Charity Robey

Sweet corn ice cream

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO
Sweet corn ice cream.

Sweet corn is here, and you know what to do.

The best sweet corn of the season is coming in now.  This is stuff you can eat raw, a practice I observed at Sep’s farm stand when one employee was so overcome by the creamy beauty of the ears she was selling, that she shucked an ear and ate it one-handed, while making change with the other hand.

 It’s easy to get carried away and forget your corn manners. Don’t pry open the husk to examine each ear, ruining it for everybody else. Buying corn is often a group activity, like rifling through the bargain bin at TJ Maxx. You may examine the cut end to make sure it isn’t brown or dried out, and lightly squeeze the ear to make sure it feels firm.  More investigation than that marks you as someone who can’t make a decision.

And buy a lot. With three extra ears, you can make ice cream.

The first few times I tasted corn ice cream, I objected to the way the kernels wrapped themselves around my molars. At home, I adapted my go-to ice-cream base recipe to accommodate corn, eliminated the whole kernel problem with an immersion blender, and added some yogurt to tone down the extreme sweetness. I think vanilla extract in ice cream adds an icy liquid to the cream when frozen, so I make ice cream with vanilla bean paste for a better consistency.

Corn ice cream

Makes more than a quart of ice cream.

3/4 cup superfine sugar

1 cup whole milk

Three ears of sweet corn so fresh that
when you cut the kernels off the cob,
pale white corn juice puddles on the cutting board. (Scrape it into the pot along with the kernels and the cobs.)

½ cup of vanilla whole fat Nordic or Greek yogurt

1 and 1/2 cup heavy cream

1 tablespoon vanilla bean paste

1. Mix the milk and superfine sugar in a 2-quart saucepan.

2. Cut the kernels off the three cobs by holding them upright and cutting from top to bottom along the side of the cob. You can rest the bottom of the cob in a shallow bowl to catch the juices, but if you are doing this right, kernels will fly. Get over it.

3. Break the naked cobs into two pieces (snap it by hand, it’s almost impossible to cut) and scrape the kernels, juices, and as many of the cobs as will fit,  into the saucepan with the sugar/milk mixture.

4. Heat the mixture until you see a little steam, but don’t allow it to boil. Turn off the heat.

5. Let the corn/sugar/milk mixture steep for one hour.

6. Discard the corn cobs and blend the mixture with an immersion blender until you can’t see anything that could be identified as a corn kernel.

7. Strain the blended mixture into a 2-quart bowl, pressing the solids firmly to extract all the liquid. Discard the solids.

8. Add the yogurt, vanilla and heavy cream to the corn mixture, whisking to remove any yogurt lumps.

9. Cover and refrigerate for at least two hours before freezing.

10. Using your favorite ice cream freezer, churn the mixture until the paddle won’t move. The harder you can get it before you give up and scrape it into a a one-quart container with a tight-fitting lid, the better.

11. Put in the freezer and let it firm up for an hour before serving.

Friends since 1652: Shelter Island's place in Quaker history

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO
A sign on Route 114 marks the entrance to the Friends outdoor meeting place.

It was 38 minutes into the one-hour Quaker meeting before anyone said a word.

Gathered on the grounds of Sylvester Manor, seated on a jumble of rough-hewn logs fashioned into long benches in a wooded glade, there were six at the meeting, seven if you count the small white dog on Shelter Islander Jim Pugh’s lap.

They sat largely in silence, until Mr. Pugh gathered the group of Friends together in a circle of hands called the rise of meeting.

In a time when listening is out, venting is in, and most of your friends are people you never actually see, the Quaker approach to worship is distinct, even a bit strange. It must have seemed as strange to the 17th century Puritans of colonial New England, one reason why Shelter Island’s Quaker history, which goes back to the founding of Sylvester Manor in 1652, is relevant today.

The Quaker and Island connection

Quaker practices include plain speech, modesty, avoiding showy things such as flags and grave markers and an unwillingness to swear an oath. Activists for peace and social justice, Quakers have advocated for women’s rights and the abolition of slavery.

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO
The Shelter Island meeting takes place in a grove near the Quaker monument at Sylvester Manor, as it has since the 1970s.

The Religious Society of Friends, known as Quakers, was established by George Fox in England in the mid-17th century, around the same time that Nathaniel Sylvester and Grizzell Brinley married in England and crossed the Atlantic Ocean to become the first European residents of Shelter Island.

The Sylvesters brought with them Quaker practices and beliefs. When the passage of anti-Quaker laws in 1656 imposed punishments such as branding, ear-cropping, imprisonment and later banishment and death, Nathaniel and Grizzell Sylvester made the Island a refuge for persecuted Quakers.

