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My mother-in-law, Lydia Werbizky of Vestal, NY, learned to make Kulich in Kiev in the 1930s.  Kulich is a sweet twice-risen bread that is the centerpiece of the Easter feast in Orthodox Christian households; Lydia, 85, is a founding member of a small Russian Orthodox congregation in Endicott, NY.  Tania and I visited her recently to learn the fine points.  At the end of the process, while Lydia was rolling the cylindrical loaves back and forth to keep the insides from becoming, gooey, she discovered she had made a small mistake on one of them.  She said a Russian proverb which translates as, “Live a century, learn as long as a century.”

6 to 7 cups unbleached flour
4 packages “rapid rise” dry yeast
Grated peel of two lemons
3/4 to 1 cup granulated sugar
3 packs vanilla sugar
8 egg yolks and 1 whole egg at room temperature
2 sticks unsalted butter
1-1/4 to 1- 1/2 cup milk at room temperature,  (lower humidity = more milk)
1/4 tsp. salt (if butter is unsalted)

Mix flour and yeast; set aside.  Don’t be afraid to put in a lot of yeast.

Add lemon zest and sugars to eggs; beat in small bowl until stiff and whitish.  Don’t put in too much sugar, it makes the dough too heavy.

Add melted butter and milk to egg/sugar mixture.  Take care not to put in too much butter, which also makes the dough heavy.

Use some of the milk to clean lemon zest off the grater. Also use some of the milk to pour into the eggs to help get the stiff batter off the beaters.

Put dough hook on Kitchenaid or other large mixer.  Put wet ingredients into its bowl.  Add the flour/yeast mixture a little at a time.  Mix for several minutes – first on low, then high speed.  Dough should come off the sides of the bowl but not become too stiff.  Add more milk if it’s too stiff.  Mix until it is the consistency of bread dough before kneading (ie, soft).  If it’s too thin, add flour.

Scrape sides of bowl and turn dough out onto lightly floured board.  Shape the dough but don’t knead it.  It should have a light consistency.  Lightly flour the bowl and put the dough back into it.  Let rise 1 to 2 hours until doubled.  Don’t let it rise too long or it will become sour.

Cut risen dough into quarters.  Put each quarter in a Kulich form in such a way that the dough’s surface on top is smooth (tuck folds underneath). A Kulich form can be made from a large tin can (such as a 32 oz. juice can) that has had the top cut off.  Put a layer of tinfoil around the outside of the can on the bottom. Line the inside of the can with parchment to keep it from sticking: one layer of parchment on the side, three layerson the bottom. Raisins can be added to the dough at this point if desired (although the traditional Kulich does not have raisins).  Let rise again until doubled in size, then bake at 275 degrees for 60 to 90 minutes. It will continue to rise as it bakes. To test for doneness, tap the top of the loaf; when it’s done, it will sound hollow.

 (above) How the dough looks after first rising; finished loaves coming out of the oven

After removing the loaves from their forms, roll them one-quarter turn every five minutes as they cool. This keeps the inside from becoing gooey.  When they’re cool, put white icing on the top and spell out “XB,” for “He is Risen,” with raisins or squeeze icing.

In Orthodox Pasha (Easter) service, one Kulich is designated as the “Artos,”  or “consecrated bread.”  This one must not have frosting or raisins.  After the Easter service it sits inside the opened altar for a week. It is consumed the Sunday after Easter.

Happy Easter to everybody!

On January 19, 2009, the French publication Le Figaro published an article about Deep Springs College.  I ran it through the Froogle automatic translator to turn it into English.  Here’s the result: pretty funny, I think.  My favorite line: “Hence the two basic rules, never called into question since 1917: prohibition of alcohol and mixed impossible.”

FAR WEST ACADEMY

This institution is most unlikely that is, mid-mid-school ranch. Located in the desert in California, Deep Springs College hosts the best students in the country. Students in the morning, cowboys in the afternoon, they will be tomorrow at Harvard or Oxford.

For six hours we have left Los Angeles and its skyscrapers. Along the Death Valley and the Sierra Nevada. In fact full of dusty towns qu’ennuyeuses all. A pass to cross in the mountains peeled, and we débouchons on a geological depression in eastern California, nestled at 1 600 meters, as large as the bowl of Dien Bien Phu, but the hair … and more calm.

Here, 50 kilometers from the first village a little human, that is Deep Springs College, “one of the most selective colleges and most innovative in the world” (The New York Times says). A venerable institution that recently celebrated its 91 spring. And that looks more like a ranch than a school. Aged 17 to 23 years, his twenty-six students, long hair and beards drues, filthy overalls and Timberland feet, going about their occupations, that repairing a fence, which includes cows. For it is one of the features of the facility: the day begins at 4 h 30; study work in the morning and the afternoon (minimum of twenty hours per week, depending on the tasks carried out). Three times a day, 6 to 30 h, 12 h 30 h 30 and 18, a bell invites them to the canteen for a snack robori, but diet, mitonnée students affected by the cooking.

On the tables, not Coca-Cola, but the milk (of cows) or water (from source). No burgers, but my vegetables (garden) and steak house (ultimate delivery of cattle and calves, reared and slaughtered by the students). No television (banned), but books lying around everywhere, Thus Spake Zarathustra Nietzsche côtoie The Banquet of Plato or the works of Jane Austen. The anti-American in appearance. It pinched: was the starry banner which floats in the courtyard, it’s like being in a phalanstery Fourierist or one of Icari Etienne Cabet these collectivist and socialist utopias of the nineteenth century. Women less: to Deep Springs, it accepts only men.

David Neidorf, the president of the college, we illico mistake: “This is not a socialist experiment. Nothing to do with communities of 60 years or the new left. Moreover, Deep Springs was founded much earlier. “In 1917, exactly. “A year that saw the birth of two utopias jokes David Neidorf: Communism and our college. Only the latter survived. “Surely the inventor of this unique educational, Lucien L. Nunn (1853-1925), was not exactly a Bolshevik. On the contrary. An icon of the conquest of the West.

The idea of a self-made man, the icon of the West

This is in Colorado that has built its fortune in the years 1880-1890: in turn minor, then a banker, he finally hit the jackpot by building hydroelectric power stations (including Niagara) and demonstrating that the current alternative could be transported via son over long distances in the West.

At its businesses, the self-made man realized that he needed young men, intellectually operational (engineers, if possible), but also capable of physically and morally spartan living conditions. The pioneering spirit. One day, he sold his assets, toured America, sank into the desert and bought the field of Deep Springs.

The isolation of the scene was the main advantage. Convinced that “the desert has a voice” (leading to wisdom), he wanted his future elite is formed far from the miasma of the city and its corrosive temptations.

Hence the two basic rules, never called into question since 1917: prohibition of alcohol and mixed impossible.

The three “pillars” of the school, the foundations of philosophy nunnienne have not changed: quality education, labor and self-management. Just a list of past courses conducted by three professors surdiplômés (in social and political sciences, humanities, mathematics and science) and the shelves of the library (25 000 volumes) to understand that cancres are not welcome. A laboratory intellectuals. On étudie jumble Herodotus, Heidegger, the Copernican revolution or linear algebra. At the end of their course of two years (with a single vacation - three weeks - in the middle), these bright subjects incorporate best universities: Harvard, Chicago, Columbia, Stanford or Oxford in Great Britain. It is no coincidence that a survey has classified Deep Springs in the third rank of American excellence, behind Princeton and Yale.

But, according to the students, there is not the major attraction of Deep Springs. The “more” is the manual work. Every two or four months, it gives them a job: caring for 10 horses and 300 head of cattle, fields of alfalfa, the garden of the Fleet (a dozen pick-up truck and that old they have), supply (a journey “in town” per week), catering (kitchen, service, cleaning). Sam Allen, 20-year-old from Massachusetts, who milked the cows every morning at 4 am 30, summarizes the general opinion: “It’s unique, very rewarding. Six months ago, I was responsible for the slaughter and rendering of animals. Tomorrow, I’ll be a cowboy and I’ll take care of a calf is born. And everything we do is useful. Deep Springs to live. That is why the studies are free, which is rare in the USA (annual cost estimated at $ 50 000, ed). ”

Last but not least, the self-preparation by students. The President told us his role is essentially to manage the college (funded by donations from alumni and foundations). For the rest, everything is decided by the students, who meet weekly to discuss and vote. A kind of agora where everything is discussed and adopted at the majority of the possibility of having a pet in the recruitment of teachers and students (200 candidates each year, selected on 40 records and written tests, 12 selected after a course of three days on site), through the choice of programs.

Surprising? Certainly. But do not repeat to anyone, because Deep Springs College do not like advertising.

My grandfather, George Mountain Edmondson Jr., invited a film crew from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to his farm in Culpeper, VA in 1947.  Images of my grandfather and father made it past the final cut. My uncle John remembered the film to me earlier this year, so I tracked it down at the National Archives and had a copy made.  I found a big-budget production with two clips that everyone agrees on, and two more clips that might or might not show Edmondsons.  I have put them all here so you can make up your own minds and discuss this among yourselves.

Although Grandpa ran a small farm in northern Virginia, his father was a prominent photographer in Cleveland. The photographer sent Junior to Cornell University in 1921, but he didn’t stay.  When the Depression hit, grandpa and grandma had three boys and two girls to feed. Jobs were hard to find, so he bought the farm to ensure a safe place to raise his family. But Grandpa was a scholar, too. He studied agricultural techniques. He was devoted to improving land, and he was active in the local Republican Party. These two things might explain his involvement in the Culpeper Soil Conservation District.

Traditional agricultural methods had been hard on Southern soil. Putting in a tobacco or cotton crop several years in a row depletes soil nutrients, and the longer you keep doing it, the worse the soil gets.  Plowing and planting a hillside causes severe soil erosion if you don’t do it right, and many farmers messed this up, too.  Thousands of southern farmers were failing because their land had been played out. Their children were moving away because there were no jobs, and there were no jobs because no one had told the farmers a few simple techniques that could preserve and enhance the value of their land.  The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Soil Conservation Service was a New Deal program that sent agents to teach farmers these tricks. Soil Conservation Districts were the local coordinating boards for the USDA.  My grandfather was active on his local board, and this is how the USDA learned that his farm used contour plowing and other techniques they wanted to talk about in their educational film.

“The South Grows Green” was released in 1948. It is charming, corny, and hopelessly dated. Its message could easily be covered in a short pamphlet:  cover crops, contour plowing, crop rotation, and diversification can boost a small farm’s productivity.  But a lot of southern farmers back then didn’t read pamphlets.  The film was an organizing tool.  It was made for small groups to see in rural meeting halls, so it also had to be a show.

The film is about 45 minutes long, in two reels. It opens with an expensive dolly shot, and the first several minutes are devoted to a goofy travelogue celebrating the south. There are scenes of the shopping districts of downtown Dallas and Knoxville, which must have been thrilling to a farm wife who didn’t often get further than the general store. There are several shots of attractive young women, some of them wearing bathing suits, which have nothing to do with soil conservation but were almost certainly thrilling to the farmers. And there is a cringe-worthy scene of a black “mammy” serving fried chicken and cornbread to a scrubbed-up white family in the dining room of an old plantation house. Sixty years ago, nobody gave that one a second thought.

About nine minutes into the movie, the booming “Voice of God” narrator starts talking about Soil Conservation Districts, and my grandfather makes his first appearance. The men of the Culpeper District are shown at the edge of a field, discussing and evaluating. My grandfather, the guy with wire-rimmed glasses and brown hair, is shown briefly, squatting, talking, and pointing. He’s taking charge, as usual.

A few minutes later, the narrator is talking about how smart it is to plant lespedesia, a form of clover, in fields that aren’t being used for crops. This is where my father, Tom Edmondson, makes his first appearance. He is 18 years old, and he is helping a conveyor belt deliver bales of clover hay into the loft of the Edmondson barn.

Edmondson Farm was considered an example back then because the Federal government was encouraging farmers to grow lots of different things and reduce their impact on the land. Today things couldn’t be more different: the USDA has spent decades promoting monoculture, fertilizer, pesticides, and federal subsidies. Meanwhile, local markets in many places have returned to the 1940s by rewarding small, diversified, low-impact operations that sell direct to consumers. Today it’s called “sustainability.”

