The Brown Food of Woodstock

Even as a small child, Woodstock held a very special place in my life. The short version: sometime in the 1940s or thereabouts (the story has been told to me about a million different ways, depending on which way the wind is blowing), my Uncle Marvin’s father, Harry–an anarchist/architect who had managed to escape from Russia with the Czar’s troops chasing him the whole way–bought a chunk of property right on Tannery Brook in Woodstock proper, with the intent to build houses there so he could get the family’s kids out of the city for the summer. This was not just whim; polio had infiltrated the city’s schools and playgrounds, and he wanted his grandkids and nieces and nephews out of danger. But what started as just a practical idea wound up being a virtual Brigadoon: he built 3 houses surrounding a small central compound less than a block away from the brook, less than three blocks away from the center of town. 

In our family, we all have very separate memories of Woodstock. My cousin Nina tells me, with great and precise detail, that she can close her eyes and see her Grandma Lena (Harry’s wife) walking from her house down the path to Nina’s, holding a still-warm, freshly-baked blueberry pie, because she knew how much her granddaughter loved them. There are stories of my cousin Stan’s succulent barbecued chicken, of volleyball games and of teaching the children how to paint; and of how, during the War, Lena and my Aunt Thelma pin-pointed on a gigantic map exactly where my Uncle Marvin was in Europe, based on an agreed-upon set of secret clues he’d sent her in letters, which passed the censors without issue. As a child, I remember little more than feeling remarkably safe there, and being surrounded by very cool people who all really liked each other a lot, which I guess is not too different from how the festival-goers claimed to feel during that muddy weekend in 1969, forty or so miles down the road from my aunt and uncle’s house. My family’s compound in Woodstock was just like the festival, only with pinochle and Allan Sherman.

Years after my family sold the property in the 1970s, my time in Woodstock was limited to visits as a teenager on my days off from a summer job working in Maplecrest, New York, and some years later, visiting with my late friends Peter and Tim, who had a small cottage up the road from town, in Lake Hill. In both instances, I found myself searching for Lena, her outstretched hands holding a warm, freshly-baked blueberry pie, and for Stan’s barbecued chicken. Instead, I was faced with Brown Food. 

Peter and Tim, in the space of a few years, cooked for me all manner of Woodstockian Brown Food: there were pilafs and tarts, breads and pies, soups and “salads”, the latter of which were always devoid of a high note, like a simple vinaigrette, or even a squeeze of lemon. They were just Brown. And murky. And muddy. Much like Wavy Gravy’s recipe for a dish that he would call “breakfast in bed for 400,000”:

A few years later on Thanksgiving, I spent the holiday at Peter and Tim’s house and was given clear directions: we don’t care what you cook, but it has to be vegetarian. They didn’t specify that it had to be brown, but it was strongly suggested to me that I stuff a large pumpkin with a brown lentil stew, which I did. What they neglected to mention (and because I was not a vegetarian I didn’t know) was that unless I bought the correct kind of pumpkin, the stuffed one I had in the oven would explode and ooze brown lentil stew all over their brown 1970s oven, and all over their brown pine floors. Which it did. 

The odd thing about The Brown Food of Woodstock, at least in Peter and Tim’s case, was once they left Woodstock and headed home to the city, their food ceased to be brown. Sometimes, it was green. Sometimes, if tomatoes were involved, it was red. But once they went back to Woodstock, the food they cooked — and they asked me to cook — was invariably brown, including: