The most remarkable thing about my mother is that
for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers.
The original meal has never been found.
-Calvin Trillin

 
Image Credit: She Knows.com

Every few months, someone publishes another article claiming that the “family meal” is dead or dying, and that if we could only revive it, it would help us fix a laundry list of societal ills from obesity to teen pregnancy. These stories usually make four main rhetorical moves:

1) Invoking Tradition and History: They universally portray the family meal as a long-standing tradition that Americans lost sometime in the recent past. For example, a post on Epicurious last week was titled “Radical Call To Take Back The Family Dinner,” which not only implies that it’s something we had at some point but also that something or someone took it from us, possibly without our consent. Frequently, these articles conflate cooking from scratch, eating at home, and eating with the members of your nuclear family, which makes it difficult to pinpoint exactly which behavior they think has declined, or what counts as a “family meal” in the first place—if a nuclear family eats together at a restaurant, does that count? What about eating take-out at home? Is eating in a car an automatic disqualifier, even if the food is homemade and everyone talks about their day?

The historical timeline is also usually pretty fuzzy. It’s almost never clear when the author thinks the “family meal” supposedly prevailed or when we “lost” it—the 1920s? the 1960s? The 1980s? And yet they’re sure it existed at some point. Much like the missing “original” meal in Calvin Trillin’s joke about leftovers, it’s an absent referent.

2) Explaining Why the Family Meal Is a Panacea: Whatever they think it was, and whenever they think we lost it, the authors are clear about at least one thing: family meals are a good thing and we need to get them back. That’s often exemplified by the titles, like the Huffington Post article linked in the Epicurious post: “How Eating at Home Can Save Your Life” or Miriam Weinstein’s 2005 book, The Surprising Power of Family Meals: How Eating Together Makes Us Smarter, Stronger, Healthier and Happier. The authors often point—or at least gesture vaguely—towards studies that have shown correlations between how often children eat with their parents and higher GPAs, lower BMIs, lower rates of alcohol & drug use, and a decreased likelihood of developing an eating disorder. Because everyone knows correlation = causation, right?

3) Blaming Individuals Instead of Structural Changes: Authors sometimes initially point the finger at structural changes like the increasing reliance on industrial-scale agriculture and processing to feed a growing & urbanizing population (dated either to the post-Civil War or post-WW II era) and growing numbers of women in the workforce after the 1960s. However, they all find a way to shift blame, and thus responsibility, back onto individuals. That’s rhetorically necessary, because the goal of the articles is usually to change individuals’ behavior. Also, it would be futile and/or offensive to suggest that the “answer” is a massive population cull, giving up city living, and/or  women leaving the workforce en masse. Indeed, many feminists were rankled by Michael Pollan’s article “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch,” even though he specifically notes that the amount of time spent on food preparation has declined dramatically even for women who don’t work outside the home and specifically calls on women and men to “make cooking a part of daily life.”

The factors they end up blaming instead are nonsense or, at best, totally un-measurable. My favorite is when they claim that the problem is that Americans are busier than ever…but also lazier than ever. From Epicurious:

We're certainly at a lazy point in history, though ironically, for all the conveniences at our disposal, we seem even shorter of actual time.

We’re working more hours than ever, but as a culture, we’ve gotten lazy. American kids are running around trying to do more extra-curriculars than ever, especially if they’re college-bound, but they also spend all their time on passive, mind-slushifying electronic entertainments. Chefs, farmers, and food writers have achieved celebrity status, the Food Network and shows like Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution and Bravo’s Top Chef achieve stellar ratings, and there’s never been more interest in eating organic, natural, fresh, local food…but we’re a fast food nation addicted to HFCS and cheap, industrially-processed, “empty” calories. Yadda yadda, a dozen other unsubstantiated, contradictory clichés that tell us nothing about what is responsible for Americans cooking and/or eating together less (if indeed they are cooking and eating together less).

4) Calling for Change: All of which leads up to the same old rallying cry: Even if you think you don’t have time, you should make the time! If you don’t know how to cook, you should learn to cook! If you and/or your kids prefer fast food and convenience foods, you’re basically a failure at life and you should learn to roast Brussels sprouts and grow an adult palate, stat. Then they make perhaps the stupidest claim of all: not only is cooking at home and eating together a moral obligation to your children, family, and nation, the real reason you should do it is because it will make you happier. After all, there is no greater joy than sharing a home-cooked meal with the people you love.

 American Beauty dir. Sam Mendes 1999 (from Orange Crate Art)

The “family meal” lecture would be annoying enough as it is—smug, hectoring, and totally unoriginal—but worse, it’s almost entirely based on myths, lies, and logical fallacies. Read more

Our CSA subscription kept me so busy finding new ways to eat greens and green beans this summer that I haven’t done anything new with meat in a long time. But I recently found myself with a package of pork chops, more apple cider than I wanted to drink, and one last bunch of chard. Turns out pork chops are pretty easy—if you just season them with salt and pepper, sear them on both sides over high heat and then cook them until they’re pink inside over lower heat (~155F), they turn out pretty tasty. So this was the meal I came up with: I reduced the apple cider to a glaze along with some whole-grain mustard, cooked the pork chops as described, and then served them both over a bed of sautéed shallots and chard. Quick, easy, elegant, delicious, and perfect for Fall. 

