Charity Robey

Inside Long Island's Fruit Farms

Inside Long Island's Fruit Farms May 2020 Feed Me magazine.

Great food is slow food. A radish goes from seed to salad in few weeks, but an apple takes a decade. A peach tree needs five years to bear fruit, a cherry about seven. It takes an old farm to grow the best, and only a few Long Island families have been around long enough: men and women with the skill and the attention spans to raise the finest fruit.

On a mild April afternoon last year, I climbed into the cab of Clark McCombe’s Bobcat to see the spring bloom at Briermere in Riverhead, where his family has farmed ever since 1961. Even before McCombe’s father, Leonard, a photojournalist for LIFE magazine, bought the property, fruit trees had been growing on it for 40 years. Today, about 200 acres of the land is planted in rows of berries, peaches, nectarines, plums, pears and apples.

Clark McCombe, owner of Briermere Farms in Riverhead. Credit: Randee Daddona

I particularly wanted see the gooseberries, a plant that is rarely grown these days, and more’s the pity. Gooseberries have a complex flavor and a load of pectin that gives them substantial texture when cooked, which makes them ideal for pies and jellies. They are the most beautiful of berries, light green to deep purple, with veins of pink like fine marble.

The rows of gooseberries at Briermere have been productive for decades; the first ones were planted 52 years ago. The bushes are about shoulder high, and on this day, they were the greenest thing around, covered in new leaves and tiny flower buds with delicate tendrils that would produce berries in July. McCombe remembered tending the boy- sized plants was one of the first farm jobs he was entrusted with as an eight-year-old, in spite of the menacing, needlelike thorns. When I returned in July to get gooseberries for a few weeks of cobblers and fools (see recipe, below), I bought enough to freeze a few bags against winter days when I would need fruit.

 

A pint of gooseberries at Briermere Farms in Riverhead. Credit: Randee Daddona

When a fruit variety is called heirloom, it means the plants are handed down from generation to generation, freely propagated by farmers and gardeners, and sometimes even grow wild. Heirloom fruit varieties are usually at least 50 years old, and rarely commercially viable, but most established farms grow a few anyway, for reasons sentimental as well as practical.

“Heirloom fruit is so difficult, so gnarly, has so many negative attributes that it just isn’t a satisfactory fruit for a commercial farm operation,” said Tom Wickham of Wickham’s Fruit Farm in Cutchogue. “You can have some to talk about, but not to rely on as the only fruit you are going to sell. You will be out of business in no time.”

Tom Wickham, L.L.C manager of Wickham's Fruit Farm in Cutchogue. Credit: Randee Daddona

Strawberries are the first fruit of a Long Island summer, and for Tom Wickham, whose family has been farming in Cutchogue since the 1640s, they are an excellent example of why cultivating the traits of heirloom fruit is so important, even if trying to sell actual heirloom fruit can break your heart.

Strawberries on Long Island used to grow in lockstep with the length of the days, reaching the peak of ripeness when there was most daylight, around June 21, and producing large, delicious fruit that was picked and eaten in a matter of weeks. But in Europe, heirloom strawberry varieties paid no attention to day length, producing fingertip-sized strawberries all summer long, often full of tiny seeds and sometimes more pink than red, even when fully ripe. Wickham said scientists at the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva decided to breed a better berry. “They started crossing those little, long-bearing strawberries with luscious large, red berries we have on Long Island, and lo and behold, they finally got several varieties that are really very nice.” The everbearing strawberry hybrids have largely replaced old varieties that bore fruit in June and then took the rest of the growing season off. “Those old varieties have wonderful traits. The problem is how to integrate those traits with the wonderful traits we want today,” said Wickham.

Pints of strawberries inside the retail market at Wickham's Fruit Farm in Cutchogue. Credit: Randee Daddona

Laurie McBride is the Wickham’s farm stand manager, a twelve-year veteran of the Cornell agricultural stewardship program, where she helped local farmers translate science into on-farm applications. Sitting in the Wickham family farmhouse, the spiritual center of this 400-year-old-plus enterprise, she and Tom Wickham described the all-too-brief cherry harvest centered around the Fourth of July—a few weeks of fruit joy preceded by decades of cultivating, and eventually removing old trees as they age. “We had a tree up against the house that we planted in the late ’50s, that gave us our first cherries, planted by my father,” Wickham said.

“Yes, and you just took that cherry tree down,” McBride said. “We just planted more cherry trees, and it will be five to seven years before that planting is in full swing. The first two seasons, the tree is working on its roots.”

Many pears qualify for the heirloom moniker. At the edge of a Briermere field yards from Long Island Sound, McCombe introduced me to a Bartlett tree that is still producing fruit after nearly 100 years, quite a record of fecundity. “That’s the last of the original pear planting,” he said. “Dennis Gash, a hired hand who was here when my father bought the farm, was like a grandfather to me. He started working this land in 1920, and he remembered planting these trees.”

Pears are a crop my father loved,” said Tom Wickham. “The old saying ‘grow pears for your heirs’ has two meanings. It takes forever to get them to fruit, and once you do, they last forever.”

Harvested heirloom arora pears sit in a crate at Wickham's Fruit Farm in Cutchogue. Credit: Randee Daddona

At Wickham’s, Anjou and Bartlett are among the pears his father planted in the 1980s. Flemish Beauty is a 100-year old variety that is new to the Wickham’s farm, meaning he planted them a few years back, and they are just now starting to bear fruit.

Spend time looking at a family’s orchard, and you start to recognize traits that are as much markers of the clan as the cultivars. At Milk Pail, Jennifer Halsey Dupree and Amy Halsey are the 12th generation of their family to farm in Water Mill, on the shores of Mecox Bay. Halseys have worked this land since the 17th century. The sisters’ side-by-side homes (their parents’ home is next door) share the best backyard ever—20 acres of blooming, productive fruit trees in undulating rows that stretch to the bay, with Dune Road and the Atlantic Ocean visible just beyond.

Dupree said Granny Smith apples have been part of Milk Pail’s orchard since her father started growing fruit on this land 40 years ago. “We still have two rows of Granny Smith from the early ’80s,” she said. “They are very productive, but we had to replant some because of flooding from the bay. I had no plans of replacing them before that.” Milk Pail’s Granny Smiths are not the uniform baseball-size fruit found in supermarket bins. “Our Granny Smiths have a nice pink blush on them, and they vary a bit in shape and size. A Granny Smith in the supermarket, they are all exactly the same size and the same shade of green.”

Jennifer Halsey Dupree in the apple storage barn at Milk Pail in Water Mill. Credit: Randee Daddona

“We are a mile from the ocean, which makes us one of the latest-blooming orchards in New York State,” said Dupree. However, the moderating effect of the ocean gives Milk Pail the longest possible fall growing season. “I was harvesting Pink Lady apples right through Thanksgiving last year,” she said. “They have a real pizzazz flavor.”  

In Wickham’s opinion, the most flavorful apple on his farm is a greenish-brown fruit with no official name. It is sweet and tart, with a great crunch. “A grower in Virginia found a branch, liked it and saved it, somehow it got to the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station, and then we grew them here. We love them, but never found a commercial market. We call them Razor.”

