Lard

New York City’s health department is asking for all city restaurants to voluntarily give up using trans fats in their cooking.

Trans fats, as we should all know by now, are the artificially hydrogenated vegetable oils that seem to be in every commercially produced baked good, snack food and fast food in the country. They also seem to be worse for humans to eat than either butter, or the subject of today’s postlet–lard.

Some folks seem to be scared of lard–probably because of all its bad press over the years as being the world’s most unhealthy of fats, but I think a lot of it comes from the fact that the word itself just has a pejorative connotation. When we want to insult someone, we call them “lard-ass” or “tub-of-lard.” Lard comes from pigs, who are among the maligned of animals, being as they have the reputation of being fat, gluttonous, and smelly. Calling someone a pig is a dire insult indeed, but I notice that for all that people revile pigs as creatures, they sure do like the way that they taste.

The fact is, lard really is better for you to eat than Crisco. My Gram knew it had to be so all along–but medical science has born her intuitive mistrust of artificially hydrogenated fats, and the result is that the FDA has ruled that for reasons of public health, every food that has trans fats in it will have to be labelled as such by 2006. Warning labels–hrm–what other consumables have such things? Oh, yes, alcohol and tobacco products. Hrm.

Back to lard.

I am not saying that lard is a health food here. It is fat. You shouldn’t sit your butt down and eat a big bowl of fat every hour of the day. That will kill you.

However, lard is not as bad as we have been led to believe.

Listen to the statistics reported in a New York Times OpEd piece this morning: “It has half the level of saturated fat of palm kernel oil (about 80 percent saturated fat) or coconut oil (about 85 percent) and its approximately 40 percent saturated fat is lower than butter’s nearly 60 percent. Today’s miracle, olive oil, is much lower in saturated fat, as everyone knows, but it does have some: about 13 percent. As for monounsaturated fat, the current savior, olive oil contains a saintly 74 percent, yes. But scorned lard contains a very respectable 45 percent monounsaturated fat – double butter’s paltry 23 or so percent.”

Doesn’t sound that evil, does it?

That is probably because it really isn’t that bad. Again, I am not advocating that you toss out your olive oil and canola oil and fry everything in gobs of lard here, and eat pie crust made from lard thirty two times a week–what I am saying is that folks might want to think about giving lard a second chance.

Besides its partly undeserved bad health rap and pejorative connotations, I think lard also suffers because it isn’t very easy to work with.

While it makes the best pie crusts in the world, hands down, it is a pain in the tuckus to work with.

The reason for this lies partly in its slightly healthier fat profile than butter–it isn’t hard and solid, even when refrigerated, the way butter is. It has less saturated fat than butter–and saturated fat is what makes a fat solid at room temperature. Well, if you set butter and natural lard (not that artificially hydrogenated lard stuff that is godawful) next to each other on the counter and let them come to room temperature, they will have different consistencies.

The butter will soften, but the lard will become practically gooey.

That is why when I gave my recipe for the half lard half butter pie crust, I advocate all those little tricks and techniques to keep the dough cold at all costs. Because if you get lard warm at all–it will gum up the works of any pastry making endeavor.

Compared to Crisco, which you can cut into flour while standing on your head in a hot room with the oven door open and blasting, lard is just unruly and horrible, so no wonder people switched over. Besides a lot of housewives had to render their own lard, which is a smelly and inconvenient process, which I have helped with many times.

Crisco was easy, lard was hard, and then, suddenly, lard was unhealthy, so why bother?

Except that now, we understand that not only does Crisco make a tasteless pie crust, it isn’t even good for you to eat it. Why then, make something that neither tastes good, nor is good to eat?

So, we come to the moral of my story: don’t be afraid of the pig. If you can find a source for good unhydrogenated lard, buy it and use it. (If not, give a shot to rendering your own, though do realize that if you have a small apartment, your entire place will smell like lard for a good long while.) Remember, it is soft and so might be fractious if you are making pie crust, but if you use my little tricks and tips, you can get through it. Or melt it in a pan and shallow fry up a batch of chicken–it will be the best you have ever tasted. (Or, do like my Grandma did and use mostly liquid vegetable oil mixed with lard or bacon grease for flavor.)

