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 Entertainment | Restaurants & Dining | March 2007 
The Lettuce Lady's Farewell
 Peggy Grodinsky - Houston Chronicle
| | Worker John O'Dell has just picked a basket of tango lettuce in Camille Waters' salad garden beside Patrenella's Cafe in the Heights. (Craig Hartley/Chronicle) |
Higuera Blanca, Mexico - Camille Waters is at the wheel of her Toyota Tundra, playing tour guide. She apologizes for the sere, though beautiful, countryside; the rain will transform it a few months hence.
Waters rails against burgeoning billboards and marvels that the breakneck development she thought she left behind in Houston is overtaking this tiny village where she has planted both herself and a garden, and where she is building a new life.
Until very recently, the road to Higuera Blanca, in the state of Nayarit up the Pacific Coast from Puerto Vallarta, was dirt and barely passable. Now it's a sleek two-lane highway. In a section where incongruous, bright-white streetlights have just been installed, Waters interrupts her patter and mutters, "Damn." She is scrutinizing a withered potted palm, a scrap of landscaping the road crew seems to have abandoned. She meant, but forgot, to put a gallon of water in her truck to give it a cooling drink.
From pug dogs to palms to forgotten heirloom seeds, the feisty, free-spirited Waters has spent a lifetime nurturing living things. Houston foodies likely remember her as the Lettuce Lady, or sometimes the Lettuce Queen. Thirteen years ago, she planted a seed in Houston's fine-dining scene, literally and metaphorically, growing heirloom lettuces as fine, wild and delicate as fairy fixings and selling them to local chefs. The dozen or so heavyweight restaurants that have bought from her over the years include Cafe Annie, Quattro, Mark's American Cuisine, Mockingbird Bistro and Rainbow Lodge. Some note her name on their menus.
On April 1, Waters, 60, will close her Houston garden and host her final Garden Party, an annual event that benefits the Chefs Collaborative, Urban Harvest and Pug Rescue of Southeast Texas. Outlandish garden hats and gourmet dishes incorporating Waters' greens will be featured attractions.
"She opened the door for a lot of people who are doing farmers markets today, (for) bringing great product to your back door," chef Mark Cox said. "She got the ball going on (eating) local. She was one of the first to say, `I can grow the product here in Houston.' "
While Houston is no San Francisco - a city where headlining exquisite regional produce on fine-restaurant menus is de rigueur - a small network of "boutique farmers" supply Houston's best chefs with locally grown produce and sell directly to consumers at public markets. This reflects a national movement toward eating locally, organically, seasonally and sustainably. Here in Houston, Waters was a pioneer, if not the pioneer; her ideas and example have helped the growers who have followed her down the garden path.
Southeast Texas roots
Waters was raised by her grandmother in Genoa, "way out in the country then, on the old Galveston Highway." It was an Eden-esque existence of milk straight from the cow, vegetables from the garden, warm eggs from the hens and canned goods that her grandmother, "the best cook who ever lived," put up. "Later on, I discovered that we were poor as dirt. But what a rich childhood."
She attended high school in Bellaire and at 18, married a man richer, more cultured and much older than she. The marriage ended after five years, whereupon Waters did what any self-respecting 23-year-old bohemian in 1969 might have: She opened a vegetarian restaurant, the first in the state.
The Natural Child, set in a ramshackle house on Montrose Boulevard, was "the pinnacle of hippiedom" with stained glass, peasant-blouse-clad waitresses, brown rice and steamed vegetables, alongside a bawdy fruit plate involving an upright banana.
"Hell, no, I didn't have a business plan," Waters said. "It was my equivalent of running away to join the circus. It took me a year, exactly a year, and then I sold it."
In the next two decades, Waters traveled, waitressed, worked in regional theater, planned solstice celebrations ("Let me tell you, if you ever want to get 1,000 weirdos together, do a free event at 5 a.m. on a Sunday") and became the go-to gal for restaurateurs hoping to open eateries in Montrose.
In the early 1990s, she planted her first commercial garden. Intrigued by the market-garden movement elsewhere, she had a gut feeling that Houston was ready. For Waters, who has dabbled in astrology, gut feelings are market research. She knew local chefs and understood that she'd have to avoid deliveries during lunch service, be reliable, sell something the chefs couldn't otherwise get, know her products through and through and never sell less than the best.