The best known of these was the Quaker martyr Mary Dyer, who left her husband and six children in Boston in the early 1650s, moved to England where she became a Friend, and returned to Boston as a Quaker preacher in 1657 only to be arrested and banished on pain of death.

In spite of her banishment, Dyer went back to Boston, was sentenced to death, but was spared at the last moment in a bizarre public execution in which two fellow Quakers were hanged before her. She was made to stand on the gallows hooded, and then suddenly spared.

She made her way to Shelter Island where she spent the winter of 1659-60, a time the historian Mac Griswold describes in “The Manor,” her history of Sylvester Manor, as “the happiest, most dedicated, least fractured time of her life. Her actions embodied her faith; all the rest of life’s concerns had burned away.”

Ms. Dyer chose once again to return to Boston and her fate. She was publicly executed in June 1660.

Shelter from the storm

Nathaniel and Grizzell Sylvester also harbored Lawrence and Cassandra Sethwick, Quakers from Salem, after they were banished and two of their children ordered sold into slavery. The Sethwicks fled across Long Island Sound to Shelter Island.

Shattered physically and emotionally, they lived out their last days, both dying about a month after arriving. A copy of Lawrence Sethwick’s last will and testament, written on Shelter Island, and witnessed by Nathaniel Sylvester, is dated May 1659.

In 1661, King Charles II issued a royal order meant to stop the executions of Quakers in Massachusetts.

It was personally delivered to John Endicott, the governor of Massachusetts, by a London Quaker and ship captain named Ralph Goldsmith, who later settled in Southold.

Nathaniel Sylvester’s brother Giles, who was living in London, signed the petition listing the sufferings of American Friends, which prompted the royal order. Historians have posited a link between Grizzell Sylvester’s correspondence with her father Thomas Brinley who was in the court of King Charles, and the order to stop the executions of Quakers in Massachusetts.

As joyful as the Sylvesters must have been to see the end of Quaker executions, the arrival of the Quaker founder, George Fox on Shelter Island 10 years later was likely even more satisfying, as an indication of their prominent position.

COURTESY PHOTO
George Fox, a founder of the Quaker movement, who visited Sylvester Manor.

Mr. Fox had left England for a tour of America in 1671, and after two months in Rhode Island, finally visited the Island in August 1672. He wrote of preaching to hundreds of native Americans from the porch of the Manor House, and of trying to persuade slaveholders in America, such as Nathaniel Sylvester, to free the people he held in bondage. At the time, about 70 percent of American Quakers were slaveowners.

Nathaniel Sylvester died on June 13, 1680, aged 70. Grizzell, in settling the estate, followed Quaker practice by declining to swear, “being a person that cannot take an oath for conscience sake,” and instead testified to the inventory of her husband’s estate, which included 23 enslaved people.

Grizzell died on June 13, 1687 at 52. In keeping with Quaker practice, the Sylvesters’ graves bore no markers of any kind.

Noticed and remembered

For most of the 19th century and first half of the 20th, the 8th, 9th and 10th owners of Sylvester Manor were members of the Horsford family. They spent summers at the Manor, and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Eager to recognize the history of the Friends, and the Manor’s role as a refuge and haven, the Horsfords dedicated a monument on July 25, 1884 to their Sylvester forebears.

They made sure it would be noticed and remembered. A large crowd including most of Shelter Island, as well as friends and colleagues from Cambridge attended. A three-piece band and a choir performed.

The poet John Greenleaf Whittier, known for his dramatic poems about Quaker history, and a friend of Professor Eben Horsford, wrote a special ode for the event about The Friends’ ordeal and Island sanctuary, with the lines: “A peaceful deathbed and a quiet grave/Where ocean walled, and wiser than his age,/ the Lord of Shelter scorned the bigot’s rage.”

In 1952, Andy Fiske, the 13th owner of Sylvester Manor, and a direct Sylvester descendant, called on Henry Cadbury, who had recently accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the American Friends Service Committee, to conduct a Quaker meeting on Shelter Island. Cadbury not only came and conducted the meeting, but established a Shelter Island Friends meeting that is still active, albeit with occasional fits and starts.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Friends met at the Garr estate; during the 1960s, at Union Chapel in the Heights; and starting in 1970, outdoor meetings took place in the grove by the Quaker cemetery at Sylvester Manor.

And that is where six people sat last Sunday, with Friends past and present, in silent awe of all that was around them, and in search of all that is within.

The great thing about living in a small town is that everyone knows you. The awful thing about living in a small town is that everyone knows you.

My bedtime, how long the television stays on, who is visiting me, all may as well be a matter of public record. If I fail to pick up after my dog during our morning walk my neighbors may not care, but they will certainly notice.