When I saw this movie, I saw two more clips that I thought showed Culpeper and the Edmondsons. One of them happens during a segment on managing woodlots. It seemed to me that the broad-bottomed man walking into the woodlot was my grandfather, and the guy watching a core sample being removed from a tree is my father. When I showed this to my dad and Uncle John, however, they said this could not be because they did not have a woodlot. My dad also said that the young man in the woodlot is not the same young man who’s loading hay. He does not remember anything about the filming, however. So what do you think? Is this another shot of the 18-year-old Tom Edmondson, and do you remember Grandpa’s rambling gait the same way I do?

Unfortunately, my uncles (Bill and John), aunts (Liz and Alice), and grandmother (Mary Elizabeth) are not in the film. But I think there is one more shot of my grandfather. My father and uncle say that the dairy farm shown in the following clip is not theirs, and that the man hanging up a pail of milk is not their father. I think it’s the same guy who was squatting in the field and walking into the woodlot. What do you think?

For me, the most poignant moment in “The South Grows Green” comes at the end. The announcer says, “When Northern farms are still covered with snow, livestock are filling out on Southern pastures.” My grandfather paid attention. By the time this film was released, the Edmondsons had left Culpeper and moved to another farm in Nokomis, a rural outpost in the southern part of Sarasota County, Florida. My grandfather’s Florida pastures had been cleared just 25 years before he arrived. He moved the family into a small house that was covered with tarpaper. The first thing he did was dig a drainage ditch to control flooding, and his children remember being frightened by things howling in the marsh on pitch-dark nights. Edmondson Farm in Nokomis was a lot closer to the raw frontier than it was to the mansions of Cleveland. But Grandpa proved his homestead, and he also moved back into his old role as a community leader as Sarasota County’s postwar boom began. He even served a term in the Florida State Legislature.

My grandfather is 44 years old in these images. He was 56 when I was born in 1959. When he died in 1973, he was 69 and I had just turned 13. In my first-hand memories, grandpa is a jolly old man who has a bad hip and back pain. He smokes Pall Mall cigarettes and has heart disease, but he hides this from the grandkids. His health is fading as my childhood memories become clearer. “The South Grows Green” is a wonderful gift because it shows me Grandpa in his prime, working with his neighbors to make a better world. Thanks to Uncle John for remembering the film crew and setting me off to find the footage, and Merry Christmas to all the Edmondsons.

Contact: brade@lightlink.com

Between August 12 and October 22, I joined my friends Jim and Sara Kersting on a bicycle trip across the United States.  We had a blast and raised $39,000 for the Finger Lakes Land Trust, a group Jim and I have served for many years.  We met a lot of interesting people, too.   I kept a blog during the ride, and if you want to know more about what happened to us on the road, it is the place to go.  If you’re really interested, you might also like to know that I turned the blog into a book that is available for purchase.  Search for “Coast to Coast for Conservation” to find it.  All of the proceeds will go to the Land Trust.

This happy guy used to be in Beatty, Nevada, about 90 miles north of Las Vegas on U.S. 95. He was jumping for joy because there were natural hot pools for rent at the campground. The sign is gone and the campground is for sale, but the hot tubs are still for rent at $5 per pair of buttocks as of June 2009.  They aren’t fancy (cinderblock walls and a tin roof) but they aren’t chlorinated, either. If you’ve been sleeping out in some dry canyon somewhere and are covered with fine wind-blown grit, you can buy a nice hot soak and a towel here, then head into town for some steak and eggs at the Exchange Club. Now that’s livin’.

Easter is over but they will be skiing for several more weeks on Tug Hill, the part of New York just east of Lake Ontario. The reason is “lake effect,” a local phenomenon that occurs when prevailing Arctic winds from the north and west sweep over the comparatively warm surface of the water. The wind carries the moisture into the air, freezes it, and drops the snow just downwind, sometimes with spectacular results. Lake effect forms in narrow bands that move back and forth, spraying snow over the land like a high-pressure hose. It isn’t unusual for it to accumulate at five inches per hour. Osceola, NY got nearly twelve feet between February 3 and 10 this year, a new state record.

