Persimmon Pudding

Fall is my favorite season here at Heritage Oak. The mornings are cool and crisp. As the sun rises, I frequently see a light fog sitting over the vineyards. It rained a little last month and now the native grasses have sprouted. Everywhere the ground is green again. It is good to be out from under the blanket of summer heat.

It is already mid-November but the afternoons are still sunny and warm. It’s as if the days don’t want to let summer go. We spend time getting equipment ready for storage, making repairs. This is also a great time to work with the soil. It is slightly moist from the early rains, but also loose and warm. We dig bulbs in the garden around the patio- tulips, iris, daffodils- and spread them into places they have never been. They will wake up in February and shout their color from an new vantage point.

The vines don’t agree with my pollyana outlook. The poor things are exhausted; leaves mottled, bronzed and dysfunctional from a loss of chlorophyll. Their burden of fruit is gone, but harvest left them battered. They look like they want to be left alone to rest.

And rest they will soon get. With the first heavy frosts of late fall and early winter, they will drop into deep slumber, shedding their leaves with the wind and rain. Then, with winter’s cold fully upon us and the vines dormant, we will enter the fields to prune canes and shape the coming year’s crop.

The wines have been made and have begun their metamorphosis: a transition where they begin as little else than fruit juice with alcohol in September to emerge in May as adolescent wines, full of hope and promise. During their sleep, I interrupt their solitude with racking and blending, and periodic micro-doses of potassium metabisulfite. They would like me to leave them alone, but I never do.

With the red wines resting in barrels, the white wines now become my focus. They must be stabilized for heat and cold and filtered for clarity, all the while protecting their fragile hue from oxygen, the dreaded beast.

This time of year, the bright spot in the landscape at Heritage Oak are the persimmon trees. We have two of them behind the winery belonging to the Japanese cultivar hachiya. Their leaves have begun to drop, revealing an abundant crop of fat, orange lobes. Shaped like apples with points, they hang from the branches on short, thick woody stem. With the coolness of fall, they magically ripen and their flesh turns from hard and un-giving to supple, soft, sweet, almost gelatinous. But it is the color and texture of the skin that is most amazing: deep orange with twinges of red, smooth and shiny. There is nothing like them. Nothing in the fall beats the jubilance of a persimmon tree full of fruit.

As they ripen, the birds find them. Flocks of cedar waxwings come through devouring the sweet pulp. We pick them too. People come into the tasting room and see the persimmon trees out back and ask what they are. They go home with persimmons in a bag and recipes in their pockets. Food is always a great thing to share.

Cooking with persimmons is a tradition in my family. My Grandmother Hoffman had a tree in her yard and each year she would make persimmon cookies and persimmon bread. My favorite though has always been persimmon pudding. For me, it is just as important to Thanksgiving dinner as a turkey. Especially when it has a dollop of hard sauce on it.

Persimmons are amazing because, after they have turned color,  you can pick them any time you want and keep them forever! It is the only fruit that you completely control when it ripens; something you do by simply putting it in the freezer. When you want to use the persimmon to bake something, you just take it out to thaw. The freezing/thawing process takes it from not-quite-ready-to-go to perfectly ripe. I’ve never understood exactly why this is, but the good news is that you can keep them in your freezer as long as you want. Persimmon pudding for Easter is a great concept!

Here is my grandmother’s recipe. If you are interested, we still have persimmons on the tree. Stop by. I’ll loan you my clippers.

Grandma Hoffman’s Persimmon Pudding

 1 cup granulated sugar

2 tablespoons melted butter

1 large egg, well beaten

1 cup flour

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

½ teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 cup milk

1 cup sieved persimmon pulp

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

½ cup chopped walnuts

½ cup raisins

In a bowl, beat the sugar and melted butter into the beaten eggs. Sift together the flour, cinnamon, salt, baking powder and baking soda. Blend into the sugar and egg mixture, and then blend in the milk and persimmon pulp. Stir in the nuts and raisins. Pour the batter into a lightly greased mold or covered dish placed in a pan of hot water to about half the depth of the pudding mold. Bake at 350 degrees F. for approximately 1 hour until it tests done with a straw or knife.

Serve warm with Hot Lemon Sauce, Brandy Sauce, Hard Sauce or whipped cream. The pudding can be prepared several days ahead and reheated lightly covered.

For another recipe and lots of photos visit “Persimmon Murder“.

 

A small grove of trees

When I was a child back in the fifties, my Uncle Verne operated a hog farm on the property occupied now by the vineyards of Heritage Oak Winery. Many of the old out buildings here, such as the silo, are relics of that era. 

Though the operation was large and covered many acres, the focal point was the vicinity just behind where the winery stands today.  There were two farrowing houses where the sows delivered and nursed their young.  I remember it always being dark in there, with heat lamps over each pen to keep the small pigs warm.  Down the road from the farrowing houses were the boar pens.  There enormous male pigs lay about all day in moist earth waiting for an opportunity to put sperm, manufactured in half gallon-sized testicles, to work.  My uncle also had a feed processing facility.  Grain was received, stored, then ground and bagged to be used here or sold to other hog farmers. 

