Visiting dozens of ‘country freak’ communes in the 1970s, this woman made an amazingly now cookbook
Lucy Horton’s ‘Country Commune Cooking’ is at home in any farmer’s market today
The worms add protein, Lucy Horton was told as she pressed apple cider at the Black Flag commune in New Hampshire in 1971. She was there for a “houseraising,” a gathering of members of the Black Flag and neighboring communes — like those from Milkweed Hill in Vermont, who’d slept in the barn the night before — along with local farmers and a “nimble elderly carpenter.”
The party had actually started the night before, when one member’s parents arrived from Queens with 200 hot dogs and a vat of horseradish mustard. It continued into the morning, when Black Flaggers cracked brown rice in the grain mill and served it for breakfast with honey, nutmeg, cinnamon, currants, and cream from their cow. As the group triumphantly raised the framework of the barn-beam house, Lucy worked the old-fashioned cider press, feeding it the “wormy, bruised windfalls” from the commune’s land to prepare for a traditional harvest buffet set for midday. The Black Flag was just one of 43 communes Horton visited that year, as she hitchhiked across the country collecting recipes. It was an odyssey that culminated in the joyful 1972 collection Country Commune Cooking.
The spiral-bound cookbook, with lovely line illustrations by Judith St. Soleil, is sadly long out of print. But the principles it espouses — the tenets of what Warren Belasco in Appetite for Change called a “countercuisine” — have permeated mainstream culture. The ingredients showcased in Country Commune Cooking have nearly all become supermarket staples — or have made a recent comeback as the natural food movement gains ground once again. Horton credits Alice Waters and the many others who elevated natural cooking for bringing it to the masses, “to the betterment of our fractured nation.”
In 1971, Lucy Horton was a 26-year-old with long, middle-parted blond hair and round teashade glasses who liked to talk about food “the way bikers like to talk about motorcycles and astrology freaks about rising signs.” She already had quite a bit of life under her belt. A graduate of Bryn Mawr, Horton had taught at a school in the South Bronx, waited tables at the famed Max’s Kansas City, and worked as a live-in maid and cook for a wealthy woman on Park Avenue. But what she really wanted to do was write a cookbook.
The idea actually came from Horton’s friend Robert Houriet, who had just written Getting Back Together, a tour of American communes and a meditation on the communal way of life. (Horton, then staying with Houriet and his wife Mary in their Vermont cabin, had typed Houriet’s notes for a draft of that book.) When Horton mentioned she’d like to write a cookbook, Houriet suggested she visit communes, too. In contrast to sensational portrayals of communes as dominated by sex or kooky spirituality, food was truly the raison d’être of many. In Country Commune Cooking, Horton writes of a “New Age of Food Consciousness” dawning. A commitment to whole, unprocessed, non-chemically fertilized foods had been evident in the food co-ops springing up throughout the country. Now, young people had gathered to live out their vision of a more equitable, authentic life, and growing food was at the core of the experience. Horton describes with openness the way communards incorporated seasonal ceremonies modeled on those of Native Americans, whom she calls the “heroes of country freaks.”
Horton set off in 1971, beginning in the Bay Area, and traveling over the course of months to British Columbia, down to New Mexico, through the Midwest, and through Canada back to Vermont, where she wrote her manuscript and tested the recipes she’d acquired on the Houriets’ wood stove.
“My travels went extremely well,” says Horton now. “Amazingly so, when I look back on it. I was welcomed everywhere, showered with helpful recipes, and given names of more places to go.” She visited 43 communes in all — places with names like Breadloaf, Hog Farm, and Prairie Dog Village. Some were focused simply on self-reliance; others sold bread or the produce they grew. Milkweed Hill supported itself “by a candlemaking operation carried out in a geodesic dome.”
The food itself is wildly varied. Horton’s book does lend credence to some of the hippie stereotypes. For instance, she says she loves bulgur wheat so much she could “live on it.” The chapter on “Cereals and Pancakes” begins, “I’ve selected three out of eight recipes for granola.” There’s also a lot of stir fry (Horton calls tamari soy sauce the “sine qua non of commune cooking”), as well as curries, stews, and other one-pot wonders. Vegetables abound. Grains were the other pillar of the commune diet, “often bought in bulk through food co-ops run by local longhairs” and “flavored with a free hand by stoned culinary adventurers.”
