Accent on Living
VERMONT is a stale where the selfrespect of the cook is still a powerful force. The traveler would find it hard to name another where the distance between one good meal and the next is so short. In any of its larger towns the commercial hotel, however weather-beaten the exterior, is usually dependable for first-rate food, and ils villages all have something notable to eat that careful inquiry will locate even for strangers and city folk. 1 first met the full range of Vermont cooking, and the spirit behind it, when my wife and I spent a weekend at Idlepine Lodge.
Our young daughter was in a summer camp nearby; the camp recommended Idlepine for parents and visitors, and I had made a reservation, mentioning a late arrival, by writing to the proprietors, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wilcox. I had no idea of what a place for “parents” might be like, and I was uneasy about any place suggested by a camp; there was a good hotel a few miles away.
Everyone seemed to have turned in when we got there, but Mr. Wilcox came out just as I pulled up at a night light outside the log lodge building. His enormous flashlight guided us to our cabin farther along in the woods, and he hustled our luggage in before I was more than out of the car. The cabin proved to be all that we could have wished: agreeably warmed from a smoldering fireplace, beds smartly turned down, fluffy Hudson’s Bay blankets, and all in fine order.
Mr. Wilcox, a sunburned, amiable man who looked the Vermont farmer that he is for ten months of the year, suggested something to eat. “You folks ought to feel a mite hungry,” he said. “Better let me get you something.” Would I go over to the lodge with him? I most certainly would.
The kitchen at the lodge was spacious, a place of scrubbed and scoured wood and many bright accessories, and even the night breezes through its screens did not quite remove a lingering whiff of homemade bread. It was a kitchen to reassure one. Just to walk into it sharpened my hunger, and so does the recollection.
Mr. Wilcox opened the door of a cold room. “Come in,” he said, “and let’s see what there is.”There seemed to be everything, including a leg of lamb and a ham, but these did not attract Mr. Wilcox. “Must be something here,” he muttered. “Here, what about some duck? What say to some duck sandwiches?" He held up a platter: two roasl ducks, intact and inviting.
Within the next few minutes Mr. Wilcox converted the ducks and some homemade bread into four lavish sandwiches. He said, ruefully, that he had no license to sell drinks but it would be a pity not to have some beer with the sandwiches. If I would accept the beer from his own personal stores, that would be the proper thing, and he insisted on carrying the sandwiches and the beer back to the cabin. Breakfast at any time, on the cabin’s screen porch, he said as he took leave of us, and we settled for 9:30.
The breakfast, which was expertly served by two pretty high-school girls, was mainly basted fried eggs and little cakes of fiery homemade sausage, blueberry pancakes with a delicate maple syrup from Mr. Wilcox’s farm on Route 5, extra supplies of muffins and toast, and an extra quart thermos of coffee — everyt hing really hot—and a copy of that morning’s New York Times and Herald Tribune.
“Most folks like to have the morning paper,”Mr. Wilcox said when I asked him about it later, “so I just drive up the river to Wells and get a few.”
The menu of our Sunday dinner at Idlepine, for our daughter and a couple of her friends, sounds so commonplace as to be hardly worth describing; stewed chicken, potatoes, vegetables, and pie. Yet, from Mrs. Wilcox’s kitchen it became a nonesuch. How it began I have forgotten; what I remember is a vast platter of chicken and dumplings, bathed in an abundance of gravy that was plainly not much more than a strong chicken broth and farm cream, the whole of it a pale, golden hue. There seemed to be gallons of it on the platter, but this was backed by reserves in covered dishes for the biscuits, and reserves for the mashed potatoes — a kind of dream substance neither mashed nor whipped, neither heavy nor fluffy, but delicate and at the same time substantial and with the golden motif repeated in lashings of but ter.
The vegetables, like the chicken, were from the Wilcox farm; one felt that the onions, served boiled, must have been pulled from the garden at sunup, along with the green things and tomatoes. Foodstuffs of this sort are not found in markets, nor are cooks like Mrs. Wilcox working for wages.
I do not know how many chickens we consumed — children from a summer camp, taking a meal out, are prodigious feeders — but everything was passed again and again; not remnants but handsomely replenished offerings with all their original attractiveness. We ate countless biscuits in gravy, even though we ate a good many with nothing but butter, just to give them their due in that form.
(I met only recently a man whose sister had gone to the same camp, and l asked him if he knew Idlepine. “Oh yes,” he said. “I believe that’s why the family sent her there — so that they could have the Idlepine cooking whenever they visited her.”) After finishing Mrs. Wilcox’s apple
After finishing Mrs. Wilcox’s apple pie — and refusing the ice cream — I sat down beside Mr. Wilcox on the veranda overlooking Lake Fairlce. I spoke warmly of the meals.
“I hired a chef when I opened this place,” said Mr. Wilcox. “He was from New York and he was really a pretty good cook. Hut he caused me a lot of trouble. We didn’t get on well at all.”
The trouble?
“The fellow was always telling me how they did it in New York,” Mr. Wilcox explained. “For instance, he told me I oughtn’t to serve sherbet with the first part of the dinner and then serve dessert too. Said it wasn’t necessary and nobody did it that way. It finally got so I simply had to let him go. So, ever since, Mrs. Wilcox has done the cooking and I get these little girls in to help her.”
Idlepine is still going strong. Its season is short —July and August. The prices are about those of a first-rate hotel, but not even the best hotel is likely to have a Mrs. Wilcox.