In the winter, when there are just over 2,000 people living here, the fish bowl really freezes over. At the IGA, I make note of other people’s grocery choices. Why is the guy browsing in aisle 4 looking at cans of Fancy Feast? Is he feeding his spaniel cat food?

The woman in the check-out line once told me her husband has a tick-borne meat allergy, so I raise my eyebrows when she places two pounds of ground round on the belt.

Why am I all up in their business? For starters, there’s no one else around.

Then warm weather arrives and thousands of people come to the Island, bringing with them the summer cloak of invisibility. Mostly, these are people I do not know, and who don’t know me. And there are so many of them, that they provide welcome cover.

For six weeks or so, I can blend in with the long line at the post office and the liquor store and no one will notice or care what I’m mailing and drinking.

A typical day on Bridge Street in the off-season.

Unless I’m an item in the police blotter published every week in the Reporter.

The blotter, also known as the Police Report, is a summary of the calls for aid and responses local police have logged in the past week. Most newspapers, whether online or print, run a police blotter, and reading it can tell you a lot about a place.

Read the blotter for Boston, and you’ll see shootings and armed robberies. For Shelter Island, you get “a caller reported that a small dog chased her and her husband at a Center location and scratched her husband” (July 22, 2018).

Some places have police blotters with a substantial readership outside their locale.

The Bozeman Daily Chronicle has published selections from the Bozeman, Montana blotter in a book called “We Don’t Make This Stuff Up.”

An item from last week’s Chronicle: “An officer advised a vehicle full of lost people from Iowa,” is an example of the deadpan tone that has made it a must-read for blotter aficionados.

Teenagers in small towns especially hate making the police blotter, a hazard of growing up that is less onerous in places where the incidents that get reported in the local paper involve actual crime.

My sister Judith had just gotten her driver’s license in Virginia Beach when she side-swiped a parked motorcycle, taking off a mirror. Apparently unaware that she had hit anything, she failed to stop. The owner of the motorcycle was standing a few feet away at the time and so was a police officer. She had to go talk to a judge about it, but she didn’t have to read about it in the paper.

On Shelter Island, all you have to do is nudge someone’s car trying to park on Bridge Street to land on page four of the Reporter.

I love the restrained and factual style of the Shelter Island blotter, a style so distinctive, that I can’t help imagining entries about my own screw-ups. For example, yesterday I decided to squeeze a bike ride into the half-hour of twilight after sunset, and rode right into a near miss.

This time, I escaped unharmed and will not read in the blotter that I struck a deer while operating a bicycle on Midway Road and sustained over $1,000 worth of damage to my right knee.

One day I hope to read in the blotter about a Ram Island osprey being fined $50 for taking undersized porgies.

A recent item in the Reporter’s  blotter about a resident who called the police for help getting the head on a boat to function, made me realize that I could be the subject of a similar report if I made an impulse purchase at a yard sale: “Police responded to a Heights resident who had purchased a tuna tower, and requested assistance to learn how it functioned. The responding officer saw that it required installation on a boat to function properly and advised that it would be necessary to purchase a boat to go under the tuna tower for correct operation.”

Fortunately, I did not call for assistance with the tuna tower.

In October of 2017 a report in the blotter stated: “A caller expressed concern about his mother’s ability to drive.”

It humbles me to think how easily that caller could have been my son.

Small town life involves trade-offs, and I’ll trade some privacy for the knowledge that when I make fried chicken, set off the fire alarm, and the police come, it could make the paper, but people who read about it will probably laugh and be glad this time it wasn’t them.

Stephen Searl-Old family farms and the power of peaches

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO
Stephen Searl beside Gardiner’s Creek at Sylvester Manor.

Pre-Revolutionary-era houses held by the same family, and largely un-renovated are scarce on the East End of Long Island.

The fact that Stephen Searl, executive director of Sylvester Manor, grew up in one and now has his office in another testifies to his commitment to preserving the history, the land and the resources of the East End.

To say nothing about his tolerance for peeling paint, temperature extremes and a steady stream of visitors.

He grew up on the Wickham family farm in Cutchogue, where his grandfather John Wickham established an apple and peach growing operation on 300 acres that has been in cultivation by his family since 1661.

“Like Sylvester Manor, the approach to our farm is a long driveway that opens up suddenly to a creekside view of house and water,” Stephen said. “These are vistas that are transformative. They left an indelible mark in my life.”

Stephen lived his first few years in upstate New York, where his mother Parnel Wickham got a PhD at Syracuse, and his father Stanford Searl was an English professor at Buffalo State University. The family moved to Cutchogue when Stephen was 5, putting down roots on his mother’s family farm.

Three generations — Stephen, his parents and Stephen’s grandfather and grandmother — lived in the old farmhouse on land planted in fruit trees, berries, corn and melons. Then and now, they ran a popular farm stand on the Main Road.

