Asian cucumber salad with salmon pâté
The local summer tomatoes aren’t here yet. The cucumbers, though, are tiding me over. For the past three weeks, I’ve gotten three pints of cucumbers each week from my local farmers, Brittany and Richard. They grow four types of cucumbers. I love them all.
If I were asked to make a short list of the loftiest flavors on the planet, I’d include toasted sesame. Sesame is an ancient crop with a history that goes back at least 3,000 years. (Barley, by comparison, was cultivated 9,000 years ago!) I always have raw sesame seeds in the fridge, and every time I think to use them I wonder why I don’t use them more often. They’re easy to toast, in a skillet. As for storebought toasted sesame oil, I use that almost every day.
I haven’t seen it in ages, but health food stores used to sell sesame salt. That’s a Japanese condiment (gomasio) made from toasted sesame seeds (ground) and salt. It’s easy to make your own. Toast the sesame seeds in a skillet, and grind them in a blender.
We usually disparage the post-agriculture diet as inferior to the hunter-gatherer diet. No doubt that’s true. But, these days, when international trade and international shipping are so easy, we can have post-agriculture foods from all over the world at low prices — foods from other climates, and thus a much greater variety of foods. Then again, a purely local diet can be healthy, too — as long as one has, or has access to, some really good fields, pastures, and gardens.