Odessa Piper Reminisces: DCFM's 50th Anniversary

Though I moved to Boston fifteen years ago, many of you know that I never left. This market and I are joined at the heart.

I have to start out with an apology to all the good people who got up early to come to market during the years I ran L’Etoile, hoping to score a bison tenderloin for their dinner party. Yes, I’m the chef who snapped them up before you got there. You may have noticed the same disappearing act could happen to your favorite goat cheese or Spitzenberg apple. Ditto the occasional mysterious wipe-out of opal basil or apple mint.

I’m not alone in these transgressions! News of our Valhalla at the Dane County Farmers market traveled far and wide. Chefs from Chicago took note and pulled all-nighters to drive up here and descend on the market like ninjas.

And then there’s the crowds—which we ALL have to take some responsibility for, but darn if all that good press didn’t aid and abet. Writers and journalists flocked to report on the miracle of America’s rural resurrection that was demonstrated so beautifully by the Dane County Farmers Market. Social scientists, academes, and politicians on every side of the aisle got to celebrate this market’s phenomenal contribution to building community. We even got the attention of the Californians. Alice Waters of Chez Panisse came through several times to see just how us northerners managed to eat local in the snow months. (Our secret is that we know apples store crisp for months just fine at low temps, that spinach plants get tastier with frost, and that a well-bred chicken tiding over winter in deep freeze will still roast up to juicy perfection.) Even the queen of gastronomy, Julia Child, made a grand tour, though I remember well, it was a very rainy day.

Rain thins out crowds, making well deserved space for the farmers and grazers and vendors who will always show up, because, well frankly, so do their vegetables, and steers, and goats and yeast-risen buns. And turning out for them, the true grit of this market, are the good food citizens of this community who care as passionately about the working landscape as they do about good home cooking. Despite all the credit given to us chefs, I think it’s the householders who make this market great. People know a good thing in a fragrant pepper, a whole grain loaf, or a heritage African stewing green.

But we didn’t always have this diversity of food, or these loyal crowds from every income level.

Imagine yourself, standing where I stood 45 years ago at this very market. In the wee hours of that morning my family and staff came in to L’Etoile to roll out hundreds of filled croissant. In those same dark hours, farmers got up, put their coffee in a thermos and got in their heavy trucks.

While they drove through the predawn, we baked, filling our croissants with all kinds of fruits and vegetables bought from Market the week before. We counted on these croissant for cash-flow to keep our doors open in those early challenged years. But this Saturday the rains came hard and heavy and very few people showed up to brave that chilly day.

I had 750 perishable croissants fresh out of the oven and a hard-working staff to pay and very few shoppers. The farmers all around the square were in the same predicament: premium perishable food, bills to pay, and no customers. There was only one thing we could do: stuff our bags full of our warm pastries and walk through the rain to hand them off from stand to stand. We gave away an entire week’s worth of work.

Later that morning as I drank my umpteenth cup of coffee and wrangled the evening’s menu with my cooks, we heard a lot of tromping on the long flight of stairs that lead to our old second story dining room. Out on our copper bar, farmers were bringing us their week’s work too; cases upon cases of strawberries, green onions and spinach. That day would begin our practice of putting food by for the restaurant; understanding that our interdependence is what sustains everything. Those strawberries were quickly processed for the freezer while we brainstormed new uses for them. Who needs tasteless strawberries from California when our own put-by tasted so good slow roasted with thyme and grey shallots on a winter pork roast?

And we were not alone. The farmers and home cooks of this plucky little market went on to push and then open the door to an entire new way of thinking about food; that we could rely on our region every season of the year, that Wisconsin artisans could not only make world class cheese but also make bread with 100% regional grains and a whole world of delicious food too. That our snow-bound Midwest could demonstrate food sovereignty and create good, local, livelihoods in a time of growing water shortages out west and a dangerously warming atmosphere.

Not only that, but we could produce food in a vibrant web of interdependent communities, navigating a friendly path through a rapidly globalizing world. Our Dane County Farmers market now showcases immigrant farmers who are introducing fruits and vegetables from their foodways of Africa, Central America, south east Asia, Europe and beyond. The cultures touched by this wonderful market showed me that the meaning of ‘local’ is a distance best measured by our hearts.

Here are Just a few of the joyful moments I’ve had at this market over the years…

That cool September day when Mark Kupper quipped that he might have to poke holes in his impeccable arugula to convince me that his pesticide-free plots were still safe for sand fleas.

When the Biersach’s came to market with enough shucked hickorynuts to allow me to introduce thousands of L’Etoile’s visitors to the deep rooted wisdom of native food.

When Ken Weston and his family introduced us to Gravenstein apples and 57 other kinds and inspired endless menu creativity from trout with pink pearl apples to King David apple tarte Tatin.

When Jim Barnard from Door County showed me how to pit cherries fast with a paper clip.

The day Shooting Star Farm introduced me to a fragrant mint called anise hyssop and rocked my culinary world.

And here’s to the three generations of The Frey Family, who supplied my restaurant true free-range eggs and whose patriarch, Mary Ellen’s pa, cracked hickory nuts down at the end of the table and taught me that busy fingers keep elder brains sharp and to prove it he offered to recite entire speeches by Lincoln.

And then there’s the day I asked Richard De Wilde of Harmony Valley “how come your vegetables always taste so good?” and he paused for a long quiet moment and then said, “Love.”

It is this same love that connects us as a community of grateful eaters, farmers, grazers, vendors, truckers, retailers, bookkeepers, teachers, healers, writers, servers, dishwashers, children, bakers, and all of you reading this, in supporting this market. We are an ecology, and every Saturday its heart beats right here.

Let’s be bold and think in grateful long arcs of time for the ones who came before us and the ones who are yet to come. Let’s think like the plants and animals of this beautiful earth. Let’s think like a planet, our planet. Here’s to the next 50 years, and the 500 beyond that, and the 5000 beyond that. Here’s to healthy soil, humans, communities, and a healthy planet, engaged in our sacred eternal work of feeding each other.

Adapted from a speech on October 1, 2022, celebrating the market’s 50th anniversary.