Stephen remembers his grandfather as bigger than life. “He was 6 feet 6 and he had enormous hands,”  Stephen said. “He loved to take me riding on the tractor and he gave me whatever was in season. Eating fruit, that’s what he was all about.”

John Wickham was not just the owner and manager of a big farm, he was an ambassador for the farming community. The old house had many visitors, including local officials, neighbors and John Halsey, who went on to found the Peconic Land Trust, an organization that has been a catalyst for land conservation on the East End for 35 years.

Stephen’s uncles and his mother now own the farm; Stephen’s uncle, Tom Wickham, runs it.
Visiting Shelter Island for the first time at 6 when his parents, who were Quakers, started attending the outdoor Friends meeting at Sylvester Manor, Stephen was struck by how similar it was to his family’s Cutchogue farm.

“The trees, the quiet, the natural environment,” he said. “That stuck with me.”

When he wasn’t at school, he did farm work. At 9, he was driving a tractor and hoeing melons. After elementary school in Cutchogue, he went off to boarding school and then to the Cornell agriculture school, graduating in 2000.

After Cornell, Stephen worked a full year on the farm – planning in the winter and managing the production during the summer, gaining hands-on experience to go with the degree he earned in school.

During his year of full-time farming, Stephen met Elizabeth Casey at an outdoor bar in Greenport under an enormous beech tree. “There was a great band,” he recalled.

Within a week they were a pair. Like his grandfather, Stephen loves to share fruit from the farm. “That’s probably how I won over my wife,” he said. “I brought her peaches.”

Stephen and Elizabeth moved to New York City, so she could attend a graduate program at NYU and Stephen went to work as a legal assistant at a law firm. His first full day at the law firm, Sidley & Austin, was September 11, 2001. Stephen was assigned to the uptown office instead of the one in the World Trade Center, where one of his colleagues died, and many were traumatized.

It was also during this period that Elizabeth’s brother died suddenly of a heart ailment. “Weathering that tragedy brought a close family even closer,” Stephen said. “We didn’t feel resilient at the time, but we are.”

In 2004, Stephen and Elizabeth married and moved to Burlington, Vermont, where Elizabeth worked in the school system. Stephen got a graduate degree in Natural Resources from the University of Vermont, and wrote his thesis on the effects of second homeowners on the greater Burlington community. “The subject was close to home,” he said. “My own family farm had been through this.”

By 2006, Stephen and Elizabeth were back in Cutchogue. He went to work as a project manager at the Peconic Land Trust handling land preservation projects on the North Fork and Shelter Island. There he joined Sara Gordon on the complex multi-year project that resulted in the creation of the Sylvester Manor Educational Farm and the conservation planning that went along with it, an undertaking that took many years to unfold, and would eventually result in both Sara and Stephen coming to work at Sylvester Manor.

Stephen and Elizabeth have three children, Owen, 11, Connor, 8, Aidan, 4. Elizabeth continues to work as an educator. Six years ago she founded the Peconic Community School, with seven students, one of whom was Owen. The school is now 65 strong; Owen has graduated and his brothers are attending.

When Stephen came to Sylvester Manor as director earlier this year, he saw the need for a comprehensive master plan, along with immediate action to preserve and protect deteriorating infrastructure – the Manor House has only been painted twice in three centuries and the windows are not providing insulation up to contemporary standards.

“This place holds layers of history,” he said. “Practically every big event in American history, Sylvester Manor was here for it. The colonial period, the Industrial Revolution, when women got the right to vote. We have this cultural lens on our past.”

“To grow our farm, restore the house, to make our interpretation of history better, having the right infrastructure will be very important,” Stephen said. “From the Quaker cemetery to the cow pasture and back.”

Stephen has been coming to Shelter Island since he was 6, but he’s been surprised by how little he really knew about the individuals who live here, and is happy to get to know them. “I knew the North Fork, but I didn’t know this community,” he said. “A whole new world has opened up for me.”

Lightning Round

Favorite place on Shelter Island? The Quaker meeting place at Sylvester Manor.

When was the last time you were elated? When I began working here and saw that this was going to be a really good fit.

What exasperates you? I don’t get exasperated easily.

What is the best day of the year on Shelter Island? One of those late September days when you can still swim and you have the whole beach to yourself.

Favorite movie or book? “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” by Jared Diamond.

Favorite food? Spaghetti carbonara. My mother- in-law makes a great one.

Favorite person, living or dead, who is not a member of the family? Mark Angelson. A close family friend for a long time. Humble, successful but success has not changed his outlook or his values.

Most respected elected official? County Legislator Al Krupski. You don’t really even know what party he is in, and it doesn’t matter. He is in tune with what the local community needs.