliced thinly
½ cup dried currants
2 tbs. amaro
2 tbs. sherry vinegar (can substitute white or red wine vinegar)
4 oz. soft goat cheese
4 oz. crème fraîche
Zest of 1 lemon
Salt and pepper to taste

EQUIPMENT:
Parchment paper
Baking sheet
Paring knife
Pastry brush
Large bowl
Tongs
Large sauté pan
Large cutting board

Partially thaw the puff pastry. Cover a baking sheet with parchment paper. When the dough is pliable enough to work with, unfold it on the parchment paper. Take a sharp paring knife and score the pastry around the edges. Use a pastry brush to brush raw egg mixed with water onto the edges of the dough, about a 2-inch border on all sides. Cover the dough with plastic wrap (you may be able to reuse the wrap the dough came in) and place in the refrigerator.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees (if your oven has a convection bake setting, use that). In a small bowl, soak the currants in the amaro and sherry vinegar. Fill a large bowl with water and carefully submerge the lentils in the water, using tongs to handle them (or cover your hands in plastic produce bags). Agitate the nettles until the dirt clinging to them settles to the bottom of the bowl. Change the water and repeat twice more until there’s little dirt settling.

Heat a large sauté pan with a few tablespoons of grapeseed oil. Using tongs, transfer the clean wet nettles to the pan and cook on medium-high until they are wilted. Add a few more tablespoons of water for them to steam if they look dry. When they are dark and look cooked through, turn off the heat and let them cool in the pan.

While the nettles are cooling, mix the goat cheese, crème fraîche, and lemon zest together, and add salt and pepper to taste. Slice the shallots if you haven’t already.

Transfer your cooled nettles to a cutting board. In the pan the nettles were in, turn on the heat and add more oil or butter, and then the shallots. Sauté the shallots for a few minutes until golden and soft, and then add the currants and their liquid and turn the heat to high to reduce the liquid to a syrupy thickness. Chop the nettles and remove any woody stems.

Take the dough out of the refrigerator and remove the plastic wrap. Spoon the goat cheese mixture onto the tart, leaving one-quarter inch border. Layer on the nettles, and then the currant shallot mixture. Sprinkle with a little flaky salt and fresh pepper. Transfer to the oven and bake until thoroughly brown and crispy on the bottom – if it is not crispy on the bottom, the dough will be gummy and unpleasant to eat. Check after 20 minutes and keep going until it’s crispy, turning down the heat if you need to to keep the top from burning.

When the tart is done, remove it and slide it onto a cutting board to slice it into rectangles the size of your choosing. Enjoy as an hors d’oeuvres or a side dish or a light lunch with a salad.