In 1982, Woodside Orchard was born in Jamesport when Robert H. Gammon began planting what would eventually be 28 varieties of apple trees on 40 acres. He rigged up an old irrigation trailer to serve as a farm stand when he started harvesting a few years later. “The raccoons ate more of my stuff than I got to sell,” said Gammon, so he moved a cabin from a former day camp at nearby Laurel Lake to the orchard, where it has served as a raccoon- resistant farm stand ever since. “When you are in agriculture, you’ve got to be self-sufficient,” he said.

Among the varieties Gammon planted was the Arkansas Black, a dark beauty of the apple world developed by De Kalb Holt in his Arkansas orchard in the 1850s. The Arkansas Black apple is almost purple in hue and turns darker as it matures. Crisp with a tart flavor, it keeps well, and like many older cultivars, its flavor continues to develop as it ages.

Gammon’s sons Bob and Scott joined him in the 1990s and now run the business. It was Bob Gammon’s inspiration to take advantage of the very large number of apple varieties the family grew to make a product that hadn’t been huge on Long Island since the 19th century. Hard cider.

Left: Bob Gammon, co-owner of Woodside Orchards. Top: An Arkansas Black apple at Woodside Orchards. Bottom: Crates of harvested apples at Woodside Orchards in Jamesport. Photo credit: Randee Daddona

“For hard cider, you need that blend,” said Bob. “Our apples are coming in from late August through November, and then they are in storage.” Woodside’s cidermaking operation opened in nearby Aquebogue in 2012. Open year-round, it uses most of the 28 cultivars, including Golden Russet, a very old American variety known as an outstanding cider apple, to create a sophisticated menu of ciders with flavors from Champagne-like to fruity.

For the last stop of my seasonal Long Island fruit tour, I circled back to Briermere on a sunny October day, where I admired a bushy row of Newtown Pippins—100 trees about 20 years old, that will produce, with careful pruning, for another 20.

The Newtown Pippin, which was first cultivated in Newtown (now Elmhurst, Queens) in 1759, is the oldest apple in the United States and one of the few heirloom apples that is still commercially viable. This green apple is firm and crisp. It is extremely fragrant and develops a sweeter and fuller flavor after a few months of cold storage—that is, 30 degrees at 90 percent humidity. (It’s closer to basement than refrigerator conditions, in case you are thinking of trying this at home).

In a world full of “new and improved” foods, these old fruit varieties are not just a taste of the flavorful past, but a living link to generations of American growers on some of the nation’s oldest farms. They’re reason enough to eat your way through the season.

Gooseberry Fool recipe

Culinarily speaking, a fool is a chilled dessert that involves whipped cream (or custard) gently mixed with stewed or mashed fruit, and it is a boon for people who love dessert, but don’t/won’t/can’t bake. The name may come from the French word fouler (“to trample”), but fool is an English dish and belongs to a category of desserts that includes tri e. Like the fruit farms of Long Island, gooseberry fool has a history going back to the 17th century. If you can’t nd gooseberries, with their complex sweet-tart avor, don’t worry: Other soft fruits, such as red currants, strawberries, raspberries or blackberries will work well, too. Just adjust the sugar to taste. Serves 4.

INGREDIENTS

2 cups ripe gooseberries

6 tablespoons sugar, plus more to taste if necessary

1/4 teaspoon grated lemon zest

3/4 cup heavy cream

1. In a saucepan, heat the gooseberries with 2 tablespoons sugar over low heat until they break down into a soft, juicy mash. Force the fruit through a fine-mesh sieve into a bowl, pressing out the juice with the back of a spoon. Discard the stems and seeds.

2. Add 2 tablespoons sugar and the grated lemon zest to the puréed fruit. Taste it for sweetness and add more sugar if needed. Let the sweetened purée cool to room temperature.

3. Beat the cream in a bowl with an electric mixer until it gains volume, then add the remaining 2 tablespoons sugar. Beat until cream holds soft peaks. Gently but thoroughly fold in the cooled fruit purée. Spoon into 4 glasses, cover tightly and refrigerate for 2 hours before serving.

More information

BRIERMERE FARMS: 4414 Sound Ave., Riverhead; 631-722-3931, briermerefarms.com

MILK PAIL FRESH MARKET: 1346 Montauk Hwy., Water Mill; 631-537-2565, milk-pail.com

WICKHAM’S FRUIT FARM: 28700 Main Rd., Cutchogue; wickhamsfruitfarm.com

WOODSIDE ORCHARDS: 116 Manor Lane, Jamesport; 631 722-5770, woodsideorchards.com

By Charity RobeySpecial to Newsday

Sea change-Inside Montauk's commercial fishing industry

Published in the Summer 2019 issue of Newsday's Feed Me magazine.

By Charity Robey Special to Newsday Updated July 21, 2019 5:00 AM

 

When Gosman’s Dock, 14 acres of restaurants and shops at Montauk Harbor, went on the market for $52.5 million in 2015, it signaled the latest evolution in a "discovered" coastal town that used to be all about surfing, fishing and dive bars. But walk past the dumpster and ice machine onto the dock that stretches into the harbor, and you’re in another world. You will typically see a forklift operator removing boxes of fish from a boat’s hold, or two guys hefting lobsters into the back of a pickup truck. Welcome to Montauk—past its heyday, perhaps, but alive and still bringing fresh local seafood to people who know enough to buy it up while they still can.

Montauk is not only the biggest commercial fishing hub in New York, it’s one of the largest in the Northeast. But that’s not saying much. In the United States, about 80 percent of the seafood we eat is imported, and most of it has been frozen, thawed and refrozen multiple times while being shipped and processed. Prices for local wild seafood, the stuff landed at the town dock or a dock on the east side of the harbor, hit a high of $21.2 million in 2012. By 2017, this figure had slid to $14.8 million.  

Unlike Gurneys’ or the iconic Shagwong Tavern, Montauk’s commercial fishing boats don’t attract investors eager to keep their businesses afloat, and their property (boats, gear and permits) is not easily transferable from one person to another. Fishers are foragers of wild food in an industry that is heavily regulated, with quotas, licenses and practices dictated by state and federal governments. And unlike farmers, they have no federally subsidized crop insurance to tide them over when their harvest is threatened by wild weather.

John Nolan, his wife, Laurie, and their son John Nolan III are owner-operators of the F/V Seacapture (“F/V” stands for “ fishing vessel”), a boat that hauls in 25 percent of the tilefish caught in the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council’s region, which stretches from New York to North Carolina. John Nolan III, 32, has been captaining the boat since he was 21, fishing 100 miles off Montauk year-round with a crew of five. They are at sea for 6 to 10 days at a stretch.

Robert Aaronson, John Nolan, Tom Eshenfelder, Armaan Gretarsson, Marty Senkus and Steven Doyles on the Seacapture in Montauk with a load of Golden Tilefish. Credit: David Handschuh

 

On a brilliant October day last fall, the 82-foot Seacapture arrived in Montauk Harbor with 20,000 pounds of tilefish in the hold. It had been a longer trip than usual: While a nor’easter pounded the coast, Seacapture had stayed far offshore, out of harm’s way. The entire crew was on deck in a celebratory state, including one young salt wearing a bunny outfit (Halloween was a few days away), who helped secure the boat as Nolan III stepped onto the dock to an emotional welcome from his mom, his sister Molly and his sister Jean’s baby, a cherub named Bodie. His father was picking up a large order of bacon-and-cheese sandwiches to feed everyone. Cousin and former crewmate Robert Aaronson, who had gone out to the jetty to take in Seacapture’s safe return, was on hand to help unload. Nolan III pointed proudly to the hold, packed full of cleaned, iced fish, and said, “Oh yeah.”