At it height of production, it was a size-able operation with perhaps hundreds of hogs.  Behind the buildings, where our 8 acre block of Sauvignon Blanc field stands today, was an open field where hogs roamed.  Other hogs were kept down in the bottomland. 

There is a grove of oak trees in the bottomland.  It lies on a small rise at the base of the bluff.  The narrow road that descends from the upland splits as it approaches, passing around the grove on two sides.  There are eleven trees standing, all very large with massive trunks.  Most of them are Valley Oaks with one Live Oak.  For me, this small grove of trees has always been a special place.

One of my first memories of the grove was of the pig pens down there and the little tee pee shaped shelters that were scattered about the pens for the pigs to go into.  I suppose it was a good location for the pens as the trees provided necessary shade for the hogs.  Hogs do not have the ability to perspire and therefore have difficulty regulating their body temperature.  I guess a nice shady grove of trees would be a perfect spot to keep them.

I remember sitting in the shady grove by one of the oddly shaped shelters one summer day a few years later.  I was older then, and the hogs were no longer kept down there.  Being eleven years old with little else to do, I began to carve my name into an old wood board one of the shelters was made of.  “Tom H was here'” I carved.  Then dated it: something-something 1962.  My uncle found that board when the pens were torn down and kept it for years in his barn on Dustin Road.  He was going to give it to me someday, he told me later, but it burned along with the rest of his barn before he’d had a chance.

I spent many an afternoon in the grove as I grew up.  There was a colony of ground squirrels that lived in burrows among the roots of the trees, so the grove was a perfect place to hunt.  Ground squirrels are fairly organized, as critters go, and it is hard to sneak up on them.  One squirrel, usually a large male, will take the job of sentry.  He will climb a fence post or sit on a stump where he has a view point.  If he sees danger, he barks a warning and all the others dive for cover. As long as the sentry is quiet, the other squirrels come out to forage of food or play.  That’s right, play.  If you have watched squirrels like I have, you would know that young squirrels can get pretty, well, squirrely. 

What I’d learned was if you are real still, the sentry won’t notice you.  It’s like you are invisible.  That’s the secret about hunting ground squirrels.  You can’t move.  So I’d sit with my back against a tree trunk and wait: knees bent, elbows on knees, arms propping up my loaded single shot .22 caliber rifle.  Because you need to be motionless, you hold this position until you can get a shot in.  As you can tell, I’ve done this a lot. 

After I’d shoot a squirrel, I’d pull off the tip of its tail and stuff it into my pocket.  When I was done for the day, I’d walk a mile back to where my grandparents lived and pull the tail tips out and count them.  Grandpa would pay me fifteen cents a squirrel.

A few years later, maybe I was in high school by then, I remember going down to the grove.  Amid the high pitched sound of chain saw motors, I saw piles of firewood.  Several men were sawing while others operated a gas powered splitter. Grandpa was standing there in the dust and summer sun in the middle of all this racket.  I asked him why he was cutting down the trees.  “Money,” he replied.  “Fire wood is twenty-five bucks a cord.  There’s probably several thousand dollars here.” 

This bothered me.  Some how I’d always thought the trees belonged to everyone and had never imagined them as a commodity that anyone had the right to sell.  I went home and told my parents what he was doing.  They too were concerned.  My dad called his sister and I talked to my cousin Bob.  His mom was my grandparents’ only daughter, and, as I learned, the son of a daughter can put pressure where the the son of a son, like me, can not. The next thing I heard was that the tree cutting would stop.  That was a pretty big victory because my grandpa  was not the kind to backed down from a position.  The idea of saving a grove of trees for future generations to enjoy was pretty radical.  And to stop a stubborn man like him with a nostalgic notion like that was nothing short of amazing.

Today, the grove still thrives.  Over the years, it has served as a picnic spot, a camp site for Boy Scouts, and always a place to rest from the hot sun.  Tall cottonwoods, willows and a few young oaks have grown up in the places where Grandpa had cut a few down.  The many branches and canopies of leaves are home to countless birds, from the tiniest Bushtits and Yellow Throated Warblers to mighty Red Tail Hawks and Great Horned Owls.  And, yes, the ground squirrels are still there.  There’s one now.  Shhhh…… don’t move.

Hummingbird Central

There is something about this piece of land here at Heritage Oak that attracts an impressive variety of wildlife. It has a lot to do with the presence of the Mokelumne River, which boarders the property for a mile on the south and south-eastern sides, and our twenty acres of native oak woodland.  Wildlife is so prolific here that one Mothers’ Day a few years back, I spotted and listed over fifty species of birds alone.

For me, however, the most incredible wildlife population is not along the river or in the oak woodland.  It is the hummingbirds found on the patio at the winery itself.