February 3 was also the day of the 27th Tug Hill Tourathon, a citizen’s ski race that winds 50 kilometers through the Winona State Forest east of Sandy Creek. This isn’t an Olympics kind of race. It is more like a grand day out for the skiers combined with an annual party for a diehard band of local volunteers. Only a few of the skiers want to win. Most of us just want to finish, or maybe beat our time from last year. We glide through pine plantations and stands of mature hardwood, the trail mostly level but undulating just enough to stave off boredom. Stark winter silences sharpen a landscape of white, black and gray. The snow is the cleanest and most reliable in the East. But the lake effect bands were going to be cranking away on race day, and if they happened to be over the course at just the right time, the party would have to be cancelled due to too much of a good thing.

Tourathon Contestant 

A foot of new snow did fall the night before, but the race started with just a one-hour delay. About 150 skiers showed up, a light turnout because of the dicey conditions, but many at the finish line said it had been the best race in years. This meant a lot to Dr. Jay Chapman, who has a family practice in nearby Pulaski. Jay is the Tourathon’s chief promoter and spokesman. “Half of the kids in our local schools weigh more than they should,” he says. “I see the effects of obesity in my patients every day. We need to attract the next generation to the outdoors. We need to go to war against video games.”

Jay Chapman

Cross-country skiing does great things for your body, but so far most kids aren’t listening. Chapman says that the average age of racers who finish the 50 kilometers – that’s about 31.5 miles — is 53. Still, all kinds of people were out there. We wore everything from Lycra to Levi’s, and I am living proof that we weren’t all in great shape. The winning time for the 50K race was three and a half hours, which was considered slow. The final finisher took six hours. But everyone who finished 25K or 50K got a medal.
New technology made the 2007 Tourathon possible, says Chapman. He decided to go ahead with the race at 4:30 that morning after exchanging e-mails with the meteorologists at a Syracuse TV station. They told him they expected the snow bands to move north of Sandy Creek around 9 am and stay north until late afternoon – a window just long enough to pull off the race. And it worked. The skiers got fresh snow swirling off the trees, bright sunlight, and a perfectly groomed track.

Hand-held radios also make the race safer and smoother than it was back in the 1980s. Dozens of local volunteers turn out every year to staff the race, and a few of them told me it is the highlight of the year. They stand out in the snow to hand out warm Gatorade and cookies at food stations, drive skiers around in borrowed school buses, and stand at road crossings to check people off the master list as they glide by. If anyone needs help, it arrives quickly – you are never more than a kilometer or two from a road, and snowmobiles run back and forth all day. You stay warm because you keep moving, and after the first few miles your sense of time gets lost in the rhythmic kick-and-glide of the skis. It does take a bit of preparation and practice to stay outdoors all day in the middle of a Tug Hill Winter, but the feeling is incomparable.

“If I didn’t like winter, I wouldn’t live here,” says Tom Towne. He is standing next to his big yellow Arctic Cat at one of the road crossings. Tom lives in Tug Hill, and two minutes into our conversation he tells me that he subscribes to Accuweather.com’s professional edition, which is marketed to “weather enthusiasts.” A lot of people around here do, he says. Tom is a traveling salesman for a tool & die company. He says he likes nothing better than to spend the day this way, going way out into the Winona and turning the machine off so he can soak in the silence. Maintaining a Tug Hill address has always required a person to be tough and clever – not college clever, but a deeper kind of quickness that comes from regularly having to meet a challenge. I guess it isn’t surprising to find people way out in these unforgiving woods who are masters of e-mail and wireless communication and the interpretation of satellite images. These tools give them a better chance.

Tom Towne

People waiting to get on the bus after the race are sweat-soaked, tired, and generally happy. While steam rises off my sweater, I eavesdrop on a man talking to a young woman. At first he bores her with a long discussion of gear and wax, which is the romantic downfall of many X-C ski geeks. But then she asks him something about the snow and he becomes lyrical. He was skiing in Tug Hill once early in the morning after a snow like the one that fell this morning, he says. He was moving through a tunnel of trees that were loaded down with fresh snow, getting cold and wet, and he asked himself why he was going to all the trouble. Then the sun reached just the right angle and lit up the path before him, and the snow crystals swirled from the trees like a million fireflies in front of him, and he found himself skiing along into an enchanted forest, he says, and he got his answer.