I have to go now and bake two pies with all butter crusts–they are for a celebration welcoming Heather back from Lebanon. I do have lard, but she’s Muslim, and well, while I don’t hold truck with fearing lard for health reasons or just because the thought of it is icky, I will not mess with spiritual reasons for avoiding the pig.

Childhood Food Memories

Deccanheffalump from thecookscottage tagged me for this meme a week or so ago, and I have been slow in posting, because I wanted to think about it a little bit. But, after a lot of thought, I have come up with five interesting, informative and entertaining (hopefully) childhood food memories to share with y’all. They are in no particular order–I thought of ordering them by age and such, but because I cannot remember some of the ages, I decided just to let them flow like water in a stream of consciousness sort of way.

Lamb: My Dad’s mother, whom most of the grandkids called “Gram,” (except for the ones who called her Hoohoo–but that is another story) taught me how to cook a leg of lamb. It was her holiday dish, her specialty, that we had once, maybe twice a year. She would order the leg special from Pearl Damus at Damus’ Market–a tiny neighborhood grocery store that Gram shopped at for about forty years. Gram always said that Pearl got the best meat, especially lamb, and she trusted Pearl and George, her brother, to get excellent lamb because they, being Lebanese, ate a great deal of it themselves. So, they knew what to look for.

The process of cooking the lamb started the night before we were to eat. She would take the leg out of the refrigerator, and unwrap it from the heavy butcher’s paper, and then would wash it gently. She’d set it on a rack over a baking pan to drip, then would pat it dry with a cotton towel. She didn’t like to use paper towels, because she said they smelled funny. As she washed and dried the leg, she would examine it all over with her eyes and hands; her long, narrow fingers would probe and smooth the flesh in circular patterns.

After it was dry, she would take up the sharp carbon steel butcher’s knife, its blade sharpened to a mere sliver of its former length and width, the steel blackened by age and use, and she would trim the silverskin and some of the fat from the leg. She was very careful in her trimming; the knife would skim over the meat in delicate strokes, and only shreds of fat and connective tissue would fall from its blade. Her hand was so practiced, she never wasted a single ounce of precious dark pink flesh.

My hands were busy with peeling fresh garlic cloves; garlic was a precious commodity, seldom used in the kitchens of my childhood, so my blunt chubby fingers picked at its papery skin carefully, not wanting to waste a single sliver of its deliciously scented mystery. An array of small jars and bottles stood like soldiers over the red formica tabletop, waiting for Gram to marshall them to her purpose.

“Lamb can be made beautifully,” Gram would intone, her cracked voice going smooth as she spoke in rhythym with the movement of her hands. “Or, it can be turned into the worst meat you have ever eaten.” The knife was laid down on the tabletop, the worn wooden handle clicking with finality. Scooping up the trimmings, she saved the morsels of fat for her dog, sealing them in an old margerine tub from my mother’s house. Into the refrigerator they would go, and to the sink went Gram, to wash her hands.

Drying them on a faded dishtowel, she took up the knife again, and said, “You have to be careful with it, and not cook it too much; if the meat goes all brown, you cooked it too long, and it will be tough and gamey. It has to be pink inside.”

Laying her left hand on the leg to steady it, her right hand brought up the knife like a dagger, and quick as a fish, the thin blade darted into the flesh, making a series of shallow and deep punctures at regular intervals in the flesh. “If you just put the garlic on the outside of the meat,” she instructed,” the flavor won’t get inside and make the meat sweet. Besides,” she paused and looked at me, her hazel eyes dancing, “if you leave the garlic on the outside, it will burn, and burnt garlic is right nasty.”

She’d keep stabbing the meat, turning the leg over as she needed, until it was riddled with small punctures of varying depths. Then, her attention would turn to the peeled, pearly garlic cloves, and she would smile as she sliced them into paper-thin slivers. “There’s no need to hurry,” she said. “If you hurry, you take the pleasure out and cut yourself and make awful messes. Start the process in enough time, and work at your own pace. You cut that last clove, and mind–make them thin–if they are this thin, they dissolve as the meat roasts and mix in with the juices of the roast and make everything good.”

My little knife flashed as I carefully, under Gram’s sharp gaze, tried to cut garlic slivers thin enough to see through, like Gram’s. Mine never were that thin,, but she’d smile, showing her gapped front teeth and say, “That’s good. You’re getting better. Now–here’s where those little fingers will come in right handy–we need to tuck a sliver or two in each little slit in the meat, like tucking in a doll goodnight.”

Gram, of course, was right–my little fingers were better than her big ones at getting the garlic into the slits in the meat–especially the ones she cut deep. She finally stopped working at that task and pulled a punchcup out of the cupboard, and lined up her little bottles of herbs and spices .

“Now, listen, while I tell you which herbs to use,” she said, as I went on with my tucking and poking, my fingers slippery with lamb fat and garlic juice. “Marjoram, just about a teaspoon, rosemary, the same, but you have to crumble it–here–smell it. Isn’t it nice?” She’d waft the open jar of rosemary under my nose and laugh when I sniffed and nearly sneezed. “Strong, isn’t it?” she’d say when I nodded.

“Thyme is my favorite,” she said, as she put about three teaspoons of it into the cup, crushing the leaves lightly between her fingertips and thumb. “It really brings out the best in lamb, even more than it does for beef.” She opened up a new jar of cracked black pepper, and dumped a liberal two teaspoons into the cup, and said, “Now, that is my secret. Plain black pepper tastes like dust compared to this–never be afraid to use plenty of pepper. It marries with other flavors and awakens your tastebuds. “

She opened up some paprika, and poured in about four tablespoons. “Paprika is more for color than flavor,” she’d mention, as she sprinkled the brick red spice over the herbs and pepper.

Then, she poured about a teaspoon and a half of kosher salt from its red and white box into her palm, and held it out to me to examine. “This is the best salt to cook with. Morton’s is fine for the table, but for cooking, kosher salt is best.”

“Grandma makes pickles with it, “I volunteered.

Gram nodded. “I bet she brines her bacon and hams in it, too, though the irony of that is interesting.” I didn’t really understand what she meant, but I was too busy watching her mix the herbs and spices in that little cut-glass punchcup to worry too much about it .

“Now,” she said, “We rub these onto the meat. When it goes in the oven, all of this will dry out, and make a brown, crisp crust.”

So, we’d scoop out the salt, spices and herbs, and rub and massage it over the meat. Gram always took a lot of time doing this step; she said it was crucial to get a little bit of the rubbed stuff down in all the slits and crevices we’d made, so it would flavor the inside of the meat, too, not just the outside.

Then she’d set the rack with the leg on it into her big black and white speckled roasting pan, cover it with the lid and set the whole thing into the bottom shelf of the refrigerator (unless it was wintertime, in which case, she would put it in the enclosed back porch) and let it sit to “settle” as she called it overnight.

The next day, she would roast it in a hot oven, basting it with the juices and a little bit of wine and melted butter. She’d take it from the oven and let it sit while she made the richest deep mahogany gravy from the drippings, along with some thinly sliced onions and some cream, flour and water. It was delightful, especially over her creamy mashed red potatoes. When it was time to slice the meat, Pappa would carve it, and it would fall away from the bone, perfectly done: the outside crackling crisp and flaky with herbs, the immediate interior a pale brown, and the very middle, near the bone, pink and sweet.

The flavor was incomparable.

To this day, although I make delicious lamb roasts, and I do it mostly like she did, mine never tastes like hers. Probably, because I cook it more rare, and use olive oil instead of butter for basting.

I think that part of what made her lamb so special is because we only ate it once or so a year, and the process of making it was such a ritualistic process that it lent the entire meal an air of festivity that colored the flavor of the food in our memories.

Saurkraut: For all that my Dad’s family were Bavarian, not many of them ate or liked saurkraut. I grew up with a taste for it, though, because Mom’s parents made it at home, and thiers tasted fresh and wonderful. The stuff we used to buy in cans had a harsh metallic taste that I could never abide, but when it came fresh from the crocks in Grandma’s basement or from one of her canning jars, it was mild, with a complex, almost floral flavor that I have never tasted again.

I used to help “put up” the saurkraut, which was an all-day affair, involving many hands, what seemed like mountains of fresh cabbages a pair of huge salt-glazed pottery crocks that must have weighed over thirty pounds each while empty, a bag of kosher salt and a battery of odd-looking and somewhat lethal tools.

We always started in September or early October, as I recall, and the first step, was the harvesting of the row upon row of cabbages. Grandpa excelled at growing massive heads of cabbage–giant heads that were larger in circumference than my own, cupped in deep green outer leaves that I once tried to taste, and found to be bitter. It was my job to run each head, back to the bushels at the end of the rows. Grandma, Uncle John, Grandpa and Mom each wielded a wicked looking machete which they used to hack the heads from the stalks with a solid thwack. Into my hands the head would go, still cradled in the outer leaves, and off I would dart, toward the big baskets, stripping leaves as I went.

Into the keeper bushel went the cabbages, with a satisfying whump, and into the other bushel went the outer leaves. When that basket filled, which it did quickly, I would heave it up and run off to the chicken coop, where I would scatter the leaves, then pause to watch the chickens descend upon them as if we hadn’t fed them in months. Those hens loved greens and would fight over the choicest bits or on a beetle that was found harbored beneath a pecked leaf.

Then, back I would go to pick up the piles of cabbage heads the cutters had left for me, and I would work fast to catch up, sweat beading on my arms and pouring down my back. The red clay dust would cling to my skin and get under my nails, then mix with the sweat and stain me so that my pale arms and face would streak with cedar-colored stain. Grandma and Mom would laugh at me and call me a redskin and say that finally, thier Indian blood was “showing” on me.

By then, the bushel of outer leaves would be full and it would be time for me to run it to the pasture where the cows placidly chewed grass and clover. They, too, loved cabbage, and would come running when they got a whiff of the sulfurous odor of it on the breeze.

I liked to feed them by hand, and pet their broad white muzzles while they chewed, thier huge molars grinding the tough, bitter leaves with a slow, determined rythym. They smelled good to me–of sun and soil, animal sweat and green grass, and they liked it when I scratched at their deep red necks and flanks, which would twitch under my fingers, as their ears flicked at flies and sweat bees.

After the heads were cut, we’d haul the baskets down to the basement, and the welcome cool darkness would enfold us. The sweat would dry, and we’d actually shiver, so cool it was kept, insulated by thick concrete block walls and poured concrete floor. Grandma would cut the heads in half, and Mom would fill the sink with cold water, and she’d salt it slightly, as we tossed the halved heads in to soak. The salt would draw out any worms or bugs hiding in the cabbage, and they’d float to the top, where I would skim them from the top, collect them in a cup and when we were done, I’d run them to the chickens who would have already had thier appetizer of cabbage leaves and would be waiting impatiently for their main course.

When I got back, Grandpa and Mom would be shaving the cabbage into whisper-thin slices on the kraut cutters that Grandpa had made–they looked like the fancy mandolines chefs use, but were made of wood with carbon steel blades he had made from an old broken tiller. The blades were wicked-looking things–the angled shape made them look like guillotine blades and the time-darkened steel looked ominously as if it were blood stained. It didn’t help that he had them honed to so sharp an edge, I wasn’t even allowed near the things; just looking at them made me shudder.

Mom and Grandpa used them blade guards that he had also made–blocks of wood with nails stuck through them. The nails would dig into the cabbage head, and they could hold the blocks of wood and thus run the cabbage up and down over the blade. The cutters were set up on cinderblock risers, so that a pile of icy-white cabbage would flutter down like snow, for me to gather in big enamelled basins, which I would carry to the crocks.

Grandma and Uncle John had the tampers–big, heavy oak pestles that Grandpa had turned on his lathe–they were slenderer at the top, then flared wide at the bottom, and each weighed close to five or six pounds. Along the length of the pestles, he had turned pretty shapes, embellishing a tool that was used at most, twice a year, because to Grandpa’s mind, just because something was functional didn’t mean it had to be ugly.

They held the tampers at the ready, hovering near the crocks, and I’d pour the basins of cabbage in, a little at a time. At Grandma’s direction, I’d dip into the kosher salt bag with a teacup, and sprinkle the proper amount over the cabbage, then layer more cabbage and more salt, ending with salt.