I got the idea from a recent conversation I had about why bacon is so often smoked with applewood. The answer, as far as I can tell, is because pork loves apples. Applesauce or cooked spiced apples are a classic accompaniment for pork chops. You can buy apple-flavored pre-made sausages. Whole roasted pigs are traditionally presented with apples in their mouths. The pairing is at least as old as Apicus (a 1st Century Roman) whose writings include a recipe for minutal matianum, which was a sort of stew or ragout of pork and apples. In England, serving pork with applesauce was common by the Early Modern period, and may have started much earlier (according to The Food Timeline).

There seem to be three possible explanations:

1) They Are What They Eat: Wherever there are both orchards and pigs, the pigs have traditionally been allowed to graze on the windfall apples that cover the orchard floor during harvest season, which also happens to be pig-slaughtering season. Pigs like apples—especially ones that may be fermenting a bit—but that’s not the main reason they get to eat them. Instead, it’s because windfall produce is an ample source of omnivore-feed that’s generally not quite fit for human consumption. There’s a nod to both pigs’ affinity for apples and using windfall apples to keep pigs “in good health” in Orwell’s Animal Farm:

Now if there was one thing that the animals were completely certain of, it was that they did not want Jones back. When it was put to them in this light, they had no more to say. The importance of keeping the pigs in good health was all too obvious. So it was agreed without further argument that the milk and the windfall apples (and also the main crop of apples when they ripened) should be reserved for the pigs alone. (right at the end of Chapter 3)

Most livestock animals are ruminants and thus don’t compete with humans for food (at least traditionally—the shift from grass to grain as the mainstay of cattle feed is a recent development in the history of animal agriculture). Pigs are extraordinarily efficient at converting feed into flesh, but since they can’t survive on grass and alfalfa, if there aren’t enough “slops,” pigs sometimes eat at the expense of hungry people. Anthropologist Marvin Harris suggests that that’s likely part of the reason they’re the object of religious/cultural prohibitions originating in certain regions of the world.

It’s possible—likely, even—that apple-fed pigs taste a little bit like apples, especially if that’s what they’re gorging on right before they’re killed. Fancypants Iberico ham is supposed to taste like the acorns that pampered Spanish pigs are fed. Some artisan pork producers claim their pigs are fed exclusively with apricots, which supposedly imparts a uniquely sweet and floral taste. Cooking apple-fed pigs with apples or smoking their meat with applewood might have initially become popular at least in part because they would enhance and complement the apple flavor.

2) It’s the Time of the Season for Apples & Pork: The second and probably more important reason is that both pork and apples are Fall foods. The apple harvest coincides with pig slaughtering season—Fall was traditionally the time to put up enough cured pork products to last through the long winter, especially before over-wintering the animals was common. And although much of the pig could be preserved—the legs and the belly would be salted and/or smoked for ham and bacon and much of the meat could be ground up and preserved in some kind of sausage—some of the cuts were eaten right away. Apples would have been a natural component of those meals because they were plentiful at the same time. Further evidence: duck and goose, Fall game birds, are also often paired with apples.

3) Cutting the Fat: Pork is fatty and umami. Apples are sweet, acidic, and light. Applesauce is a condiment that makes the same kind of sense with pork as mint jelly with lamb or malt vinegar with fish & chips (I’m in Ireland this week, can you tell?)—it’s just something sharp and bright to cut something rich and meaty. However, the gustatory rationale probably explains why the tradition lasted more than why it started. Ultimately, bright and acidic condiments are sort of interchangeable. If not for pig affinity/seasonal considerations, people might have as easily paired pork with mint jelly.

I suspect it’s a combination of all three. And tradition aside, the cider-mustard glaze would also be excellent on baked winter squash, chicken (I can imagine it as a great dipping sauce for wings), or anywhere you might use a sweet, mild barbeque sauce.

Read more

When I first set out to make these chocolate-covered peanut-butter balls, I intended not to refer to them by their traditional Midwestern moniker. Surely, I thought, neither the State of Ohio nor its flagship public university can claim any special relationship to sweetened peanut butter in a chocolate shell. There’s no reason I have to invoke tOSU’s mascot in the middle of football season in Michigan. But then I found some pictures of actual buckeyes nuts, and I’ll be damned if they don’t look uncannily like their namesake.

Real buckeyes are the seeds of trees in the genus Aesculus, which includes between 13 and 19 species (depending on how you count) that grow all across the Northern Hemisphere. The name “buckeye” is generally attributed to an American Indian word for the seeds and the nutritious mash they made from them after roasting—“hetuck,” which means “eye of a buck.” One species in particular, Aesculus glabra, became commonly known as the “Ohio buckeye,” even though it grows throughout the American Midwest and Great Plains regions, ranging from southern Ontario to northern Texas, apparently because the botanist who gave the tree its English name first encountered it on the banks of the Ohio River.

