~ From the Field to the Hearth ~
Hen & Hearth doesn’t buy from a distributor. We buy from people — by name, by handshake, often by phone call at six in the morning when the weather changes. This page lists every one of them.
Our partners
Grass-fed beef, heritage pork, lamb
Four generations on the same land along the Lamoille River. The Boydens rotate their herd through silvopasture — cattle grazing under maple and apple — which is what gives the beef its distinct sweetness. We buy whole animals, half at a time, and break them down in our kitchen. The shoulder becomes Sunday's braise; the bones, Tuesday's stock.
Raw cream, cultured butter, A2 milk
Paul and Louisa run a small herd of Jersey and Normande cows on rolling pasture up by the Northeast Kingdom. Their cream — pasteurized at low temperature, never homogenized — is what makes our pastry program possible. The butter on every table came out of their churn fewer than seven days ago.
Year-round vegetables, root cellars, ferments
Pete Johnson built one of the most ambitious year-round vegetable operations in northern New England. Heated greenhouses in February. Cold-stored carrots that sweeten in the dark until April. Hen & Hearth's vegetable menu in February is essentially a love letter to Pete's root cellar.
Pasture-raised chicken, turkey, eggs
John and Robert Palmer raise their birds in moveable shelters on rotating pasture — the way chickens were raised before factory farming. The yolks of the eggs are nearly orange. The birds taste like chicken used to taste. We use everything: legs for the daily roast, breasts for the cassoulet, feet for stock.
Heritage pork, charcuterie collaborations
Dave runs his Berkshires on woodland pasture and finishes them on whey from the dairy across the road. We co-cure a 90-day prosciutto with him every February — twenty-six legs at a time, hung in the cellar of our restaurant. It's the most local prosciutto you'll eat in America.
Cellar-aged cheeses, Bayley Hazen, Harbison
There is no better cheese cellar in America. Mateo and Andy Kehler dug seven aging caves into a Vermont hillside and have been refining the art of New England farmstead cheese for two decades. Our cheese course rotates with whatever they bring through the door.
Seed for our kitchen garden
We grow about eighty percent of our summer herbs and a third of our salad greens out our back door, from High Mowing's seed. Open-pollinated, organic, regionally adapted. The cilantro you taste in August started as a seed in March, in a tray on the kitchen windowsill.
Heirloom apples, cider, pressed juice
A hundred and forty varieties of apple, including the kinds nobody grows anymore — Northern Spy, Esopus Spitzenburg, Roxbury Russet. Bill Suhr and his team press a single-varietal cider for us every October. It goes in the Sunday braise.
Summer berries, stone fruit, garlic
A worker-owned cooperative in the Berkshires. Their garlic — twelve heritage varietals braided and cellared — runs through our kitchen from August to April. We buy two hundred pounds of it at harvest and store it in a closet by the back door.
~ The Calendar ~
Mar – May
Fiddleheads, ramps, the first asparagus, baby radishes. The hardest season to cook in New England — the cellar is empty, the garden hasn't started. Our menu shrinks to twelve dishes and leans on cured proteins from the winter.
Jun – Aug
The garden out back peaks. Tomatoes hit the menu in mid-July and stay through frost. Cucumbers, peppers, eggplant, herbs. Half the salad course comes from forty feet behind the kitchen.
Sep – Nov
Squash, apples, every kind of root. The cellars fill. Pigs are slaughtered. We cure, we ferment, we pack the lard. Our heaviest, most generous menu of the year.
Dec – Feb
The hardest season is also the most honest one. Root cellars. Long braises. The bread program at its peak. Whatever was put up in October is what we cook with — and that constraint is, frankly, where most of our best dishes come from.
Buying direct is harder. The Boyden beef is twice the price of commodity beef. Jasper Hill cheese costs four times what a wholesaler would charge for a similar wheel. Pete’s vegetables come in funny shapes and rough sizes — a cook has to peel them, trim them, learn each one.
We pay the difference because it’s the right way to feed people. Because the farms that built this valley deserve to still be here in twenty years. Because a carrot that grew in real soil tastes like something, and a cow that ate grass tastes like the field it came from. And because, ultimately, the best meal you’ll ever eat is the one where you can name the farms.
— with gratitude, the kitchen at Hen & Hearth
The full menu changes every Tuesday. Reservations open thirty days ahead.