Christmas in Vermont, 1976

I'm looking out high over Central Park, on a shining day watching the children scudding down the little hills on their sledges, and what with their ear muffs and parkas and bulging snow pants, they look like characters in a Bruegel landscape seen through the wrong end of a telescope.

I must say that crisp snow and a cloudless day do wonders for New York, making us believe for a little time that this is not a city wracked with problems and might even be called, briefly, by the rather fatuous name the former Mayor Lindsay tried to give to it, 'Fun City'. By the way, this delusion was helped, a day or two after Christmas when the Mayor and the Governor of New York State went down to the island retreat of President-elect Carter in Georgia and got from him the forthright promise, I quote, 'Bankruptcy is not a viable alternative for New York City and we have eliminated that as a possibility for the future'. Mayor Beame and Governor Carey came bouncing back to New York as jolly as the Bruegel Fathers of the Bruegel kids in the park.

Well, I myself spent a four-day Christmas with daughter in northern Vermont, and New York, even with its fresh layer of snow, is still as strange to me as, I suppose, London would be to a man just down from the Highlands of Scotland or, maybe I should say, a man from Greenland.

When I flew out of here over a week ago, New York was bright but there wasn't a smidgeon of snow. Yet, by the time we were flying 200 miles to the north, over Boston, every lake and pond was a white rectangle and the trees were as stiff and leafless as a forest of broomsticks. And the towns we flew over were collections of little wooden boxes planted in a child's sandbox. And then the snows came in, filling the valleys and fringing the mountains and then smearing them, and by the time the pilot was banking over the snow-capped evergreens, the only bare land you could see were the federal highways, these long, curving ribbons of cement, snaking through a planet of snow.

And when you're not used to it, it's always a shock to get out of the plane up there and feel that somebody's slapped you in the eyes with a towel. This is simply the sudden adjustment to the blinding light. On my light meter, it registered F-16, a little more, at one-hundredth of a second. Well, I went padding toward the tiny airport, taking deep breaths of oxygen as sharp as ammonia, and wondering how people in cities ever managed to keep their lungs pumping. I was met by my daughter and son-in-law and grandson, another Bruegel trio, almost a parody because it had been 14 below zero when they woke up and though it was now practically suffocating in 20 degrees, their outlines were thickened by all the snow boots and billowing pants and I don't know if you know those blessed parkas which look like balloons but they weigh about an ounce and are warmer than all the wool and sweaters in the world.

My family, in short, looked like the first family of spacemen out there to greet me as I landed on some undiscovered planet imagined by Charles Dickens. Very casually, my daughter told me to put my bag in the back of the station wagon, or shooting brake, if you like, and when I got there, I found that was impossible because rearing their rubber necks and honking away were two of the fattest geese outside the Christmas Carol.

Well, about twenty minutes later, when we'd arrived at the graceful, little, eighteenth-century wooden box my family calls home – a sign outside says 'Edgewood Farm, eggs, Tempwood stoves' – I should say not more than ten minutes after we arrived, the two fat geese had departed this life having had their necks wrung by my son who'd flown in from California, not for that reason, and my son-in-law.

I didn't see these two for the next hour, which is just as well for a squeamish city type like me, because they'd been plucking and butchering the birds against the Christmas feast. Now, the kitchen, which in any working farm is the centre of things, was dense with odours and piled with platters and bowls and boards and knives, and my wife and daughter up to their elbows in onions and chestnuts and forced meat and chanterelles, and pans bubbling with morels.

The only time I ever saw anything like it was one time in rural France, in one of those country restaurants which have managed to snag three stars from the Parisian dictators of such things. My daughter and son-in-law, I must say, lead a hard life, but on these occasions it does look to an outsider an idyllic life. The food is not everything, but growing it and cooking it happen to be my daughter's passion. After all, she has a lot of time hanging on her hands. She gets up sometimes as late as 6 a.m. She has two small children to take care of, the chickens, and the vegetable and fruit planting in the summer and fall, cleaning the house, shovelling the mountains of snow on winter mornings, or clearing the barns, ferrying the four-year-old over ice and snow to school, not to mention campaigning for the public, non-commercial television station in Burlington, forty miles away. So this leaves her ages to prepare three meals a day and, I don't why, they're never snacks at any time of the year.