  This time of year, in mid-July, we have up to four species.  The most common one is the Black-chinned Hummingbird.  He’s a feisty little guy with a green back and black throat.  Because the Black-chinneds nest around here, the majority of the hummers we have right now are their young, like the one shown on the left above.  Anna’s Hummingbirds are also frequent visitors.  They are a little larger and have green on their backs and wings. Though they nest here, they are out numbered by the Black-chinneds by about ten to one. 

The other species we have here in July is the Rufous/Allens’s hummingbird.  These are migrants and are here for just a few weeks.  They stop by for a break enroute from summer breeding grounds in Alaska, Canada and the California coast to their favorite winter vacation spots in Central and South America. They arrive tired, hungry and with absolutely no patience for my lazy, go-nowhere Black-chinneds.

Carmela has done a wonderful job with the garden.  She seeks out plants that attract hummers and butterflies.  However, it is my job to take care of the feeding stations.  The population has grown to the extent that I employ four of the 30 ounce Perky Pet feeders in separate locations about 10 yards apart, and this time of year the birds are emptying three of these feeders a day. ( I estimate our hummingbird population to be around thirty birds on the assumption that each bird consumes about three ounces a day for a total of 90 ounces.) It is part of my morning ritual: make a cup of espresso, read the paper, mix up a batch of nectar for three feeders. I put one cup of sugar to every 30 ounces of hot, hot water, then stir until it is all dissolved.

This is the kind of hobby that takes space and effort. Our eleven feeders occupy an entire shelf in the kitchen.  I need a large supply because some are always dirty, some are in the washer, some are hanging on the patio and I need to have some to replace empties. Everyday I have to tend to my feeders and spend a fair amount of time washing, rinsing, sterilizing, mixing, filling clean ones and replacing  the empty ones.  When shopping, we look for sugar on sale and stock up.

Visitors to the tasting room get a kick out of watching our hummingbirds zip backand forth as they chase each other with threatening screeches and angry chirps.  Occasionally they launch into aerial displays, diving in wide arcs at breakneck speeds while coming perilously close to the ground.  On a pleasant afternoon, people frequently buy a bottle of wine, borrow some glasses and sit on the patio just to enjoy the entertainment.  I find it ironic that people find it peaceful to watch a these tiny, hostile, impatient critters, whose lives are anything but peaceful, zoom about on wings that beat 80 to 120 times per second.

Our hummingbirds are such a fixture around here that we have an event every other Friday evening based around them.  It goes from the end of May until the first of August. Carmela makes dessert, I play the piano, and people come to sip wine, watch the hummingbirds battle it out while the sun goes down.  We call it Wine, Music and Hummingbirds.  Not a poetic name, but it fits.  Wine and dessert are $5 each. Music, sunset and feathered entertainment are free.

Blackberries are ripe!

This past weekend we had a Hoffman Family reunion here at the winery.  About 60 people from all over came to the event.  It was great to see all the aunts, uncles, cousins, their children and their children’s children. After lunch, most of them went down to the beach with the intention of floating down the river and playing baseball out in the meadow. But almost everyone got side tracked by the  blackberries. It was fun watching them get buried in the blackberry bushes while they gorged themselves.

Picking blackberries has always been a summer tradition for me.  One of my fondest childhood memories of my Grandma Hoffman was joining her to pick them one summer morning.  We started out early in the morning and walked out past the barn and corral where the sheep were kept, and turned south down the lane that led toward the bottomland.  I remember her wearing a wide brimmed straw hat that tied under her chin with a scarf.  She took with her a pair of gardening gloves and I soon learned why.  The berries were growing along the fence line there in great profusion.  She chattered away as she picked, instructing me on how to go about the task.  I’m sure most of the berries I conquered ended up in my mouth.  I remember being somewhat intimidated by the task, but Grandma knew what it was all about. In no time we had enough for a pie. 

That was the start of a long relationship with blackberries.  They were also part of my life as a teenager.  We lived in town then, but the family farm was just a few miles away.  I remember using the promise of the sweet, savory fruit to entice any girl I happened to fancy to join me on an outting.  If I got turned down after mentioning the need for long pants and sleeve shirts to keep the bugs and stickers off, I figured she probably wasn’t the girl for me anyway.

As an adult, I’m proud to say that my two fine sons were raised on blackberry pie.  Fresh fruit pie is a tradition in our family and we eat it anytime of day.  We’re talking scratch here.  We’ve got an unspoken rule that says no store-bought crusts are allowed in the house. Apple pie is great, but when  blackberry season arrives, I’m the first one out the door, bucket in hand.  I use a cherry picking bucket with a harness that holds five of those little green plastic berry baskets. That way I can use both hands to get the fruit.  I go armed with clippers to get the extra canes out of the way, and wear plenty of clothing.  Grandma Hoffman taught me well.

If you happen to read this before the end of July, come out and help yourself.  Stop by the tasting room and I’ll tell you how to get to the best spots.

Thanks to my son, Robby, for the photographs. He’s a pro, literally. Visit his website at www.roberthphotography.com for more of his stuff.