Courtney White McQuarrie is a Southerner, proud University of Virginia sorority sister and lover of Italian cuisine. In summer 2012, after earning a degree from the International Culinary Center in New York City, she printed out directions from MapQuest and used them to wend her way deep into Vermo nt’s Northeast Kingdom. While searching online for cooking jobs, White McQuarrie had stumbled on Vermont’s Table, a five-week summer program at Sterling College in Craftsbury Common, which specializes in sustainable agriculture and the environment. Anne Obelnicki, then the school’s director of sustainable food systems, led the curriculum. Participants would learn to bake bread, make cheese, cure meat from the school’s own pigs and make kraut alongside famed fermenter Sandor Katz. The lesson plan was ambitious, fun and gutsy — sometimes literally. White McQuarrie loved the program so much that, at its end, she packed up her belongings and moved briefly to Vermont. “I was seduced,” she recalled. Attending Sterling “felt like going back in time, in a way.” The dining hall Credit: Suzanne Podhaizer Now White McQuarrie is among the alums facing sad news. Last November, trustees announced that Sterling College would cease to be an accredited higher education institution after one more semester — in June. While the board wrestles with novel ideas for keeping the campus working and vibrant, faculty members are searching for jobs. And the folks who manage the school’s dining services have a daunting assignment: to use up thousands of pounds of food — from frozen, campus-raised chickens to many jars of pickles to a wall rack full of seasonings to 50-pound sacks of grains — by the appointed day. The staff is well prepared for that mandate. At most institutions, dining services puts out pucks of meat, gloopy mac and cheese, and other standardized items in the exact same way every time. At Sterling, adaptability is the whole point. With the accumulated knowledge of decades spent balancing the fluctuating desires of young adults with the availability of local foods, the Sterling kitchen staff is a repository of culinary wisdom. “The cafeteria at Sterling is what I wish all cafeterias were like,” White McQuarrie enthused. “It’s exactly the kind of food that’s healthy for people and for the environment. It’s what I want my kids to eat.” Seven Days recently spent a morning cooking with the crew, whose members shared tips and memories in hopes that the school’s legacy of sustainability and efficiency will live on in the home kitchens of our readers. It surely will in those of the thousands of former students and community members Sterling has fed. After cooking, we supped in the dining hall, a bright but institutional room with a vast collection of mismatched plates and coffee mugs and a ceiling that looks like an overturned canoe. The salad bar may have been standard-issue — with its sneeze guards and metal trays — but the food it contained was anything but. Handmade milk bread buns, glazed and coated in sesame seeds, came in various shapes and sizes. Bone-in chicken thighs and drumsticks were grilled hard and coated with an herby, moss-green sauce. Side dishes included roasted butternut squash, the last package of summer’s roasted tomatoes — thawed and sizzled briefly in a pan with onions — fermented purple cabbage, chard-stem relish, and sweetly spiced “tongue” pickles. Milk bread buns with sesame seeds Credit: Suzanne Podhaizer What are tongue pickles? “You take overgrown cucumbers, you seed them [after slicing them lengthwise], and then you pickle them,” Sterling teacher and director of dining Liz Chadwick explained. The combination of cinnamon and clove, she continued, makes them taste “like Christmas in a jar.” The chard-stem relish, she said, was a way to use something most kitchens discard. While the leaves were wilted and eaten long ago, the sinewy stalks have benefited from a long soak in seasoned vinegar. “You can pickle anything,” she enthused. “Elongating the season is at the core” of the Sterling cooking methodology, Chadwick said. Extra apples and strawberries are dehydrated, herbs are frozen in cubes with oil, and every animal bone ends up in the stockpot. Her weekly menus are designed to explore global flavors, give students the comforts of home and rotate through whatever needs to be used. Obelnicki, who did some of the same jobs as Chadwick under a different title, now runs tiny Woods Edge Farm in South Burlington on a property that also functions as a short-term rental. She has 23 fruit trees and grows garlic, sweet potatoes and other crops in raised beds, selling products such as fruit, jams and herb salts at nearby Bread Butter Farm. Obelnicki came to Sterling with a degree from the Culinary Institute of America and a master’s in agriculture, food and the environment from Tufts University. These days, rather than cooking for hundreds of students, she prepares meals for herself and her two school-age children. But she was happy to offer recommendations for home cooks who want to cook like they do at Sterling. “When you’re trying to use local food, freezer management is very important,” she said. While it’s far from the only food preservation skill, she explained, freezing food is more practical for people who “don’t want to take on a new career in fermenting and processing” or don’t have room for all the crocks