Then, when I went to gather more shredded cabbage, she and Uncle John would set to pounding it down with the tampers. Even in the cool of the basement, they’d work up a sweat, and pretty soon, Mom would take over the tamping, and Grandpa would shred alone, and Grandma would go upstairs to finish cooking supper, while I ran back and forth with snowy piles of cabbage in those basins, and sprinkle salt. Mom would tease her younger brother, John, if he got winded or complained of a sore back, and she would raise her tamper higher and pound harder, to urge him on to greater efforts.

On and on it would go, until supper was ready and we’d stop and eat, and then back we’d come to finish.

The last hour would seem to go on forever, as the crocks slowly filled with shredded, crushed cabbage and salt, layer after layer, ounce by ounce.

Finally, the last shred was in and Grandma would salt it one more time, then in each crock, she would do the final pounding, because she didn’t trust either Mom or Uncle John to pack it as tightly as she said it had to be. Mom would pull out the sterilized plates–big round stoneware platters that fit just perfectly inside the cirumference of the crock opening. She’d lay these on top of the cabbage, then press down with all of her weight, while John would heft up a cloth-wrapped clean cinderblock, which we used to weigh the plate down, making a good seal.

“Where’s the vinegar?” I had asked the first time I helped make kraut.

Grandma laughed. “There’s no vinegar in it,” she said. “We aren’t making pickles.”

“Then what makes it sour?” I asked, confused, as I looked over at the untouched gallons of cider vinegar stashed nearbye.

Grandma smiled and said, “Magic.”

Grandpa snorted and shook his head. “Don’t fill her head with nonsense, Dean–tell her the truth.” He knelt down next to me and said, “It ferments. There’s little microbes in the air down here that get in there and they start to eat the sugars in the cabbage and turns them sour. The salt keeps the bad microbes from growing in the crocks and the good ones turn the cabbage into kraut if you leave them alone and don’t stick your fingers in or blow your nose on it or something dirty like that.”

Microbes seemed as improbable as magic to me, but then, the first time I was really little. Now, of course, I know that it is a lactic acid fermentation that makes saurkraut, and that there is nothing particularly mystical about it at all, but tell that to a small child.

After that, we cleaned everything up, resterilized the cutters and put them away, along with the basins, the tampers and the machetes. We’d be tired–kraut making is tiring work, especially if you aim to have a hundred or so pounds of it when you are done.

After that, we’d wait while the magic or the microbes or whatever did its work. Every weekend, when we’d visit, I’d go down to the basement with Grandma to check the kraut. She’d lift off the block, then pry up the plate and beneath it, there would be bubbling and fizzing and wonderful smells forming as the fermentation went about its business.

After it was done, Grandma would have us back and we’d can some of it and leave some in a smaller crock. Canning it changed the flavor somewhat, but Grandpa didn’t like to keep it stored all winter in the crocks–he had seen a few batches of kraut stored that way go bad and stink up the house and make people sick, so we’d only eat a bit of it “fresh” after transferring it to a much smaller crock. The rest we’d put up in jars, to eat all through the fall, winter and spring, while we waited for the first fresh vegetables of the season: radishes, peas and lettuces.

The flavor of the kraut, which Grandma would cook with pig’s knuckles and knackwurst that they’d buy from a German farmer down the road, was phenominal. Grandpa put his over mashed potatoes, but I ate mine separately, with bread and butter, and boiled potatoes on the side. It was delicious, very complex, not just sour, but with a greenish, somewhat herbal or flowery flavor that was surprising. It almost tasted like spring in a way, even though the snow was blowing and the sky was grey.

Noodles: Gram taught my Mom how to make homemade noodles.

She learned from her mother-in-law, Grandma Fisher, whose mother brought the recipe from Bavaria.

I learned to make them from my mother, though I cheat and use my Atlas hand-cranked pasta roller to roll and cut them out instead of doing it all by hand.

Which is cheating, I suppose.

But it was my favorite dinner of all in my childhood, and still holds a special place in my heart.