The crew—Tom Eshenfelder, Stephen Doyle, Al Ellis, Mark Semkus and Armann Grettarsson—were ebullient. “We had a little bit of weather,” Nolan III said. “But we fished every day. We have a good boat for it. We were getting beaten up pretty good, good-sized waves one day. Stuck it out and caught some fish.”

Extreme weather, the sprawling thicket of regulations and quotas, and reproduction and migration changes in fish species are existential threats to today’s commercial fishing business. The key to survival is to grow and maintain a sustainable fishery, and the story of how the Nolan family developed the market for Atlantic golden tilefish out of Montauk is worthy of a Harvard Business School case study.

The Nolans catch tilefish on a longline, a 40-mile length of wire rope with 4,000 baited hooks that snap on, an innovation John Nolan introduced to the Montauk fishery in the 1980s, after he and Laurie saw it used to catch tilefish during a fishing sojourn in Florida. Prior to that, most Montauk fishers used nets for tilefish, but the Nolans’ new gear began to outperform the traditional method.

Left: Unloading Golden Tilefish from the Seacapture on the dock in Montauk. Top: Captain John Nolan III on the Seacapture. Bottom: Steven Doyles sorts Golden Tilefish by size in the hold of the Seacapture. Photo credit: David Handschuh

Although it takes a skilled crew to bait and then remove fish from the line without being gouged by the business end of a hook, line-caught fish are never damaged by a net, and the method, when properly managed, results in less bycatch.

It was Laurie Nolan, who shed for five years alongside her husband, that spearheaded another important change in the Atlantic golden tilefish industry in 2004, when she decided the fish was getting a bad rap. Since the 1970s, the FDA had put tilefish in the same category as swordfish, tuna and king mackerel—fish that contain elevated mercury levels and should not be consumed by pregnant women or small children.

Knowing that the warning was based on samples taken in 1976 from the Gulf of Mexico in the vicinity of oil drilling (which can produce mercury pollution), she wanted to see if the local tilefish, which live in deep, clean water and do not migrate, had elevated mercury levels as well. She followed testing protocols and sent samples of fish caught by her family to a lab for analysis. The results showed no danger from elevated mercury levels, the FDA amended the warning and Atlantic golden tilefish became recognized as one of the most sustainable and healthy fish around.

It’s also one of the most delicious. Most of the Nolans’ catch goes to Hunts Point, the vast wholesale market in the Bronx, where restaurants and seafood shops from all over the Northeast go to buy fish. A few thousand pounds is distributed through Dock to Dish, a community-supported fishery program that supplies Montauk seafood to restaurants and consumers, and another 1,000 pounds of whole tilefish from every load goes to Gosman’s to be filleted and sold to East End restaurants. With a firm texture, white flesh and flavor similar to lobster (because of their habit of eating crustaceans), tilefish is a favorite of chef Dan Barber at Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills and makes a regular appearance on the menu at Nick & Toni’s in East Hampton. The Nolans’ tilefish is a mainstay at the New York Google cafeteria, where 5,000 employees not only enjoy eating it, they know who caught it.

The same goes for the Jonah crab claws from Montauk’s John Aldridge and Anthony Sosinki. They are fishing partners who have been instrumental in establishing the viability of this meaty- clawed creature, usually considered a bycatch of lobstering. Sean Bennett of Dock to Dish said the Google employees are particularly enthusiastic when steamed Jonah crab claws are on the menu at the company cafeteria.

Googlers may not realize, however, that they’re eating the catch of bonafide media figures, ones who can tell you in harrowing detail about the dangers of the job. Aldridge and Sosinski, longtime partners on the F/V Anna Mary, fish for lobster, and in the middle of one July night in 2013, Aldridge, alone on deck, fell off the boat. He spent 12 hours in the ocean without a flotation device or GPS personal locator beacon before he was pulled out by the Coast Guard. The story of the resourcefulness and resilience he called on to survive long enough to be rescued became a book and movie, “A Speck in the Sea.”

“It’s a job for somebody who has something to prove.”

John Nolan III

Even if you don’t fall overboard, fishing is not for the faint of heart. “It’s a job for somebody who has something to prove,” said Nolan III. “For me, it was my dad, I guess. You got to dig deep some days. You wonder, ‘What am I doing?’ And you just do it anyway.”

Family plays a part even for someone like Dave Aripotch, who happens to be one of the few commercial fishers in Montauk who did not grow up in the business. At 63, Aripotch is “the oldest full-time offshore guy” in the area, and he’s been at it for enough years to prove he’s not just being rebellious. “I’ve been doing this since I was 18,” he said. “Some nights I wake up in a mad panic thinking, ‘I’m going to have to get a real job someday.’ ” Like so many baby boomers born on Long Island, Aripotch went clamming in the Great South Bay as a child, but unlike most, he graduated quickly to working on a commercial trawler, going for swordfish, tuna and tilefish on trips that would have him at sea for weeks. Today he works from the 73-foot FV Caitlin & Mairead.

Aripotch’s wife, Bonnie Brady, is his advocate and shore-side support, as well as a vital voice for commercial fishers at sea, who can’t attend the endless rounds of hearings around issues of licensing, fishing regulations and quotas. “It requires 15 plates spinning,” she said. “If you do it right, you have this great harvest of fish and you get to feed people.”

So far, none of Aripotch’s children has shown an interest in following him into commercial fishing. His first mate, Jackson Urgilez, has been working with Aripotch for more than a decade. Aripotch hopes to work out a deal to pass the boat and his fishing permits to Urgilez when he retires in a few years. “I would like to see him do it. I would like to see fishing stay in this town.”

Montauk’s fishing families have mixed feelings about government regulations and quotas, which can hurt their short-term bottom line but help keep species sustainable in the long run. A prime example is the sea scallop fishery. “Scallops made a big recovery,” Aripotch said. “You had to rotate the areas, which makes sense. They came back. So did fluke, sea bass, striped bass. They put all these regulations in place, and fishing got better.” That is not to say that Aripotch approves of government intervention in his business. A recent proposal, to allow a Danish company to build a wind farm in the middle of a prime fishing area 35 miles offshore, is one that Aripotch and most other commercial owner-operators out of Montauk consider a serious impediment to their business.

Hank Lackner, owner-operator of the trawler Jason and Danielle—at about 90 feet, the largest commercial fishing boat out of Montauk—thinks the threat the proposed wind farm poses can’t be fully appreciated by people who don’t understand how much space in the ocean fishers need to operate. When the nets of a trawler open up, they are like a huge sail moving through the water, herding schools of fish before them.

“Those windmills, you can’t tow a net around them,” Lackner said. “They become closed areas, even if they are a mile apart.”