"If it's 99 percent perfect, we won't sell it," says her current garden manager, Mary Carol Swearingen. "We want (our produce) to be visually and palatably - is that a word? - perfect."
Waters found a slip of land on Westheimer behind the Oak Farms Dairy, just east of Shepherd. From the start, she had a knack for persuading owners to let her plant on vacant lots inside the Loop, often returning the favor with greens. She used raised beds in pleasing, red-green checkerboard patterns, gardens so pretty that owners were soon inviting her in.
"I started planting things that sounded good to me," Waters said. "I always aimed toward salad greens. The idea was that salad greens are sexy. I understand them from seed to plate. From Day One, I've sold every single scrap of everything I could grow."
Her methods weren't always orthodox. One year, she tried a "chicken tractor" to rid beds of a bug infestation, loading a couple of chickens borrowed from the Wabash Feed Store into a cage and rolling it through the infected beds. "It was a lot of trouble, but it was so hysterical. It was entertainment."
Another time, when she relocated a garden, "I was so afraid that the garden spirits lived in the soil that I hired a backhoe and a dump truck, and I took the dirt. Honey, that's an expensive thing to do. The next time I had to leave a garden space, I just said, `OK, you garden spirits, come on. We're leaving now.' "
At first, Waters worked alone - sowing, weeding, watering, harvesting, washing, mixing and delivering the greens. Wearing embroidered thrift-shop jeans and funky sunglasses, pug in tow, she drove up to restaurants in her distinctive art car, stenciled headlights to tailpipe with lizards, dragonflies, flowers and frogs. She harvested in the morning and delivered by lunch.
Waters pored over seed catalogs and carried bags of unusual finds back from trips to Holland, Germany and Italy. She planted oddities that even chefs had rarely heard of - burnet, oxalis, lolla rossa, calendula - and offered a mix so good and varied that she quickly earned their respect.
"Once I came back from Italy all excited about some incredible, succulent arugula I'd eaten there," Cafe Annie proprietor Robert Del Grande said. "And then Camille shows up at the back door, and she's got some!"
In Mexico, she plucked a leaf from that same wild Sicilian arugula for me to taste. Extraordinarily peppery and alive, it put its supermarket cousin to shame. About the plant's dime-size, edible yellow flowers, Waters said, "You put this flower in your mouth, and your mouth explodes yellow."
Listening to the expert and passionate Waters talk about her greens is almost as good as eating them.
"One of my favorites is an American heirloom called a buckhorn plaintain. It's also called minutina. The minutina looks like a tiny little staghorn fern. It has a very subtle flavor, but it's very rich. It's the sweet side of nutty as opposed to the spicy side, which arugula is. And the little flowers are delicious. I adore it."
"I also really, really like very young, tender mustard-green leaves. I grow one called `green frill' that's better-looking than the ordinary one. Most lettuces are more or less soft. In a salad mix, I want softness, but I want some crunch, too. I want a feast for the eyes as well as a feast for the palate. I want the perfect balance of different textures and something sharp to balance something sweet."
"I also use wild ingredients. Chickweed is delicious. It's one of the most invasive weeds, and it's one of the best things I grow. It tastes like baby green peas. There is also a wild oxalis that my grandmother used to call `rabbit grass.' It has a flavor similar to sorrel, but to my palate it's a cut above."
"I don't (grow) microgreens, and I don't do baby lettuce because it tastes to me like it's been pre-chewed. My lettuces have always been more or less pubescent lettuces. Of course, I've always used flower petals. I use whole Johnny-jump-ups. I use whole rococo pansies, because they are the right scale for the plate and have a frilly little edge."
A paying hobby
At the peak of her business, Waters operated four gardens half the year (in the Houston area it's too hot to grow lettuce in summer), with eight employees and a dozen clients. Like her fit-on-a-fork salad greens, her business stayed small.
"I wanted my hands in it. I always wanted to be really, personally connected. That was the whole point. That's where the pleasure is for me."
This year, her greens sell for $11.50 per pound, "pricey but worth it. I wouldn't say I made a living," she said. "It was a very profitable hobby - let's put it that way."