They start with plain all purpose flour, eggs and water. Nothing else.

Mom made a pile with the flour, like a hill, and then would make a well in the center, into which she would drop the eggs, one by one. Then, a drizzle of water into the egg volcano, and she would start stirring with a fork, down in the crater. The dough would start to form as the egg yolks broke and stirred thickly into the flour. She’d stir faster and harder, and the dough would come together as a stiff mass with ragged, crumbling edges.

Then, she’d flour her hands, and start kneading it into a smooth, elastic pale yellow dough with quick movements of her small hands. She wouldn’t knead too much–the Bavarian noodles were supposed to be tender and soft, then she would tip a bowl over the dough and leave it to relax for a while–about a half an hour or so. She used to tell me that the dough had to nap, and would tell me to go be like the dough, so I would curl up under a laundry basket and try and sleep, while she drank a cup of coffee, had a cigarrette and went back to whichever Stephen King novel she was reading that day.

After it had rested, I had napped and she had smoked, she’d clear off the aquamarine-colored formica counter, wipe it down, let it dry and then sprinkle it well with flour. Then, taking up her rolling pin, she would cut the dough into pieces and start rolling it out, thinner and thinner, leaning hard into the task as she put most of her weight into it. I’d beg to help, and she would let me stand on a chair in front of her and put my hands over hers and we’d roll together, but she told me the dough was too hard for me to roll alone. We’d roll out about four or five balls of dough, one after another, down the long blue counter, like an assembly line with only two workers.

Then, she’d move the chair to the side, so I could climb up and watch as she used the old butcher knife from the long closed Fisher and Fruth slaughterhouse, and cut long, 1/2 inch strips of noodle dough out of each rolled out piece. These she cut crosswise into strips about three inches long, and then sprinkled flour over them lightly, and left them to dry. She’d go on down the line, cutting and sprinkling, and I’d watch the noodles start to curl as they air dried in place.

What a mess the entire process made! And how time consuming.

Meanwhile–while the noodles dried, Mom would put on a whole chicken to stew, along with some onions sliced up, some dried sage and thyme, salt and pepper. She’d bring it to a boil, skim the foamy bits and then cover it and let it simmer the rest of the day, while the noodles darkened slightly and curled up into brittle bits that looked somewhat like the pale shavings of wood my Grandpa made when he carved white oak on his lathe.

After the chicken meat had cooked up pink and was falling from the bone, and smelled like heaven distilled into a pot, she’d fish it out, let it cool, pull the meat from the bones and cut it bite-sized, then put it back in the pot. Celery and carrots went int then, and sometimes, if she felt extra rich, a jar of sliced mushrooms.

When Dad was home from work, she’d throw in the noodles, at last. I’d gather them up for her, shaking off the excess flour and putting them in a bowl, and she’d cook them up, then thicken the broth with a little flour and water. Salt and pepper went in, and maybe just a pinch more sage, and she’d mash the potatoes with margerine and milk, using her hand mixer to make them light and fluffy.

We’d spoon up great mounds of potatoes onto our plates, and make wells. Into the wells went ladlesful of chicken, noodles, and broth. On the side we usually had some of Grandma’s frozen corn and peas, both seasoned with margarine, and then, we’d eat until we felt like we’d burst.

That was my birthday dinner for every birthday from age one to age fourteen, I think. Soon after that, Mom quit making the noodles, because she said they were too much trouble.

I was glad to find out that my Aunt Judy still makes them, so at least I am not the only one in the family who makes them now and again. I would hate for Grandma Fisher’s noodles to cease to exist.

Chocolate Mousse: Aunt Judy made the first taste of French cooking I ever had.

She lived with her Siamese cat, Bingo, in a carriage house in Nashville, Tennessee, where she majored in Journalism at Peabody University. She was very much my role model; to my eyes, she was worldly, glamorous and beautiful, and she always had tales of adventure and romance to tell us all when she drove up to visit us in Richard, her lion-hearted cream-colored 1962 Volkswagon Beetle. She was creative, and always dabbling in the arts–painting, sculpture and calligraphy, doll-making, petit-pointe and music were all things she could do as easily as most people breathed, and she loved to cook and eat, and she was constantly wanting to try out new and interesting foods.

