Category: Culture

Gourmet magazine, R.I.P.

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My mother’s mother’s biscuit pan, now a working heirloom

It is strange that, at a time when Americans’ interest in food and culture seems to be reawakening, Gourmet magazine goes out of business. Much has been written about the end of Gourmet, but I very much agree with what many of its readers and former readers have said: Gourmet was much more than a snooty magazine. It always implicitly understood the intimate connection between food and culture.

These days, when even young top-of-the-world Internet whiz kids like Jonah Lehrer can not only write lyrically about home cooking, but also write for Gourmet magazine, it almost feels as though an era has ended when it had barely begun.

Like Jonah Lehrer, I strongly suspect that an interest in cooking often if not always has its roots in childhood. These childhood memories were not only about learning about food and cooking, they also taught us about whatever culture we were born into.

I was a child in the 1950s, living in North Carolina’s Yadkin Valley. My relatives lived mostly in the North Carolina Piedmont and foothills and up into the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. In those days, relatives visited relatives, and often Sunday dinner (which was served right after church) was involved. If one stayed overnight, as sometimes happened, you got not only to sleep in an unheated bedroom under a deep pile of homemade quilts. You also got breakfast.

Whether it was breakfast or dinner, there were always biscuits. As a child, I began to realize that everybody’s made-from-scratch biscuits were very, very different. To this day, if you put a hot time-warp biscuit in front of me on a cool October morning, I believe I would be able to identify the aunt, grandmother, or older cousin who made it.

Let’s hope that the spirit of Gourmet magazine lives on in our blogs, as we learn from each other’s cooking and culture.

Stigmatized dialects

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Mountain Talk, N.C. State University

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The Queen Family, N.C. State University

When I reflect on my long relationship with language, it seems odd to me that the schools in these parts never (or at least used to didn’t) actually tell children that they’ve grown up speaking a stigmatized dialect, and that if they want to enter the business, corporate, or professional worlds, they’ll have to learn to speak “standard English” as a second language. (You got tripped up by that “used to didn’t,” didn’t you? Just working in a bit of dialect…)

One could argue over whether the local dialect here in Stokes County is Southern or Appalachian. I would say that in the truly rural areas, the local dialect is Appalachian. Yes, I understand it perfectly, and I love to listen to it. I can still speak it, but I have to pause, think, and flip some sort of switch in my brain, because all my live language circuits have been rewired from years of speaking standard English.

Don’t doubt for a minute that Appalachian English is severely stigmatized. Once, having just told a young man from California in my department at the San Francisco Chronicle that I can speak fluent hillbilly, he said, of course, “Say something in hillbilly.” I thought for a moment, adjusted my mouth, and said something. The look of disgust on his face was genuine and involuntary, as though I’d just pulled a maggoty apple out of a bag.

Even here in North Carolina, Appalachian English is stigmatized. When I was at the Winston-Salem Journal, we had recently hired a young woman from Ashe County who was an experienced clerk and an ultra-fast typist. But she had never learned standard English, and behind her back people made fun of how she talked. This is all the more sad because anyone who can type fast has well-developed language aptitude.

Walt Wolfram, a linguist at N.C. State University, is one of the few people who have ever tried to do something about this stigma. Its human and economic costs are high.

I am no linguist, but I am doubtful that Appalachian English consists mainly of old speech patterns preserved from the British Isles or Ireland. I have traveled some in Scotland, England, Cornwall, Wales and Ireland, and I never heard anything that really reminded me of Appalachian English. The region, at least to my ear, that comes closest is Wales, where English is spoken with a kind of lilting rhythm and cadence, very pleasing to the ear, that sometimes reminds me of the rhythm of Appalachian English.

Rolling back the clock on sweets

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These will be ready to eat tomorrow.

There are a couple of scenes in the BBC series Cranford, which is set in Cheshire around 1840, in which some children get very excited about the fact that their cherry tree has come into season. The children get a big thrill out of helping the new doctor in town knock cherries out of the tree. The BBC series, by the way, is based on the novel Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell, a less well known but witty and competent 19th-century writer.

