I was raised outside of a small town in Northern California. Not born there, but my family moved there when I was 12. I only lived there from ages 12 to 18, and for a couple very brief periods as an adult, but I think Grass Valley is the place I will always think of as home. We lived on a small farm, complete with a country-sized garden and livestock. Did we eat well? Does a Duroc spend its days rooting in the mud? To this day, I don’t think I’ve ever managed to eat such pristine food. We had two freezers stocked with the meat we raised. We had a few fruit trees, as well as a huge 1/4-acre patch of wild blackberries. Blackberry pie was my first misadventure in the kitchen, but I can also recall one particular height-of-summer dinner I prepared when I was 17 or 18. Some aunts, uncles, and cousins were visiting, mostly from Iowa. The dinner included grilled pork chops, zucchini fritters, and fresh corn on the cob, among other things. I’m sure if I were to prepare the same meal today it would be a far-cry better, but the simple purity of the food must have gone a long way towards masking my mistakes. Everyone said the meal was great, but what else would you say to a teenager just starting out in the kitchen? On that farm, I lost my culinary virginity. On that farm, I was infected with a cooking itch that I never really started to scratch until 15 years later.

            As much as I loved the food at home growing up, I loved our infrequent excursions out to dinner even more. I don’t remember too many of the restaurants where we dined, but I know there was a lot of pizza, some Mexican, and even some occasional Chinese. I wonder what I would think if I could go back to 1978, packing with me the years of culinary experience I now have, and eat at those same restaurants - I suspect I would be sorely disappointed. For one thing, my parents probably didn’t waste their money taking me and my sisters to nicer restaurants that we couldn’t appreciate. For another, I honestly believe food, in general, has come a long way since the late 70’s. It’s not my intent here to diss Grass Valley and its food, though. My younger sister moved back there a few years ago, and she regales me with tales of some remarkable meals she’s had there. It has also become home to something of an artisanal food movement. When I went back for a visit last summer, I was stunned at the price and quality of the produce at a farmers’ market that I roamed. Garden-fresh tomatoes for $1.25 per pound! You can bet some fantastic gazpacho was made that day. But I left Grass Valley when I was 18 to go off to college in the city, and I never really left the Big City ever again.

            I thought about my rural past the other day when David and I went for a drive out in the countryside. Nominally, it was to be a day to meander along the Mountain Loop Highway, which re-opened after a 4-year closure, but it turned to be a day to re-connect with uncitified grub. We started with a visit to a pumpkin patch. Hey, why not, it was coming up on Halloween, which everyone knows is not just for kids anymore. Incredibly, this was my first visit to a pumpkin patch. We trudged through the muddy field and David picked out a pumpkin to carve. (We’ll see if he follows through.) It may eventually end up as pumpkin pie or pumpkin bisque. After we finished in the fields, we headed to Glacier Falls for lunch. Not too many options for dining in Glacier Falls, at least along the main road, so we settled on a Mexican restaurant. It was the kind of place, viewed from the outside, that you knew exactly what you would get. Or so I thought. A lot of the details of our lunch were standard Mexican fare – Mexican rice and beans, plates finished under a broiler, chips and salsa to start. And then there was the machaca. Only the best machaca I had eaten in my life - and I used to eat a lot of machaca back in my college days. Really simple and flavorful, without any extraneous additions to muck it up. Besides the machaca, we also had some delicious house-made salsas for our chips. David’s chipotle chicken burritos were outstanding as well. Score one for Mexican food in Glacier Falls.

            Then, after our afternoon loop through the mountains, we hit Darrington. Or, rather, Darrington hit us. This was not our first time in Darrington. A few years ago, on our way back to Seattle from Mt. Baker, we also trekked through Darrington. As it was dinnertime, we found our way to a roadside dinner. My dinner wasn’t memorable; I think it was a Reuben sandwich with a sad little salad. I got the better deal. David, however, ordered chicken-fried steak. It arrived tough, with a pasty gravy that obviously derived from a packet. The kicker, though, was an insipid small bowl of previously-frozen, microwaved, graying peas and carrots. My dinner wasn’t memorable, but that bowl of vegetables was. I have never sustained a held-in burst of laughter as long as I have for the 20 minutes it took David to pick through his meal. I could barely keep it in, finally releasing in the car before we even escaped the parking lot. I wanted so badly to capture his meal on film, but I feared getting my city-ass kicked by a bunch of out-of-work foresters. To match the worst side of vegetables ever, on Sunday we were served, in a different Darrington establishment, the worst hot chocolate ever. It wasn’t hot, it was lukewarm, it was way too sweet, and David only took one sip. We were cold, and some hot chocolate would have really satisfied and warmed us. It was not to be though.

            So, what’s my verdict on small-town food? Is small-town food my $1.25 fresh-out-of-the-garden tomatoes, or is it a humorously evil side of frozen vegetables? What strikes me is that here, in the Big City, you probably wouldn’t find either the tomatoes or the peas and carrots. Sure, we have delightful weekend farmers’ markets, but we pay Big City prices at our farmers’ markets, nothing like the fantastic bargains I saw in Grass Valley last summer. You also don’t find the Americana of small-town diner food in Seattle. Even in our small neighborhood joints, the food is still influenced to some extent by the sophistication of venerable downtown institutions. I have a friend who runs a neighborhood comfort food place in the Ravenna neighborhood, and I know Dan would sooner die than serve a side of pruny and cadaverous peas and carrots.

            I guess the (painfully obvious) answer is that small-town food is as good and as bad as anything you can find in the Big City, just different. I go out to great restaurants here all the time; I am also frequently disappointed here as well. I think the major difference between Seattle and Grass Valley or Darrington is the breadth of variety that you find in the Big City. I know you can’t choose between eight different Ethiopian places in Grass Valley, or hundreds (thousands??) of Thai places in Darrington. And maybe that’s a good thing. Small towns should stick to what they do best; so should big cities. And even in Darrington, I believe there is hope. Along with our awful hot chocolate on Sunday, I also ordered a slice of apple pie. If I had been in Twin Peaks instead of Darrington, I might have written an epic poem about that gorgeous slice of pie. With that slice of pie, Darrington redeemed itself to me. With that slice of apple pie, I remembered what it felt like to be an utterly small-town American.