So, it should come as no surprise, that on one visit to West Virginia, she packed up not only Bingo, her suitcase, and walking shoes, but a dufflebag full of odd-looking kitchen equipment, some strange ingredients, and a two-volume set of a cookbook: Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

And so, she arrived, and on the third day of her visit, resolved that she was going to make us supper, in the French fashion, and was going to wow us with something called chocolate mousse, for which she had brought some special chocolate that had come all the way from France at a price she could barely afford on her single working student’s budget.

Ah, but she would not be stopped, nor deterred, nor disuaded. Off to the market and the grocery stores she swept, with me in tow, and we drove all about town, picking up this and that and the other thing, and coming home with a veritable mountain of purchases piled precariously in Richard’s back seat. A feast were going to have, and a feast she was going to make.

So, she did. There was chopping, there was mincing, there was grinding, and whipping and grating, and she whirled like a dervish in Gram’s tiny, green-painted kitchen. Her long chestnut hair done up in a scarf to keep it out of the way, she moved from stove to table to stove and back again, as she simmered, poached and roasted the main courses. The scents were incredible, and the steamy kitchen grew hotter and hotter, but I was not about to quit the premises. My eyes were filled with too many interesting sights to leave.

The books were marked and dogeared and scribbled upon in Aunt Judy’s spidery handwriting that is so full of whorls and curliques that looked rather like a language other than English. I didn’t get a chance to read much of them over her shoulder, until she opened to the recipe for the mousse, a page that was littered with chocolate brown fingerprints and smudges.

“Oh, yes,” she muttered to herself, as she plopped another pan into the teetering stack in the sink. Gram hovered in the corner, watching shrewdly. “Jude,” she finally said, “I do believe you have dirtied every pot in this kitchen.”

“I’ll wash them directly, Mamma, don’t you worry, I just have to make the mousse, then I will be right on it.”

That was my cue to hop down and do the dishes, but I wasn’t moving until I saw what a chocolate moose looked like. I had it in my small-child’s mind that she was going to mold large forest ungulates out of chocolate, and while I had eaten many chocolate rabbits in my time, and more chocolate eggs than I could count, a chocolate moose had never been on my menu before.

Well, I was surprised to find out that a mousse is not a moose, and is in fact rather like a pudding, even if it is spelled like mouse and pronounced like moose.

At first, I was disappointed, and dejectedly, went off to help Gram with the dishes, trying to hide my sorrow at not being able to eat a moose for dessert.

That lasted until Aunt Judy served the mousse after a long, fine, meal full of rich textures and wonderful flavors that had never struck my imagination until that evening.

She set before me a little punchcup full of chilled mousse, and one of Gram’s nice silver spoons, polished for the momentous dinner.

I remember scooping my first bite out rather hastily, as I was still a bit stung at not having a moose, and thinking that the French must all be mad to think that a mousse is pronounced moose, not mouse.

As soon as I popped it into my mouth, my doubts and sorrows, distain and haughtiness melted away, along with the chocolate on my tongue.

It was a cloud–a cloud made of chocolate–a Willy Wonka dream of a dessert. It was fabulous, fantastic, and beautiful beyond my understanding, and all I could do was close my eyes and wiggle in place out of joy and rapture. “Mmmmmousse,” I said, smacking my lips.

I opened my eyes to see Aunt Judy grinning at me, her smile knowing.

Pappa scraped his punchcup clean and declared, “Well, that was an awful lot of trouble for some chocolate pudding, but I reckon it was worth it.”

I just licked my spoon, dove into the cup again and smiled at Aunt Judy, and said, “Mmmmousse.”

She nodded in understanding and winked as she took another shiver-inducing bite of mousse.

Thus concludes my Childhood Food Memories. I know I am supposed to come up with five of them, but these were so long, I stopped at four. As it is, I fear that I am going to bore everyone to death with these. If you made it this far, you deserve a cookie.

If you are tagged, here’s what you do: Remove the blog at #1 from the following list and bump every one up one place; add your blog’s name in the #5 spot; link to each of the other blogs for the desired cross-pollination effect.