The first night we started with a platter of smoked blue fish, one of a dozen 13-pounders her husband had caught in the summer off the end of Long Island. We smoked them within hours of the catch and they froze beautifully. After that came the irresistible 'piece of resistance', venison. Ten days before, my son-in-law had shot a doe and I'm happy to say I was not on hand to watch him and my daughter spend the next six hours skinning, de-gutting and butchering it, before hanging it for a week or so.

Now I've had venison in lush restaurants in Paris and London and, more often, in modest homes in Texas, and I can only say that they all wag their fingers against their noses and confide to you their dark, secret recipes for hanging and cooking, and having it come out just right. But it's always smelly and gamey and a little tough. Of course, in a restaurant you can let the whole thing go with a sickly nod at the waiter but the Texans are nothing if not considerate and eager hosts and they always beg you to tell them if you've ever eaten venison like that. The true answer is yes, unfortunately, always. {Laughs}

But you think up some ambiguous variation on the line that old Sam Goldwyn used to use. Whenever a film producer came pressing him for an opinion after he'd given Goldwyn a preview of his latest masterpiece, 'Louis,' Goldwyn would say, looking the producer square down in the eye, 'only you could have made a film like that!'

Well, I want to tell you that that first evening, for some reason, I'd thought the venison was to be the Christmas dinner, and it was two nights early, I assumed as I started eating it that we were having a beautiful steak cut into long thin slices – I mean of beef – it was so tender you could have eaten it with a spoon but a round of 'mmm, mmms' alerted me, rather late, to the fact that this was the venison, with a delicate chanterelle sauce, a salad with raw mushrooms, then Susie's fat and creamy cheesecake with some of the fruit of the 200-odd strawberry beds that I'd seen her planting earlier in the year. But it was the only delicious venison I've ever had. And, just to keep things in the family, the wine was a remarkable claret from the vineyard my stepson farms in the Alexander Valley way north of San Francisco.

Well, it went on like that and on Christmas Day we had the geese. Very serene in death, but also, succulent. And a billowing cheese soufflé, and then the kitchen wafted in the scent of the four sorts of bread my daughter had baked. I once said to her, 'Any day now, Susie, you'll be making your own soap'. I was too late, she'd done it.

At the Christmas feast, with old Thomas Beecham whipping his orchestra and chorus into the most joyous rendering of The Messiah, I was asked to turn it down a little while my son-in-law, who's a modest, self-sufficient New England version of Gary Cooper, he wanted to propose a toast. And I should tell you that he is not a gabby man and this extraordinary initiative must have been inspired by those Alexander Valley grapes.

Anyway, he said he didn't know what a proper toast should be but all he could think of, well, he said with pride I guess you can call it, was the fact that everything we'd eaten in three days had lived or been grown right there, or roamed in the woods that rise from the long meadow that goes up to the hills. Nothing, as they say in New England, was store boughten. And, he ended, if it doesn't sound pretentious, 'I think we should drink to the bounty of nature'. It didn't sound pretentious at all, it sounded odd, but just right.

So, we drank to the bounty of nature, a very weird thing to toast in the last quarter of the 20th century when you can hardly buy a loaf of bread that isn't made of foam rubber, or buy a tomato that hasn't been squirted with a chemical red, because this is an era when chickens are raised in little cages on gravel and since they are practically immobile from birth, they are puny and must, for our protection, be injected with antibiotics and god knows what. I know a very knowledgeable food writer in France who says that he recalls that the last time he'd tasted a chicken, a real range-free chicken, in a restaurant was in 1952.

Well, that evening we sang carols in close, if creaky, harmony with the four-year-old, Adam, piping 'God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen' right on pitch. Next morning, I woke up and he was out on his skis. He got them a year ago when he was three, and now he was plumping up the hills and skimming down them with the poles helping him on the turns.

And I thought, what an extraordinary childhood. He was born in twenty below zero – outside of course, he was born inside. Winter is about between 100 and 120 inches of snow, May is the squishy month when the thaw sets in, summer is bang up in the 90s, the fall is a riot of scarlet and gold and the inky forests of evergreens over the mountains, and here, at the age of four, he's skiing over the deep and crisp and even, like a Disney doll and this is all the life he knows. One day Adam will grow up and, I'm afraid, taste of the forbidden fruit. One day he will read the New York Times and Adam will be out of the Garden of Eden for ever.

In the meantime though, a Happy New Year to you.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.