The Farm Team

In Vermont, says Julia Alvarez, the interior landscape is more important than the geography. Everything is so understated that you really have to listen to hear, really look hard to see, really inhale to smell. The novelist is telling me this in the wrinkle between deep winter and early spring, when the color green is absent from the Vermont hills.

Alvarez grew up comfortable in the Dominican Republic, the daughter of a doctor who took the family and fled to New York when the politics at home got out of hand. Her husband, Bill Eichner, was the son of tenant farmers in Nebraska at a time when suburbia was encroaching on the family farm. Dinner at the couple's Vermont home is a study in how far-flung flavors have come to enrich the simple sturdy fare of America.

Eichner cooks with the assurance and precision of a surgeon, which he happens to be. Alvarez assists, fluttering through their kitchen with the tentative fragility of the winged insects that figured in her novel ''In the Time of the Butterflies.'' The exuberant passion of her other books, ''How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents'' and ''Yo!,'' is nowhere apparent in the kitchen, where she seems to lack, well, confidence.

Cooking is Eichner's way of tending to the family. Even after eight years of marriage, Alvarez is amazed at how potent the culinary medium is. Not that any of this is seamless. ''This kitchen was built for one,'' says Eichner, glancing warily toward Alvarez, who is arranging the ingredients for her family's bread pudding on the single butcher-block counter. ''I measured everything for you, honey.''

Alvarez smiles like a Caribbean sunrise and accuses her husband of mixing the lemon peel with the sugar, which is not how the recipe goes. Alvarez defers to recipes, while Eichner, after a lifetime of planting and harvesting, relies on his own intuition. He's fluent in a variety of cuisines, from the humble food of the prairie to the robust fare of Italy to the spicy dishes of the Middle East. After his divorce from his first wife, he cooked a bit of everything for his two young daughters.

Alvarez, who once led the life of an itinerant poet, leapfrogging from one teaching job to the next with a lot of books and a can opener (she teaches at Middlebury College), found Eichner's attention to food amusing. I'd never met anyone who thought so much about eating,'' she says. ''His whole family spent every Sunday afternoon sitting around the table, comparing the flavor of this year's carrots with last.''