Happy Thanksgiving

Peter Hoffman’s excellent op-ed piece in in the NYTimes yesterday, reminded me of an opinion piece I wrote last year; it’s a mixed blessing that the article is just as relevant this Thanksgiving as last.

Hoffman, chef-owner of Savoy in NYC, writes to call attention to the fact that federal and local health officials are putting the kibosh on chefs dry-curing meat; and it’s true because the health officials don’t know anything about dry-curing. They think only, "You want to serve this ham that’s been hanging at room temp for how long, a year and a half?  Sorry, Charlie."  The health officials then make the chef throw out this great healthful food.

Chefs and health officials need to work together to create a protocol for small restaurants dry-curing meats.

When I first wrote the story below (Charcuterie was just coming, so it was on my mind), I sent it to my friend Russ Parsons.  He wrote me an angry letter back.  I don’t think he read the whole thing.  It infuriated him when people dissed American culinary tradition.  But I’m not doing that at all.  My story is about preserving food, what we’ve lost by using our freezer as our main preserving tool, what we might learn from a renewed attention to the craft of curing foods.

A Holiday That Might Mean More Than Leaving the Table Stuffed
published 11/16/05 in Cleveland’s The Plain Dealer

Thanksgiving, the holiday shared by Americans irrespective of their demographic categories, is a fundamental component of our culinary heritage. Yet what it points up each year is how slender a culinary tradition we have and the ways this deficit affects how we think about food and diminishes what we do with our extraordinary bounty.

"That’s what culinary tradition is – making the harvest season last all year long," Judy Rodgers, chef of San Francisco’s Zuni Cafe, said about the practice of preserving food. "My God, the most unique holiday we have is Thanksgiving. If you really ponder what Thanksgiving is all about, you would really understand food. But so many people think it’s about gluttony, the beginning of the ‘eating season,’ as opposed to truly revering this, your great harvest celebration, and then . . . putting stuff up so you don’t starve over the winter."

Preserving food is a fount of a culture’s food heritage and a custom that helps us understand the meaning of food. The need to preserve food gave us the confits of France, the soppressatas of Italy, the gravlox of Scandinavia and the fermented anchovies of Southeast Asia.

All of these foods remain a lively part of the cuisines of their countries.

Vagabond America got into the culinary game relatively late, and so our main form of preservation has been freezing food. Thus, Birds Eye frozen vegetables are perhaps our truest culinary tradition, unromantic as that might be.

The industrialization that replaced agriculture and quickly gave way to the mass production and commercialization of food has made Rice Krispies Treats more a tradition in this country than apple pie (which you can find preserved today in almost any grocery store’s freezer section).

This is not a value judgment on fortified cereals or the convenience of the frozen pie. Rather, it’s an attempt to recognize how our methods of bringing food to the table actually distance us from food itself.

Indeed, we have great regional dishes, chowder and gumbo (which, incidentally, uses salt pork and tasso ham, both of them preserved meats). And we have quintessential American preparations, such as fried chicken, not to mention roasted turkey with stuffing. But any chef who tries to create a whole menu composed exclusively of American food soon finds himself back to the traditions of France or England or Spain or the West Indies.

This dearth is part of what makes us such a food-neurotic country. We abhor fat and salt, for instance, and yet embrace sodium-rich, calorie-laden fast food with a fervor that has made McDonald’s perhaps the most influential player in our culinary heritage, our biggest contribution to international gastronomy. We don’t know where our food comes from anymore, how it’s raised or made or how to use it well once we have it.

We don’t trust it unless it’s wrapped in plastic or, better, sealed in a box or cellophane with a helpful expiration date.

A true child of the American heartland, I was in my late 20s before I learned that you actually could create a pumpkin pie with a pumpkin. You can make the stuff that comes in a can? This was a revelation to me.

For all the silly showmanship surrounding the celebrity-chef movement, one of its benefits has been that the chefs point us back to some of the finest kinds of cooking known, cooking with one of the most underused tools in the kitchen: time. That is, salting and drying food for preservation, for instance, or poaching and storing it within its own fat.

It’s a lucky circumstance in America to have the Batali father-and-son duo curing lamb leg and pork shoulder. And Paul Bertolli in Oakland, Calif., ready to go national with his handcrafted, cured sausages. And young chef Paul Kahan opening a restaurant featuring charcuterie next to his fine-dining Blackbird in Chicago. Lucky because it’s so delicious to eat, yes – but also because it points the way to a closer connection to food and its source, which we so often lack in this country. To food that doesn’t come out of a box or a bag and to meat that’s raised on a farm, rather than in a factory.

Thanksgiving might truly be a meaningful and substantial holiday if it brought us closer to the food we eat, to knowing where it comes from, how it gets to our homes and what is the most wonderful way to cook it and share it with our families. That, rather than being simply about eating too much and drifting off in front of a football game.

Thanksgiving is about bounty, and part of the responsibility of bounty is knowing what to do with it. If Americans better understood how to preserve food and used all the knowledge that comes from such understanding – not least of which is how to avoid waste – we would be a more healthy nation, both physically and spiritually.