Children love sweets. In those days, cherries were high in the hierarchy of sweets, something for children to get excited about. These days, what child would pay the slightest attention to a cherry tree, or plain fresh cherries? Even though sugar was common in the 19th century, you could be sure that children in those days got a great deal less of it, especially provincial children. Sugar has, of course, gotten cheaper and cheaper, and the newest innovation in cheap sugar is high fructose corn syrup. Government corn subsidies help make it cheap, no matter how much evidence links high fructose corn syrup to Americans’ health problems.

But we don’t have to eat it. I can testify that if we stop eating processed sweets, we become more like the children in Cranford. A raw peach once again becomes a sweet treat. Watermelon is thrilling (the watermelons here have been inexpensive and very good this summer).

One of my grandmothers was a genius at making pies. I don’t think I can remember there ever not being at least one kind of pie in her pie safe. Usually it was a fruit pie, though she sometimes made custard pies. Still, nobody was fat, because it was home-cooked, and the dinner (which is what they called lunch) and supper tables were loaded with a variety of home-cooked foods including lots of vegetables. Once again, drawing on the insights of Michael Pollan, our grandmothers proved that a little homemade pie won’t hurt you.

You can get the Cranford series on DVD. I understand that the BBC has another season in the works to be shown in Britain this year around Christmastime. I’d expect it to be available in the U.S. next year.

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The ladies of Cranford eating sweets

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Judi Dench as Miss Matty, Elizabeth Gaskell

What's beneath the eggs ?

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Guest Post by Anivid

Is it sauercraut ??
Is it beans ??
Is it rice ??
NOPE 😉
It’s hash brown …… sort of.
Hash Brown made of raw potatoes, which after grating is placed in a strainer, and rinsed thoroughly in lots of water until the outgoing water is free of cloudyness.
– and why is that ? – for extracting the starch which else would be responsible for the whole item clotting together in a kind of porridge 😉
Then the grated, washed potatoes are placed in a cloth, wrapped up tight and squeezed until the water is drained.
Next some parsley (or other tasty, healthy stuff like grated carrots*) is added – and the mix placed on a hot oiled frying pan.
Fried on both sides – or all over (stirred, not shaken 😉
Then we place some roasted champignons at the side – and fried eggs on top.
Voila – enjoy !!
* The root of plants being just like the egg of birds – it contains everything necessary for the whole individual to grow & unfold 😉

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After the sumptuous meal we take a little chicory coffee for rounding off.

Signing out: Anivid, Southern France, Gastronomy & Culture.

Living to be 100

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The Island of the Ancients

The Huffington Post has an article today on the growing number of people living to be 100 years old. One of the reasons cited for this is “improved diet.”

I think it would have been more accurate to say “the possibility of improved diet.” The diet of the average American has decidedly not improved. The July 20 issue of the New Yorker trumps the Time magazine piece on why Southerners are so fat with a piece on why Americans are so fat. The position of the New Yorker piece seems to be that the obesity epidemic of the past few decades has primarily been caused by corporate influences — food engineering, corporate agriculture, corporate research on food’s addictive qualities, pushing larger portions, marketing, etc.

We can take advantage of brilliant new research on diet and health, we can take advantage of the availability of healthier foods, and we can cook the right stuff for ourselves at home. Or we can eat what television commercials tell us to eat and make certain corporations richer. That’s what it really boils down to.

From Time magazine:

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Time magazine has a lame piece today on why there is more obesity in the South than in the rest of the country. They’re right about some things, for example the correlation of health and weight to income. But they trot out all the old stereotypes about biscuits, fried chicken, and pie. Southerners have always been poor, but they have not always been fat, as an examination of any collection of old photos will show you.

As a Southerner, a foodie, and a person who takes careful note of what people have in their carts in the grocery store line, I claim the standing to comment knowledgeably on this question.