Lackner’s main cash crop is squid, and for the past two years the cephalopods have been unusually plentiful. The handful of commercial fishers who have permits to take squid caught their quota so early, they had to stop fishing by midsummer. Lackner fishes with two of his children and is hopeful that they will continue the family business.

“We’re some of the last hunter-gatherers on Earth,” Aripotch said, as his crew unloaded 50,000 pounds of porgy—equal to the biomass of about five mastodons. The fish were iced, boxed and bound for Hunts Point. “It’s money, but I never lose sight of producing food. Like a farmer ... harvesting fish.” 

By Charity Robey Special to Newsday

True grit.The story behind Commander Cody's Seafood on Shelter Island

Published in the Summer 2019 issue of Feed Me magazine.

 

There was a time when an East End fisherman who caught a lot more than he could sell would buy a fryer, set up some picnic tables and open a restaurant. A few of those joints, such as Commander Cody’s Seafood on Shelter Island, are still around because they have the most devoted customers and the freshest fish. Jim Hayward, who started a restaurant named for his dog Cody in 1993, says his success has more to do with simple food rooted in his raising. “If you don’t want the real deal, don’t come here, because I don’t use substitutes. I do home cooking.”

Hayward grew up in Ridgeland, heart of the South Carolina Lowcountry. He was the oldest of nine siblings, and his mother expected him to shoulder the cooking responsibilities from the age of 10. “She’d sit back and point that stick in case I’d burn the food,” he said. “I was cooking for the whole family.” He grew up cooking hearty fare in large quantities: crab boil, fried chicken, pulled pork and ribs — the foundations of his menu today.

Jim Hayward weighs out clams and muscles at Commander Cody's Seafood on Shelter Island. Photo Credit: Raychel Brightman

On a recent weekday afternoon, 84-year-old Hayward was unloading boxes of porgy, squid and clams from the back of his pickup truck, his dog Frankie (Cody passed in 1995) staying close enough to snag anything that might drop. Hayward is a big man and easily carried large boxes full of iced fish across the gravel yard to the restaurant on Smith Street, which is also the home where he raised his daughters, Chloe (39) and Amanda (35). Inside, Amanda, pastry bag in hand, was putting the finishing touches on 35 chocolate-frosted birthday cupcakes for a catering order.

The gravel yard turned into a parking lot a few hours after Hayward unloaded the seafood. Customers came in for takeout orders, to buy fresh fish or to eat fried chicken and ribs at picnic tables on the patio. To enter Commander Cody’s, they stepped past the fish-smoker still redolent of hickory, squeezed by the drinks cooler, stood next to the blue whiskery waters of the lobster tank and evaluated the vivacity of the clams before they placed their orders for locally caught, home-cooked delectables, whether smoked, steamed, grilled or fried.

Commander Cody's Seafood on Shelter Island. Photo credit: Raychel Brightman

The restaurant’s reputation extends far beyond Shelter Island — a notable accomplishment, considering a ferry ride and sophisticated navigation aids are required to find it. On a weekday in May, the Mascucchinis from Philadelphia were on their way to Montauk when a little research convinced them to detour to Commander Cody’s. Ron Mascucchini said they had to drive around and come back a few times since the hours of operation here are like the fish: subject to availability. After lunch, Mascucchini, seeing Hayward at the lobster pot on the patio, came over to thank him for the freshly prepared food, including fries with a coating of a peppery spice mix Hayward swears by. He told Mascucchini, “It won’t give you a headache, but it will make you sneeze.”

Hayward came to Shelter Island in the ’50s to farm and fish, selling his catch first from his truck and then from the seafood market in his home, and he has always kept South Carolina culture, family and food close. Hayward’s nephew Gene works with him. Eight of his nine siblings are living, and living well, several in New York. Hayward said, “If you invite the Haywards over, you better have a lot of food because this family will eat everything.”

For many years, Hayward made his living as a commercial fisher, dragging for flounder, but these days he buys most of the fish he sells. “I buy from all the guys who fish. That’s why you got cellphones. You call around and see who has fish. I usually buy striped bass from guys on the South Fork.”

Although he no longer takes a trawler out for flounder, Hayward still dredges for bay scallops, as he did this past fall after the installation of a pacemaker drew a warning from his cardiologist to avoid scalloping for at least six months. Hayward thought the doctor must have meant six weeks, because the season for bay scallops is only five months long. “I don’t know how I got it wrong. I must have seen some dollar signs,” he said. “For the time I could go out there, I felt fine.”

Decades of commercial fishing taught him where to get great fish, and also what to do with it, including preparing the notoriously bony porgy. Porgy is delicious if you can figure out how to remove the rows of short, sharp bones. Hayward stood next to a 10-gallon tub of pristine porgy fillets and said, “When I cut it, it has no bone in it. I filleted those this morning.” You could make sushi from it.

Left: The lobster roll at Commander Cody’s Seafood on Shelter Island. Top: The clam bake filled with lobster, little neck clams, shrimp and muscles. Bottom: Fried chicken. Photo credit: Raychel Brightman

The menu at Commander Cody’s is a combination of New England seaside cooking (lobster rolls, lobster dinners, clam bakes) with the coastal South Carolina dishes of Hayward’s youth, including a Lowcountry boil — a steaming, spicy pot of crab, corn, sausage and potatoes that hits all the major food groups. Hayward learned to make ribs by watching his uncle use a barbecue pit dug in the ground, a technique that virtually guarantees a stupendous quantity of food, as well as quality.

Hayward makes no accommodation to the contemporary food scene at Commander Cody’s. If tiny bits of parsley have been scattered over your clam bake, it’s not for decorative purposes, it’s food. The posted business hours are loosely observed, and the vibe is fast-casual without the fast. “I tell people, if you are in a hurry, don’t come here to eat. We cook everything to order. If you can’t wait, I’m still going to do it the way it’s supposed to be done. I believe in feeding people and giving them enough to eat. Not putting some rabbit food out.”

Amanda Hayward does all the baking and desserts, including an outstanding blueberry bread pudding served with homemade ice cream — available in very un-Lowcountry flavors such as blueberry-basil and Guinness. And although her dad swears he doesn’t eat ice cream (“I eat yogurt. I don’t like much sweet stuff.”), he is still proud of her exuberant use of dairy products, in line with family tradition, “If you don’t like butter and the real deal don’t come here.”

Blueberry basil bread pudding is served with homemade coconut ice cream at Commander Cody's Seafood on Shelter Island. Photo Credit: Raychel Brightman

Amanda and Chloe grew up on Shelter Island, graduated from the Shelter Island school and went to college, unlike their dad who left school in the fourth grade. Amanda, who, in addition to the baking, does much of the cooking at Commander Cody’s, worked in the restaurant business in Las Vegas after graduating from The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park. Chloe went to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and is manager of education programs at the Studio Museum in Harlem, to the delight (and chagrin) of her father, who would like her to live closer. “She says there is not enough culture out here for her.”

When Hayward’s marriage to Chloe and Amanda’s mother ended, he marked the transition with a celebration. “I do what I do and I do my best. I’ve got a lot of haters but I’m like a steamroller. I roll them over.” He invited 100 people, dug a pit, and roasted an 88-pound hog on an old bedspring in a ring of fire stoked with charcoal and cherry and hickory wood for flavor. “We partied down. When Jim Hayward gives a party, it’s a party.”