Horton notes that the mammoth pots of vegetable-driven fare sometimes suffer from a dearth of flavor. She refers to “underseasoned pea soup” and “rancid oil” as “major commune problems.”
But the recipes are unique and international, a melting-pot mélange of influences from all over the globe — from Ukraine to Tibet, Mexico to Hungary, Israel to Sweden. And Horton’s stories and her brainy but light-hearted prose are wildly entertaining and infuse the recipes with a playful spirit. One, for Lisa’s Super Optional Avocado Dressing, is so named because the avocado itself is not essential. From Mona of the Motherlode commune comes a good recipe for Kremsils, or matzo meal pancakes (Horton notes that some Jewish mothers of communards sent matzo meal during Passover, when Jews aren’t supposed to eat leavened bread.) On a visit to another commune during her birthday, one of the women makes a whole wheat cake topped with honey and strawberries to celebrate, but it almost doesn’t get eaten because of a proposal by another member that the entire commune embark on a days-long fast. Fortunately, the proposal is voted down, and the commune’s denizens sing “Happy Birthday” to Lucy and eat the cake. A visit to the True Light Beavers commune in Woodstock, New York soured when one of the Beavers turned to Horton and said roughly, “Do you ever stop talking? You talk more than any chick I ever met.” (She still made off with a recipe for Sprout Salad.)
Of course the centrality of food is not only about sustenance but about the nourishing rituals that surround its preparation and consumption. Some of the recipes Horton shares are steeped in an understanding that the food isn’t all, that it is largely gathering itself that has meaning. “Get everyone together and get a good feeling between you,” begins the recipe for Brotherhood Spirit in Flesh Soup. “Work out anything and everything that lies unexpressed.” The soup calls for barley and pinto beans, squash, carrots and tomatoes, some kelp powder, miso, and salt and pepper. It was served along with brown rice and millet, to the residents of a Western Massachusetts commune.
It’s easy to feel nostalgia for the world Horton chronicles, even if you weren’t there in the first place. There’s a warmth and coziness to the dwellings she describes, and the rituals at the center of communal living all radiate with intention, with an aspiration toward abiding calm, love, and togetherness.
Furthermore, these pastoral scenes are motivated by political commitment. Unlike many of the “green” wellness trends clogging our social media feeds, commune cooking wasn’t about trying to sell anything. In fact, it was inspired by a renunciation of the marriage of food and capitalism. To a great extent, it involved adaptability, ingenuity and sacrifice.
Throughout Horton’s book, there are reminders that life on a commune is hard, sometimes grueling. Against the notion that hippies sought merely to lazily “drop out,” Horton offers a more complex portrait, of diverse groupings of individuals working hard to homestead and live peacefully and respectfully together. Horton recalls that to a one, they were inventive. “I did not run into dreary, rigid types,” she tells me. “Those who clung to the old ways did not go to the country and join communes — creative people did,” and that spirit came across in the food they prepared.
Some, she notes, were forced into creativity and nonconformity by the draft. Others, like runaways, were conscripted into communal experiments by different forces. At one point, Horton mentions to the dinner circle at the Atlantis commune that she’s nervous to travel to the Crow Farm commune because of “its reputation as a gang of lecherous beer drinkers.” The girl beside her says, “You can go with me. I live there sometimes. I want to go anyway, and I don’t like to hitchhike alone because I’m only twelve.” It’s a reminder that the commune is far from an idyll. As a member of the Breadloaf commune in New Mexico writes to Horton, “Sometimes it gets crowded, sometimes lonely.”
Then again, there still remains much comfort to be drawn from Country Commune Cooking, not only because it evokes the past, but because it resonates in the present. A president in office with no moral compass, a war raging half a world away, and a population divided by injustice but encouraged to stanch the misery by buying more stuff? Maybe it’s time to head back to land once again, and make a giant pot of soup.
