In memoriam: Leslie Land

With her recipe for oatmeal-hazelnut cookies

Leslie Land, 1947 - 2013, with prized rhubarb

It’s a little late to offer a tribute to my old friend and colleague Leslie Land, who died almost exactly ten years ago, in August 2013, after a long and brutal struggle with a cancer that finally crushed her small but valiant body. Perhaps because it’s her tenth-year anniversary, Leslie has been much in my mind lately.

It might also be because she was a champion gardener, of vegetables and ornamentals alike, with flourishing gardens in her two widely separated homes, in Cushing on the coast of Maine and in the Hudson Valley town of Clinton Corners, and I’ve been struggling with my garden lately and wishing she were still here to give me advice. But not just a gardener, not just a cook (“just”???), she was a champion forager too and, with her husband Bill Bakaitis, a mycologist and a salt-water fisherman, she found plenty to add to her table and her pantry. I think the last meal I had with Leslie, in the little house in Cushing that she had converted from an abandoned garage, was a braised whole sea bass that Bill had caught, preceded by a creamy soup of wild mushrooms (mostly black trumpets, in my recollection), and served of course with whatever raw and braised provender came from her exploratory vegetable plots. Exploratory meaning that’s where one year, for instance, she grew a dozen different varieties of red sweet peppers, just to determine what the differences were in flavor and keeping qualities.

Leslie was like that—always in search of new information, new tastes to explore, new ways of doing things, and yet with an ingrained respect for the old ways too. For a while she was a gardening columnist for the New York Times (I like to think I had a hand in that appointment), and later she was food and gardening editor for Yankee magazine, but really her passion and her intelligence were expressed right in her own gardens, whether in Maine or New York, and in her own kitchens, ditto. Here’s what I said about her at the time of her death: “She was a tiny little slip of a thing, but she knew what she believed in, and if she didn’t know it, she researched it until she was able to say something about it. She was determined to find it out and then let the rest of us know. That was a reason, I think, why people respected her so much.”

Leslie’s website is still up and active and Bill occasionally contributes something to it in the way of a recollection. You can experience her strong personality by taking a look at htpps://leslieland.com.