Hayward is known on Shelter Island for the big family events he has catered over the years, including celebrations at the Shelter Island home of Gov. Hugh Carey, who was a friend as well as a customer.

Shelter Islander Esther Hunt, 95, is old enough to have babysat for Jim Hayward (she didn’t) and is a devoted customer. She recently described herself as elated when she heard that Hayward had returned from his annual spring stay in South Carolina and would soon be serving up her favorites at Commander Cody’s. “The salmon is very good, and I love his scallops,” she said. “And the servings are so generous, they can last for two meals.”

It’s tricky to ask an octogenarian to articulate his vision for the future, but for Hayward, well into his eighth decade of cooking, an afterlife with food seems like a foregone conclusion. As a child, Hayward said, “I had to learn to cook in big pots,” a life skill that proved valuable. “For a wedding on Ram Island, I cooked 100 lobsters,” Hayward said. “When I go, [the lobsters] are going to be at the Gate.”

Zac Posen Q&A

Zac Posen at his parent's farm in Bucks Country, PA. Photo Credit: Vanina Sorrenti

 

Published in the Summer 2019 issue of Feed Me magazine.

 

Zac Posen grew up in a creative household in New York City, with a father who cooked every day. The 38-year-old designer dresses the best, from fashion royalty to more than 60,000 Delta employees reaching into overhead bins all over the world. His 2017 book, “Cooking With Zac,” extends his lifelong affinity for creating beauty to luscious ingredients. He spends as much time as he can shopping and cooking with friends on Long Island.

In “Cooking With Zac,” you draw connections between designing a new collection and cooking. How are they similar?

When I’m designing clothing, I drape fabric onto a form or human body and I start building expressively. Good material is the starting point, as good ingredients are the starting point for a dish. I let the ingredient or material sing and [take] the lead.

Your recipes seem solid and tested, and they include a lot of technique. How did you come by so many good practices?

I was told, ‘Don’t worry, in most cookbooks the recipes don’t test out.’ I said, ‘I can’t have that — it would be like making a piece of clothing with an armhole that’s closed.’ Food is like storytelling. When you cook with great chefs, you learn different parts of that story. I’m self-taught, but I’ve cooked with the greatest — Marcus [Samuelsson], Giada De Laurentiis, Martha [Stewart], Eric Ripert.

What do you wear when you cook?

When I’m doing cooking demos, I wear aprons. When I’m in my kitchen, I’m in my t-shirt, Brooks Brothers pajama bottoms and bare feet. If I do wear an apron, I like to do a fold so I can put a white cloth on the tie.

Some cooks meticulously measure, dice and peel ahead of time, and some throw carrots all over the kitchen. Where do you fall on that spectrum?

I’m a messy creator! If I have to time to prep, then I can be neat and organized.

Are there foods you’d rather get on Long Island than anywhere else?

Mother Nature is our greatest designer and creator, and produce is the greatest luxury item possible. I love the hunt for good ingredients. I make all the clothing I wear, but there are two things I shop for, jewelry and ingredients [for cooking]. Long Island has incredible small farms and produce. I love the Green Thumb [Water Mill]. I get my seafood — ideally, you get it on the dock [or at] The Seafood Shop [Wainscott].

Where do you go out to eat on Long Island?

I rarely go out, even though I know there is incredible food. I grill. It’s my time off. It’s important to me to have private, quiet time, not having to interact with the world.

How would you describe your approach to cooking and eating?

It’s generous, it’s eclectic, with a real respect for the ingredients. Family style with air. Rustic to refined ... enjoying the right balance of decadence to refined simplicity ... I don’t believe in suffering, in trying to not eat—I think it’s all in moderation.

The Delta Air Lines uniforms you designed made their debut last year. What did you do and how did you do it? And how does one of the uniforms hold up if a passenger spills a Bloody Mary all over a flight attendant?

Delta was a real once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It took over three years. I job-shadowed from entering JFK to landing on the plane, from ticketing to baggage to service. We worked with stain-resistant fibers woven into the fabric. That’s where the technology came onboard. It was great to bring this into the process.

Poultry in motion. The history and future of poultry farming on Long Island

Indian Runner ducklings stand adorably upright, aligning their heads, wings and webbed feet in a way that would make them the stars of any yoga class. Fifty of them race in a tight pack around the barn of Abra Morawiec and Chris Pinto, co-owners of Feisty Acres in Southold. Morawiec and Pinto will soon turn these sturdy and comical heritage egg layers out to pasture to do what ducks have been doing on Long Island since the late 19th century: eating and making food.

Left: Indian Runner ducks run about the grass at Feisty Acres in Southold. Top: Feisty Acres co-owner Abra Morawiec feeds the ducks and chickens at her farm in Southold. Bottom: Two-week-old fawn and white Indian Runner ducklings keep warm under heating lamps at Feisty Acres in Southold. Photo credit: Raychel Brightman

Morawiec and Pinto are the new face of East End poultry farming. They raise their ducks, quail, partridge and chickens on pasture, contributing to the sustainable future of a business that has been as central to the culture and economy of Long Island as commercial fishing. But, like fishing, the poultry industry has seen its share of environmental and regulatory challenges and faced periods of boom and bust.

In 1899, Long Island was the growing center of duck farming in the United States, and Eastport was its capital. An advertisement placed in an industry journal that year by duck breeders R.B. and O.H. Dayton in the nearby hamlet of Remsenburg read: “Indian Runner Ducks, wonderfully prolific. Are rapid and easy growers. Handsome in appearance.”

The duck industry on Long Island had taken off after James Palmer, Esq., of Stonington, Connecticut, imported a flock of Chinese ducks known as Pekin in 1872. Soon local farmers started buying breeding stock from him, and the East End of Long Island, blessed with plenty of water for ducks to paddle around in and plenty of fish to feed them, became a paradise for poultry. When customers began to notice a fishy taste in the Long Island eggs and duck meat, growers responded by changing up the feed and charging more for the premium product long before “value-added” became a common marketing term.

In the early part of the 20th century, Hallock’s Atlantic Farm on the Speonk River was the largest duck farm in the world, producing a quarter of a million ducks in one year. Their tag line, “Hallock’s Celery Fed,” was a boast about the flavor and quality that was an important part of their brand until the farm was destroyed in the 1938 hurricane.

By the 1950s, Crescent Duck Farm had become one of the largest duck farms on the East End. This was a time when Long Island provided seven million birds annually, about two-thirds of U.S. duck production overall. Crescent Duck Farm’s owner, 60-year-old Douglas Corwin, comes from a family that first settled in Southold in the 1640s, farming and working mainly as carpenters for a couple of centuries before Corwin’s grandfather decided to raise Pekin ducks in 1908.

The series of federal reforms that culminated in the Clean Water Act began affecting the Long Island poultry business in the late ’50s, and, by 1972, presented significant challenges to the duck industry. Managing the excreta of ducks raised outdoors (ducks generate more waste than most other poultry) became virtually impossible for medium- or small-sized operations. Responding to these changes, the Corwins invested in waste treatment systems to comply with the federal and state regulations, buying up the local feed supplier to ensure their stock of high-quality feed.