1. Southerners have stopped cooking from scratch. This is clear from the contents of their grocery carts.

2. Southerners have too little color in their diets. Pretty much everything in their grocery cart will be meat or something white.

3. Southerners consume astonishing quantities of canned and bottled sweet drinks. By weight, sweet drinks are probably the main items in their grocery carts. Few even seem to make fresh iced tea at home anymore.

4. Southerners eat too much meat. They seem to have cut way back on pinto beans, which, in my childhood, you were guaranteed to get at least twice a week.

5. Southerners eat too much cheap white bread and too many chips.

6. Southerners buy very few fresh foods, not even fresh potatoes. It took me a while to realize that people aren’t interested in starting gardens because they aren’t interested in what comes out of gardens.

7. When Southerners eat out, whether at fast food places or not, they eat even more calories than they eat at home. Restaurants compete on price and the size of the portions.

If Southerners could go back to the era of homemade biscuits, all would be well. People made biscuits because it was hard to get white bread, or the white bread cost more. Biscuits come from an era in which everything came from the kitchen, from scratch.

Michael Pollen’s rule of thumb is the best I’ve ever heard: It’s about remembering and honoring what our great-grandmothers cooked. Many Southerners seem to have forgotten.

Hymns in strange places

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Frédéric Chopin, nocturne in G minor, Opus 37, No. 11

Some years ago, a friend who is a professional pianist (and not a very nice person), hearing what I was playing at the piano, made the rude comment, “Hymns are the lowest form of music, you know.” Instantly angry, I threw an insult back at him: “No. Jazz is the lowest form of music.”

I was listening to the Chopin nocturnes tonight, partly because, at last, I can. The speakers and stereo amplifier are in a more or less permanent place in the newly painted radio room, and the iMac (and therefore iTunes) is now connected to the sound system.

Again and again in the nocturnes, Chopin gently slips away from the wild rubato rhythm and falls into a strictly timed four-part hymn, or anthem. The four measures above are just one example. If you’d like to find and listen to this example, the hymn starts about three minutes into Claudio Arrau’s seven-minute recording of this nocturne. Adjust the times for whatever recording you may have.

Anyone who thinks hymns are the lowest form of music knows nothing about human voices singing in chorus in four-part harmony. In the nocturnes, I would say that these hymn-like sections were a form of musical contrast for Chopin, a way of anchoring and grounding the wildness of the nocturnes.

Ice cream for Lunch.

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By Anivid in the south of France

It was a sunny day in April, a perfect day for trying out an ice cream dessert before the saison of tourists started.
Instead of lunch of course – ice cream desserts being on the rich & heavy side, especially when being enjoyed in the most luxurious place of the town 😉
The one I chose, called Melissa, consisted of vanilla ice cream, drenched with sauce caramel, sprinkled with caramel pieces, nuts, grilled pine kernels, cinnamon (your mouth water starts forming ??) and topped with a lot of chantilly (whipped cream). Finally two sticks of wafers as antennae for decoration.
It was served with the usual tap water carafe.
Need I say it was heavenly ??
Especially the combination of icecream and pine kernels was delicious, pine kernels as a soft chew together with the soft caramel and ice enveloping the toungue.
There was just the correct mix of everything, and it was so sweet & cold as to rise the IQ (my mother always told me to keep my feet warm and head cold 😉 and as the brains preferred energy source is carbohydrates – I thought my choice very wise (and my mother’s maxime satisfied 😉

I sat outside by the little stream led through the city and thoroughly planted with beautiful flowers following the changing seasons.
There might be not so pretty quarters elsewhere in the municipality, but the stream with its flowers & bridges are always kept picturesque – a joy to greet for citizens & visitors.
The pleasure costed app. 14 $ – and my mouth can still remember the feeling of its cornucopia 😉

Signing out Anivid, Southern France, Gastronomy & Culture