and jars. Another tip: If buying food by the bushel feels daunting, simply freeze a bit at a time — one bag of berries every time you go picking or visit the grocery store, a quart of cherry tomatoes here and there, a few ears of corn. Obelnicki logs freezer contents on a dry-erase board, which makes it easy to keep track of supply and use up the oldest food first. Herby chicken made from birds raised at Sterling Credit: Suzanne Podhaizer Gwyneth Harris, who has been working at Sterling on and off since 1997, is a faculty member who also manages the school garden, working closely with the dining hall. Each dining services staffer “has something they’re really great at,” she said. Chadwick, Harris noted, is exceptional at using spices and making dishes inspired by global cuisines. Obelnicki worked healthy, whole ingredients onto the menus and played the long game by incorporating cured products made with school-grown meats. What has Harris learned from so many years of supplying and dining at Sterling? “You don’t have to feel like there’s this whole sector of foods that’s off-limits to the home cook,” she said. Through her observations of the students and staff, combined with resources such as books, in-person classes and the internet, she’s “really embraced the idea that you can make anything you want: sausages, smoked meats, kimchi, sauerkraut, cheeses and beverages.” Another of Harris’ takeaways from her Sterling years is the importance of appreciating and using “the whole product” and not just the fancy bits. “Celebrate unusual ingredients,” she suggested. “Learn how to use briskets and chicken necks.” Celebrate unusual ingredients.Gwyneth Harris Discussing Sterling fare that isn’t typical of school cafeterias, both Harris and Obelnicki fondly recalled “the year of the rutabaga.” That season, the roots in the garden grew unusually well, and at harvest time, the bulbous purple and orange brassicas filled the school’s root cellar. “There were 100 students and 800 pounds of rutabaga,” Obelnicki recalled. “It was a joke the whole year.” Liz Chadwick Credit: Suzanne Podhaizer How did they handle the glut? Obelnicki recalled that her weekly menus featured instructions such as “Make chili, use this many pounds of meat, throw rutabaga into it.” She ran “Iron Chef” competitions for students focused solely on rutabaga dishes. One of her favorite lessons: Mashed rutabaga could be added to tomato sauce, “and it only made it better,” she remembered. The award for the most creative use of rutabaga went to Sterling’s most veteran kitchen staffer, Paul Sweeney, who deftly adapted his applesauce-moistened carrot cake recipe to use the more fibrous, less sweet vegetable. Sweeney — who once owned a pizza place — is the maestro of the school’s weekly pizza nights, makes the tongue pickles using an old family recipe, forages red cones of sumac that are worked into Chadwick’s spice blends, and can take apart and fix the dishwasher. He’s been employed at Sterling for 40 years, more than half the school’s history, and before his tenure, both of his grandmothers worked there. In 1986, keen to take off on a motorcycle trip and needing coverage in the kitchen, Sweeney’s maternal grandmother called on her grandson, a recent culinary school grad, for help. He never left. Sweeney’s chief delight is taking leftovers, such as oatmeal and fruit, and working them into breads and desserts. “I don’t always follow recipes,” he explained, noting that knowledge of culinary chemistry helps. Another tip: When baking, don’t forget to account for the weather. Doughs rise more slowly in cool weather and can quickly get out of hand when it’s hot. While Sterling staffers and former students were generous with culinary tips and tricks they learned at the school, their prevailing sentiment was sorrow for its closing and unease about Craftsbury’s future. These days, Sterling alum White McQuarrie has two young children and runs a restaurant called Blanca Food + Wine in Norfolk, Va., where sourcing food from farms isn’t as simple as it is in the Northeast Kingdom. “My time in Vermont radicalized me in a way,” White McQuarrie said from the garden she maintains outside her restaurant, which supplies her with herbs, greens and tomatoes. Two years after leaving Vermont, White McQuarrie dined at the vaunted Hudson Valley farm-to-table restaurant Blue Hill at Stone Barns. Her friends from the city were “amazed,” she said, by the sheep barns, the pizza with mushrooms cooked in the heat of a compost pile and the sweeping farm fields. But after her time at Sterling, White McQuarrie said, the fancy restaurant left her a bit cold. “I was kind of unimpressed,” she recalled. “Sterling was very, very cool. My impression of Vermont, through Craftsbury and through my Vermont’s Table moment, was: This is truly God’s country.” Her story underlines how plenty of those who studied or sojourned at Sterling — chefs, farmers, nonprofit leaders and teachers alike — will go on sharing the school’s ethos, one bite or lesson at a time. Learn more at sterlingcollege.edu. The original print version of this article was headlined “Sterling Reputation | Sterling College closes in June, but staff and alumni of its innovative culinary program still have lessons to teach” The post Culinary Memories and Tips From the Sterling College Kitchen appeared first on Seven Days. ...read more read less