“I make a million ducks a year in an industry that makes 80 million,” said Corwin. “I’m a pure niche player in an international business.” He and his sons, Blake and Pierce, both in their 30s, produce duck that is known for its flavor and meatiness. It is a mainstay at high-end restaurants such as the Four Seasons, in Manhattan. “I was at a food show once when David Bouley put his arm around me and said, ‘Thank you.’ ”

When the Long Island Duck Farmers Cooperative in Eastport was voted out of existence in 1987, almost two dozen Long Island duck farms closed, some relocating to Pennsylvania and midwestern states. It was two decades before second-career farmer Chris Browder and his wife, Holly, used land and a barn leased from the Peconic Land Trust to begin raising certified organic chickens for meat and eggs. Influenced by the innovative techniques of Joel Salatin at Polyface Farm in Virginia, Chris had raised a few chickens for meat while working as a farm apprentice at Garden of Eve in Riverhead, and when his chicken meat was snapped up immediately he had an “aha” moment: “I realized that there was no one doing pastured poultry on Long Island.”

In 2010, the Browders began to raise white and red broilers, birds bred to be superior foragers. In order to increase production from 1,000 birds a year to as many as 5,000, the Browders moved the farm to their own land in Mattituck and purchased a processing unit.

Chris Browder continued to research the East End poultry scene, returning repeatedly to Iacono Farm on Long Lane in East Hampton, where Anthony Iacono, the second generation of a chicken-farming family in operation since 1948, has reduced the distance from farm to table to a matter of yards. The Iaconos raise and process 10,000 chickens a year, employing knife skills that would be the envy of any Lower East Side butcher. In the family’s retail store, Anthony’s daughter Amanda, who works alongside her father, recently pointed out to a customer that it is possible to buy a bird too fresh to cook immediately. She advised the customer to wait 24 hours, since a chicken that was walking around earlier in the day is better to eat once the meat has relaxed.

Inspired by the Iacono family’s processing expertise, last year Chris Browder was able to boost his business, increasing his offerings of packaged legs, breasts and wings to include prepared foods such as stock, quiche and chicken potpie.

Browder’s Birds helped establish a new way forward for the East End poultry business by showing that pastured poultry can be the basis of a viable enterprise. “The stories you hear about the conventional chicken business [tens of thousands of birds raised in a single house] ... well, we need an alternative,” said Browder. “I realize it’s not for everyone because our price point is higher. But it turns out there are lots of people who want to eat chicken, but don’t want to eat that chicken. They want a chicken that is raised well, that is raised humanely.”

Abra Morawiec and Chris Pinto met as farm apprentices at Garden of Eve in 2012. Pinto was a farmhand at Fort Hill Farm in Connecticut, a well-respected, diversified operation with a large community-supported agriculture (CSA) system. Afterward, he worked in Alabama with a family of Messianic Jews in a tiny community near the Tennessee border, raising vegetables and livestock. Morawiec had tended 40 chickens and ducks and an acre of vegetables on her father’s farm in Warwick, New York, before serving in the Peace Corps in rural Mali.

Co-owners Abra Morawiec and Chris Pinto tend to a white Indian Runner duckling at Feisty Acres in Southold. Photo Credit: Raychel Brightman

For this pair of farmers, the path to love did not run straight. Morawiec and Pinto’s relationship got off to a rocky start when Pinto intervened in a dogfight on the farm and ended up with stitches in his thumb. As Morawiec later recalled, at the time she thought, “Who’s this jerk who got involved in a dogfight?” Then, the farmer at Garden of Eve asked them to compete for speed in picking crops. Pinto threw down the garden glove: “I bet I can pick my greenhouse faster than you can pick your greenhouse.” Morawiec, who had never worked on a commercial farm before, embraced the challenge and lost, but not by much.

Morawiec spent the next few seasons at Browder’s Birds. Every time she worked a farmers market, she had people asking for quail, guinea hens and heritage chickens—that is, hardy traditional breeds that enjoy a life on pasture. “There was obviously a need for this in the market,” she noted. “High-quality game birds and eggs just aren’t available.” By the summer of 2015, Pinto was building enclosures for the 100 pastured quail Morawiec intended to raise. Pinto readily admits that he had his doubts, but by then they were partners. “I have the vision, and Chris can take my vision and build it, give it realness,” Morawiec said.

Left: Abra Morawiec, Co-Owner at Feisty Acres in Southold, holds one of her quails. Top: Quail eggs at Feisty Acres in Southold. Bottom: House-made pickled quail eggs at Feisty Acres in Southold. Photo credit: Raychel Brightman

The quail sold out immediately.

“We started from nothing,” Morawiec continued. “We had to rely on our relationships with other farmers.” In the beginning, they leased two acres from Phil Barbato at Biophilia Organic Farm in Jamesport, and once they had built their business over three years, the Peconic Land Trust offered them an 8.2- acre property and barn on County Road 48.

A major break for Feisty Acres came when GrowNYC assigned them a spot at the two largest Greenmarkets in the city, the one on Sundays at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, and the one on Wednesdays at Union Square in Manhattan. These heavily attended, year-round markets virtually guarantee a steady supply of customers during the colder months, when selling quail eggs on the East End can leave you lonely. “We are producing 2,000 quail eggs a week for Union Square and Grand Army Plaza, and we are having a problem keeping up with demand,” said Morawiec.

The city Greenmarkets have put Morawiec in touch with some of her most discerning and demanding customers, and they have spread the word about how much more delicious her pastured birds are than game birds raised indoors. “Lena, my very first customer at Union Square, bought guinea hens from us. Originally from Eastern Europe, she told her entire neighborhood and they all started coming. Joy, from Koreatown in Manhattan, started buying quail, and then turkeys, and she told everyone in her apartment building,” said Morawiec.

A handful of restaurants offer Feisty Acres birds, but they have to come visit the farm first, Morawiec added. “If not, they won’t understand why our birds cost what they cost.” One of the chefs who made the trek to Southold was Antoine Westermann, who was so impressed with the operation that his restaurant, Le Coq Rico (“the bistro of beautiful birds”) in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, started buying quail from Feisty Acres.

Co-owner Abra Morawiec collects quail eggs at dusk at Feisty Acres in Southold. Photo Credit: Raychel Brightman

The day chef Westermann, a connoisseur of poultry, visited the farm was important for Morawiec and Pinto, but restaurants are not their primary customers. “Never have I had someone come up to me and say, ‘I had your bird in a restaurant,’ but I have had hundreds of people come up to me and say ‘I bought your bird at the market and it was absolutely delicious,’ ” said Morawiec. “One restaurant wanted hearts and livers for free, and I said absolutely not, there’s about a dozen Ukrainian women who will have my head. I will not be upsetting my Ukrainian customers; they’re paying $12 a pound for hearts and livers.”

This year, Feisty Acres will drop its USDA certified organic status. Morawiec cited price competition from industrial chicken farms that severely limit outside access for their birds but are still certified organic, while Feisty Acres protocols surpass them in all the ways that count for humanely producing wholesome and sustainable eggs and meat. Meanwhile, organic status would bar Feisty Acres from feeding their birds scraps and gleanings from local conventional farms, driving up costs and hindering their connection to the rest of the agricultural community.

