Local foods get fair play in Cambridge

City produce on display in Harvard Square

From left: Simona Gokhin, Dana Keenholtz, Danielle Samuels, and Eric Wilkey try UpStairs on the Square's pickles. (Aram Boghosian for The Boston Globe)

By Aaron Kagan

Globe Correspondent / September 22, 2010

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CAMBRIDGE — The growers who attend farmers’ markets already know you can bring the country into the city. Now the cityfolk have picked up on the same idea.

Last weekend, truly local food suppliers converged on Harvard Square for the second annual Urban Agricultural Fair, where visitors could find all kinds of Cambridge-produced foods, from rat-tailed radishes to a mystery melon.

Beekeeper Mike Graney of Eat Local Honey doled out samples of “bee pollen,’’ a mixture of flower pollen and nectar that he likened to meat for bees because of its nutritional density and role in the apian diet.

Stacy Cogswell, sous chef at UpStairs on the Square, tended a surprisingly busy table devoted exclusively to pickles, though only one of more than a dozen jars contained cucumbers. “What I’ve learned is that you can actually pickle anything,’’ says the chef. Her bounty included pickled currants, shiitakes, peaches, and pumpkin, the orange flesh brined with maple sugar, cloves, and cinnamon. “It’s kind of like pickled pumpkin pie,’’ says Cogswell, dropping her voice as though speaking heresy.

Entries in a food contest included a so-called “mystery melon’’ that planted itself in an urban compost pile, eggs laid in a Cambridge backyard, and a lattice-crust pie filled with purple shadberries foraged from an undisclosed location in Central Square. The Harvard Community Garden displayed a potted rat-tail radish, which does look like its namesake and grows abundantly in the nearby plot.

Vendors included Savenor’s Market, which offered Rhode Island chicken wings glazed with Graney’s honey, and Grendel’s Den, which grilled burgers made from locally raised grass-fed cattle and oversaw a small beer garden. There fairgoers could purchase Great Pumpkin Ale from the Cambridge Brewing Co. and sip it sitting on a hay bale.

The Somerville Garden Club was on hand to provide tips for drought-tolerant landscaping using plants such as Nicotiana alata, or flowering tobacco. A (literally) grass-roots organization called Maddy Wagon presented ideas for using the lightweight, portable, blue recycling bins that the city is about to trade for larger receptacles as garden containers.

A similar event, the Urban Country Fair, took place the day before in Union Square, Somerville.

Aaron Kagan can be reached at aaronwkagan@gmail.com.