On vacation in Mexico six years ago, Waters met Pepe, a handsome younger man who was captaining a whale-watching boat. They hit it off. A year later, she bought two hectares (five acres) inland in Higuera Blanca, in part to be near him, and began spending time there. The two are still together.
"At this point in my life I need to concentrate on my life, and my life now is here," she said over lunch, culled from her garden, on the vine-covered porch of her snug, sunny, welcoming cottage. The Pacific glimmered in the distance. Fist-size bees buzzed in and out of a cascade of purple-flowered thunbergia. Waters' e-mail address, a pun on paradise, seemed no exaggeration.
At Waters' last remaining commercial garden in Houston, adjacent to Patrenella's Cafe in the Heights, a week of unusually high temperatures in November turned the lettuce bitter, so she wouldn't sell it. She pulled up and replanted. Next came hail. In three minutes, three weeks of work was wiped out. Waters had long intended to uproot after the growing season; the ruinous weather sealed her decision.
"Another thing is, I might be able to take the salad mix to another level, but I don't think so. I think I got it to the best of my ability."
"God, I'm going to miss it," she added.
The feeling is mutual. "What now?" said Del Grande in a comment echoed by other chefs. "We'll all feel kind of lonesome for a while."
In her new home, Waters plans to eat what she grows or give it to friends. A partial inventory includes tomatoes, okra, radishes, basil, sugar snaps, pea tendrils, grapefruit, star fruit, jackfruit. She's also got her eye on Silver Queen corn, which, she has read, is a fine host for cuitlacoche, a highly prized, edible fungus. But as we approach a bed of feathery, unusual-looking cilantro on a garden perambulation, her eye gleams, and she relates a new business scheme.
"I took a sample to AgroGourmet," a Puerto Vallarta company that buys and sells organic produce to restaurants and retail. "I don't have enough to sell them now, but that" - she points to an empty crescent-shaped bed - "could be a moon full of cilantro."
On the road again, we pass the cast-off potted palm, now notably perkier. Waters watered it earlier and has decided to "rescue" it; it'll be happier in her garden, anyway.
As we zip on, I ask if she's related to Alice Waters, the internationally celebrated founder of Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, Calif., who is often credited with revolutionizing American food. The two are about the same age, and their full-of-flavor, straight-from-the-garden philosophies are uncannily similar.
No, Waters answers, and yes, she's gotten the question "a lot." She laughs a big, hearty Texas laugh. "That was always my goal - for somebody to ask Alice Waters if she was related to me."
HEIRLOOM LETTUCE WITH BLOOD ORANGES, MANDARINS, GOAT CHEESE AND ROASTED, CANDIED PINE NUTS IN HONEY-BASIL VINAIGRETTE
This recipe is adapted from one by chef Mark Cox of Mark's American Cuisine. You can substitute another good lettuce mix.
Scant 1/3 cup pine nuts
2 tablespoons honey
1/4 teaspoon paprika
6 to 7 cups Camille Waters' heirloom mixed greens
2 blood oranges, sectioned
3 mandarins, sectioned
1 recipe Honey-Basil Vinaigrette (recipe follows)
6 ounces goat cheese, grated
Preheat oven to 300 degrees. On a cookie sheet, toast the pine nuts until golden. Watch carefully — they burn easily. Toss the pine nuts in a bowl with the honey and paprika. Set aside.
To make the salad, toss the greens with the citrus sections and just enough dressing to lightly coat, reserving a bit of dressing to decorate the plate. Place a handful of greens in the center of each of 6 round plates. Scatter the cheese and pine nuts over the greens. Add a few drops of vinaigrette around the salad on the plate.
Makes 6 servings.
HONEY-BASIL VINAIGRETTE
2 tablespoons tarragon Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon apple juice
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
2 tablespoons honey vinegar or champagne vinegar
1 tablespoon honey
8 large fresh basil leaves
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and ground black pepper to taste
Place the mustard, juice, vinegars, honey and basil in a blender. Purée for 15 seconds. Reduce the speed and slowly dribble the olive oil in until the dressing is emulsified. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
peggy.grodinsky@chron.com |
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