Chris Browder didn’t think too much about the local history of poultry farming until his customers started telling him about it: “A number of times at different farmers markets, people have come up to me and said, my grandfather had a poultry farm out here.” In the decade since he and Holly have been in the business, he’s seen change. “I see what has transpired just since we started, the proliferation of people who are doing chicken in some form—Deep Roots, 8 Hands. Feisty, Catapano. It went from zero to seven or eight just on the North Fork.”

Doug Corwin welcomes the relative newcomers to Long Island poultry farming. “I dare any of them to grow a duck better than I do. They’re never going to have my breeding stock. Still, they have a phenomenal product, and they add to the food culture that we have. I give them a lot of credit. It makes me smile that someone is doing something with the land. We are a Long Island agricultural community and we all want to see the same thing. I’m hoping this new generation will do well and push forward with us.”

Information

BROWDER'S BIRDS: 4050 Soundview Ave., Mattituck; 631-477-6523, browdersbirds.com

Chris and Holly Browder sell pastured chicken at Long Island farm stands and specialty stores, through their CSA and at the farm.

CRESCENT DUCK FARM: 10 Edgar Ave., Aquebogue; 631-722-8000, crescentduck.com

The Corwins have owned and operated a duck farm since 1908, and produce one million proprietary-breed ducks indoors annually. They’re found at some restaurants and grocery and specialty stores.

IACONO FARM: 100 Long Lane, East Hampton; 631-324-1107, iaconofarm.com

The Iacono family’s chicken farm (est. 1948) sells 10,000 freshly killed, indoor-raised chickens annually, year- round. Birds are butchered to order at the retail store on the farm.

MILOSKI'S POULTERY FARM: 4418 Middle Country Rd., Calverton; 631-727-0239, miloskispoultryfarm.com

The Milowskis have raised poultry since 1946. Five thousand pasture-raised turkeys are sold annually, mostly the week before Thanksgiving, out of the family’s retail store. Other offerings include rotisserie ducks and kielbasa. Cash only.

FEISTY ACRES: 45375 County Rd. 48, Southold; feistyacres.com

Abra Morawiec and Chris Pinto sell pasture-raised game birds, ducks and chickens at the Greenmarkets at Union Square and Grand Army Plaza in New York City, and through their CSA. They also sell at some of the larger East End markets, including Sag Harbor, during the summer.

 

Poultry in Motion The history and future of poultry farming on Long Island

Published in Newsday, Feed Me magazine on April 28, 2019

Indian Runner ducklings stand adorably upright, aligning their heads, wings and webbed feet in a way that would make them the stars of any yoga class. Fifty of them race in a tight pack around the barn of Abra Morawiec and Chris Pinto, co-owners of Feisty Acres in Southold. Morawiec and Pinto will soon turn these sturdy and comical heritage egg layers out to pasture to do what ducks have been doing on Long Island since the late 19th century: eating and making food.

Morawiec and Pinto are the new face of East End poultry farming. They raise their ducks, quail, partridge and chickens on pasture, contributing to the sustainable future of a business that has been as central to the culture and economy of Long Island as commercial fishing. But, like fishing, the poultry industry has seen its share of environmental and regulatory challenges and faced periods of boom and bust.

In 1899, Long Island was the growing center of duck farming in the United States, and Eastport was its capital. An advertisement placed in an industry journal that year by duck breeders R.B. and O.H. Dayton in the nearby hamlet of Remsenburg read: “Indian Runner Ducks, wonderfully prolific. Are rapid and easy growers. Handsome in appearance.”

The duck industry on Long Island had taken off after James Palmer, Esq., of Stonington, Connecticut, imported a flock of Chinese ducks known as Pekin in 1872. Soon local farmers started buying breeding stock from him, and the East End of Long Island, blessed with plenty of water for ducks to paddle around in and plenty of fish to feed them, became a paradise for poultry. When customers began to notice a fishy taste in the Long Island eggs and duck meat, growers responded by changing up the feed and charging more for the premium product long before “value-added” became a common marketing term.

In the early part of the 20th century, Hallock’s Atlantic Farm on the Speonk River was the largest duck farm in the world, producing a quarter of a million ducks in one year. Their tag line, “Hallock’s Celery Fed,” was a boast about the flavor and quality that was an important part of their brand until the farm was destroyed in the 1938 hurricane.

By the 1950s, Crescent Duck Farm had become one of the largest duck farms on the East End. This was a time when Long Island provided seven million birds annually, about two-thirds of U.S. duck production overall. Crescent Duck Farm’s owner, 60-year-old Douglas Corwin, comes from a family that first settled in Southold in the 1640s, farming and working mainly as carpenters for a couple of centuries before Corwin’s grandfather decided to raise Pekin ducks in 1908.

The series of federal reforms that culminated in the Clean Water Act began affecting the Long Island poultry business in the late ’50s, and, by 1972, presented significant challenges to the duck industry. Managing the excreta of ducks raised outdoors (ducks generate more waste than most other poultry) became virtually impossible for medium- or small-sized operations. Responding to these changes, the Corwins invested in waste treatment systems to comply with the federal and state regulations, buying up the local feed supplier to ensure their stock of high-quality feed.

“I make a million ducks a year in an industry that makes 80 million,” said Corwin. “I’m a pure niche player in an international business.” He and his sons, Blake and Pierce, both in their 30s, produce duck that is known for its flavor and meatiness. It is a mainstay at high-end restaurants such as the Four Seasons, in Manhattan. “I was at a food show once when David Bouley put his arm around me and said, ‘Thank you.’ ”

When the Long Island Duck Farmers Cooperative in Eastport was voted out of existence in 1987, almost two dozen Long Island duck farms closed, some relocating to Pennsylvania and midwestern states. It was two decades before second-career farmer Chris Browder and his wife, Holly, used land and a barn leased from the Peconic Land Trust to begin raising certified organic chickens for meat and eggs. Influenced by the innovative techniques of Joel Salatin at Polyface Farm in Virginia, Chris had raised a few chickens for meat while working as a farm apprentice at Garden of Eve in Riverhead, and when his chicken meat was snapped up immediately he had an “aha” moment: “I realized that there was no one doing pastured poultry on Long Island.”

In 2010, the Browders began to raise white and red broilers, birds bred to be superior foragers. In order to increase production from 1,000 birds a year to as many as 5,000, the Browders moved the farm to their own land in Mattituck and purchased a processing unit.

Chris Browder continued to research the East End poultry scene, returning repeatedly to Iacono Farm on Long Lane in East Hampton, where Anthony Iacono, the second generation of a chicken-farming family in operation since 1948, has reduced the distance from farm to table to a matter of yards. The Iaconos raise and process 10,000 chickens a year, employing knife skills that would be the envy of any Lower East Side butcher. In the family’s retail store, Anthony’s daughter Amanda, who works alongside her father, recently pointed out to a customer that it is possible to buy a bird too fresh to cook immediately. She advised the customer to wait 24 hours, since a chicken that was walking around earlier in the day is better to eat once the meat has relaxed.