However, there’s also a California buckeye and a Texas buckeye and even a Japanese buckeye. And the seeds of all the trees in the genus—including Aesculus glabra—are also commonly known as horse chestnuts, after the larger family they belong to (Hippocastanaceae). So there doesn’t seem to be any simple botanical or taxonomical reason why the “buckeye” became so firmly associated with the state of Ohio.

How the Buckeye Became Ohioan and Ohioans Became Buckeyes

According to one story, it all goes back the spectacularly-named Ebenezer Sproat (or Sprout), who was a Colonel of the Continental Army in the Revolutionary War. After an unsuccessful post-war stint as a merchant, he became a surveyor for the state of Rhode Island and bought stock in the Ohio Company of Associates, which sent him west with the group led by Rufus Putnam that founded Marietta, Ohio, the first permanent American settlement in the Northwest Territory. There, Sproat became the first sheriff in the NW Territory. And aside from being a relatively prominent citizen, he also happened to be quite tall and, “of perfect proportions,” according to Wikipedia, whatever that’s supposed to mean. The Indians in Ohio were impressed with his height and/or his importance, and thus came to refer to him as “Hetuck” or “Big Buckeye.” A similar account suggests that it was mostly his height—claiming he was 6’4” (which would have been tall indeed in the 18th C.) and that he earned the sobriquet on September 2, 1788 when he was leading a procession of judges to the Marietta courthouse. Indians watching the giant of a man walk by began calling out “Hetuck, hetuck.”  Read more

The Emperor’s New Spice

Saffron is well-known for being the most expensive spice in the world. In 2009, the average U.S. retail price was nearly  $3000/lb. For comparison, vanilla beans, the second most expensive spice, retail around $150/lb and even if the cheapest you can get them is $5/piece, they’re only about $450/lb. Although saffron is prized for its aroma, its subtle flavor, and its ability to dye dishes a rich golden hue, the cost is primarily due to how resource and labor-intensive it is to produce.

Each thread of saffron is a pistil from a particular species of crocus, and each flower only produces three of them. It takes 170,000 flowers to produce a single kilogram of dried saffron. Furthermore, the pistils have to be harvested by hand during the short window of time when they bloom in October, and the harvesting must happen before sunrise because the flowers are so delicate that they wilt in the sun.

As my friend Kevin recently pointed out, saffron is a great example of something priced at its economic or exchange value rather than at its intrinsic (or use) value. As lovely as it smells, its aromatic compounds are extremely volatile and especially vulnerable to light and oxidizing agents. It’s somewhat more resistant to heat, but I generally find the flavor all but impossible to discern in most dishes, including some of the classic applications like paella and bouillabaisse. Given that, I probably should have known better than to put it in deviled eggs, which get their name from the pungent spices combined with the yolks. I could barely even discern it in the aioli on its own.

However, it sure does make things sound fancier. Kevin also recalled a recipe he’d seen for a bean dish involving saffron that noted, “adding saffron to beans is a good way to tell your guests that you're not just being cheap by serving them beans.” And this, I think, is the true function of saffron at least most of the time: it’s something you put in food to prove you know what it is and can afford it, and then everyone feels compelled to say they can taste it and maybe they even think they do. But really, you could get the same effect by just telling people you put saffron in the dish.

A Classic for a Reason

In the future, I’ll probably skip the saffron-soaking. And I’ll probably just use Hellman’s/Best Foods mayonnaise with a little garlic and lemon juice mixed in instead of making my aioli from scratch. If, for some reason, you really want the aioli to be a vibrant yellow (not that you can tell anyway if you’re mixing it with egg yolks), you could always add some turmeric. Of course, then what you’ve got is just plain old deviled eggs. But there’s probably a reason the same basic preparation has been around for possibly as long as eggs and spices have been consumed.

According to The Food Timeline, recipes for boiled eggs topped with spicy sauces appear shortly after the Ancient Greeks and Romans domesticated egg-laying birds. There are recipes for spicy stuffed eggs in a 13th C. Andalusian cookbook, 15th C. Italian cookbooks, and 16th and 17th C. British cookbooks. Sometimes the recipes call for the yolks to be pounded with raisins, cheese, and spices like cinnamon and cloves, which might have produced something similar to mincemeat. However, mustard, onion, parsley, and cayenne are also common flavorings, and would probably have produced something virtually indistinguishable from the way most people “devil” their eggs today.

The association with the devil is apparently an 18th C. invention. As a culinary verb it was used for other hot & pungent preparations too— “devilled biscuits” referring to shortbreads spread with anchovy paste, mustard, and cayenne and then grilled (doesn’t that sound fantastic?) and seafood preparations that usually sound something like a curry. At least one cookbook suggested “devilling” or broiling meat with cayenne as a way of dealing with “relics of poultry or game.” None of them, I should note, involve saffron, and in retrospect if there’s anywhere you could expect saffron to shine, a dish specifically noted for being devilishly spicy is probably not it. So here’s a very foolish recipe if you want to waste some saffron, too. Or just skip to the egg part: Read more