Inspired by the Iacono family’s processing expertise, last year Chris Browder was able to boost his business, increasing his offerings of packaged legs, breasts and wings to include prepared foods such as stock, quiche and chicken potpie.

Browder’s Birds helped establish a new way forward for the East End poultry business by showing that pastured poultry can be the basis of a viable enterprise. “The stories you hear about the conventional chicken business [tens of thousands of birds raised in a single house] ... well, we need an alternative,” said Browder. “I realize it’s not for everyone because our price point is higher. But it turns out there are lots of people who want to eat chicken, but don’t want to eat that chicken. They want a chicken that is raised well, that is raised humanely.”

Abra Morawiec and Chris Pinto met as farm apprentices at Garden of Eve in 2012. Pinto was a farmhand at Fort Hill Farm in Connecticut, a well-respected, diversified operation with a large community-supported agriculture (CSA) system. Afterward, he worked in Alabama with a family of Messianic Jews in a tiny community near the Tennessee border, raising vegetables and livestock. Morawiec had tended 40 chickens and ducks and an acre of vegetables on her father’s farm in Warwick, New York, before serving in the Peace Corps in rural Mali.

For this pair of farmers, the path to love did not run straight. Morawiec and Pinto’s relationship got off to a rocky start when Pinto intervened in a dogfight on the farm and ended up with stitches in his thumb. As Morawiec later recalled, at the time she thought, “Who’s this jerk who got involved in a dogfight?” Then, the farmer at Garden of Eve asked them to compete for speed in picking crops. Pinto threw down the garden glove: “I bet I can pick my greenhouse faster than you can pick your greenhouse.” Morawiec, who had never worked on a commercial farm before, embraced the challenge and lost, but not by much.

Morawiec spent the next few seasons at Browder’s Birds. Every time she worked a farmers market, she had people asking for quail, guinea hens and heritage chickens—that is, hardy traditional breeds that enjoy a life on pasture. “There was obviously a need for this in the market,” she noted. “High-quality game birds and eggs just aren’t available.” By the summer of 2015, Pinto was building enclosures for the 100 pastured quail Morawiec intended to raise. Pinto readily admits that he had his doubts, but by then they were partners. “I have the vision, and Chris can take my vision and build it, give it realness,” Morawiec said.

The quail sold out immediately.

“We started from nothing,” Morawiec continued. “We had to rely on our relationships with other farmers.” In the beginning, they leased two acres from Phil Barbato at Biophilia Organic Farm in Jamesport, and once they had built their business over three years, the Peconic Land Trust offered them an 8.2- acre property and barn on County Road 48.

A major break for Feisty Acres came when GrowNYC assigned them a spot at the two largest Greenmarkets in the city, the one on Sundays at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, and the one on Wednesdays at Union Square in Manhattan. These heavily attended, year-round markets virtually guarantee a steady supply of customers during the colder months, when selling quail eggs on the East End can leave you lonely. “We are producing 2,000 quail eggs a week for Union Square and Grand Army Plaza, and we are having a problem keeping up with demand,” said Morawiec.

The city Greenmarkets have put Morawiec in touch with some of her most discerning and demanding customers, and they have spread the word about how much more delicious her pastured birds are than game birds raised indoors. “Lena, my very first customer at Union Square, bought guinea hens from us. Originally from Eastern Europe, she told her entire neighborhood and they all started coming. Joy, from Koreatown in Manhattan, started buying quail, and then turkeys, and she told everyone in her apartment building,” said Morawiec.

A handful of restaurants offer Feisty Acres birds, but they have to come visit the farm first, Morawiec added. “If not, they won’t understand why our birds cost what they cost.” One of the chefs who made the trek to Southold was Antoine Westermann, who was so impressed with the operation that his restaurant, Le Coq Rico (“the bistro of beautiful birds”) in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, started buying quail from Feisty Acres.

The day chef Westermann, a connoisseur of poultry, visited the farm was important for Morawiec and Pinto, but restaurants are not their primary customers. “Never have I had someone come up to me and say, ‘I had your bird in a restaurant,’ but I have had hundreds of people come up to me and say ‘I bought your bird at the market and it was absolutely delicious,’ ” said Morawiec. “One restaurant wanted hearts and livers for free, and I said absolutely not, there’s about a dozen Ukrainian women who will have my head. I will not be upsetting my Ukrainian customers; they’re paying $12 a pound for hearts and livers.”

This year, Feisty Acres will drop its USDA certified organic status. Morawiec cited price competition from industrial chicken farms that severely limit outside access for their birds but are still certified organic, while Feisty Acres protocols surpass them in all the ways that count for humanely producing wholesome and sustainable eggs and meat. Meanwhile, organic status would bar Feisty Acres from feeding their birds scraps and gleanings from local conventional farms, driving up costs and hindering their connection to the rest of the agricultural community.

Chris Browder didn’t think too much about the local history of poultry farming until his customers started telling him about it: “A number of times at different farmers markets, people have come up to me and said, my grandfather had a poultry farm out here.” In the decade since he and Holly have been in the business, he’s seen change. “I see what has transpired just since we started, the proliferation of people who are doing chicken in some form—Deep Roots, 8 Hands. Feisty, Catapano. It went from zero to seven or eight just on the North Fork."

Doug Corwin welcomes the relative newcomers to Long Island poultry farming. “I dare any of them to grow a duck better than I do. They’re never going to have my breeding stock. Still, they have a phenomenal product, and they add to the food culture that we have. I give them a lot of credit. It makes me smile that someone is doing something with the land. We are a Long Island agricultural community and we all want to see the same thing. I’m hoping this new generation will do well and push forward with us.”

Where to buy Long Island poultry:

BROWDER'S BIRDS: 4050 Soundview Ave., Mattituck; 631-477-6523, browdersbirds.com Chris and Holly Browder sell pastured chicken at Long Island farm stands and specialty stores, through their CSA and at the farm.

CRESCENT DUCK FARM: 10 Edgar Ave., Aquebogue; 631-722-8000, crescentduck.com The Corwins have owned and operated a duck farm since 1908, and produce one million proprietary-breed ducks indoors annually. They’re found at some restaurants and grocery and specialty stores.

IACONO FARM: 100 Long Lane, East Hampton; 631-324-1107, iaconofarm.com The Iacono family’s chicken farm (est. 1948) sells 10,000 freshly killed, indoor-raised chickens annually, year- round. Birds are butchered to order at the retail store on the farm.

MILOSKI'S POULTRY FARM: 4418 Middle Country Rd., Calverton; 631-727-0239, miloskispoultryfarm.com The Milowskis have raised poultry since 1946. Five thousand pasture-raised turkeys are sold annually, mostly the week before Thanksgiving, out of the family’s retail store. Other offerings include rotisserie ducks and kielbasa. Cash only.

FEISTY ACRES: 45375 County Rd. 48, Southold; feistyacres.comAbra Morawiec and Chris Pinto sell pasture-raised game birds, ducks and chickens at the Greenmarkets at Union Square and Grand Army Plaza in New York City, and through their CSA. They also sell at some of the larger East End markets, including Sag Harbor, during the summer.

By Charity Robey

Special to Newsday

Newsday, Feed Me- Q & A with Christie Brinkley

Published in Feed Me Magazine, January 2019 issue.