BeautyJoyFood
Farmgirl Fare
Becks& Posh
TheCooksCottage
Tigers & Strawberries

Next: select new friends to tag and add to the pollen count.
Then create a post listing your own five food memories.

Barrett of Too Many Chefs
Zarah Maria of Food and Thoughts
Pim at Chez Pim
Kate at Accidental Hedonist

The Locavore’s Bookshelf II: Eat Here

I wonder if anyone could possibly read Brian Halweil’s Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket and fail to be inspired to do something, anything, in order to help create a grassroots local food movement in their own hometown.

He sure got me fired up, in large part because while the book is a textbook and a manifesto and is filled with a lot of really disturbing and depressing facts about the attempts agribusiness has made to monopolize world food supplies–it is also filled with success stories.

He tells the stories of thousands of people around the world who got fed up with the way that corporate agricultural giants did business and instead of being ground under bootheels, stepped up and changed the rules of the game.

One of my favorite anectdotes involves a group of women in Zimbabwe whose husbands had been laid off in a factory closing, decided to go into the peanut butter-making business. They realized that the peanut butter they were buying was made by foreign-owned corporations with imported nuts, yet peanuts are a major crop in Zimbabwe. They decided that they could buy peanuts from local farmers and produce peanut butter more cheaply, thus saving local consumers money, supporting local farmers and providing local jobs.

It sounds kind of like a weird pipe dream–but they did it. It worked. Their homegrown company is self-sufficient, has turned a serious profit and their product has been outselling mainstream brands in local stores and supermarkets.

Halweil’s information gathering is truly global–his statistics and anectdotes are drawn in from around the globe. He even mention people and businesses closer to home–ACEnet (The Appalachian Center for Economic Networks) and Casa Nueva, a worker-owned restaurant that sources 85 percent of their food locally, are both based in Athens, Ohio, and are part of the backbone of the serious community efforts to create a viable, sustainable local foodshed in southeastern Ohio.

ACEnet’s community kitchen and business education programs are held up by Halweil as being great examples of grassroots organizations helping citizens start up small, local food-based businesses. He mentions several of the dozens of local food startups that have been given a leg up by ACEnet in the past decade, including Herbal Sage Tea Company and Integration Acres.

The book fairly teems with inspirational stories; each chapter ends with an in-depth profile of an individual or group whose efforts have succeeded in promoting the cause of a safe, inexpensive and reliable local food supply. Far too many books of this kind focus so intensely on the negative, on the overwhelmingly dysfunctional state of agriculture today, that it tends to make the reader feel as if we are powerless to stop the tide of unsustainably-raised, nutritionally inferior and grotty-tasting foodstuffs that threatens to engulf the plates of the world. Halweil’s approach is not to rely on fear and anxiety to sell his message; he doesn’t sugar-coat the ugly facts in order to get his readers to swallow them, but instead balances them with concrete ideas for what ordinary citizens can do, and have done, in order to make the dire situation better.

And I think that is what the main thrust of the book is–it is about reminding people that we all have the power to change the world, in large and small ways, with each action we undertake. It is about standing up and doing something–not just laying down and accepting that the world is the way it is, and there is no sense in bothering to try and change it. Halweil compiles a list of things that anyone can do to help step away from the unsustainable agriculture merry-go-round, and then in his appendices, gives a huge list of resources with web addresses to help the reader find more information on how to achieve their own personal goals of food independence.

What the Hell Does “Sustainable” Mean, Anyway?

“Sustainable” is a term that is appearing much in the news these days, and it is often paired with the word, “local” and “agriculture,” or “foodshed.”

I’d like to take a moment here to discuss what “sustainable” actually means, and then we can pair it with the term, “agriculture” to see if I can build an understanding of what exactly I am talking about when I say, “sustainable agriculture.” Because, while I have in my mind a fairly specific idea, I may not be conveying it very well to readers who may not have as much background in farming, gardening and the study of food to really grasp what it is I mean.

First of all, the Merriam-Webster dictionary gives as a primary definition of “sustainable” the somewhat redundant statement: “capable of being sustained.” When one looks up “sustain,” one learns that the primary definition is “to give support or relief to,” while the secondary definition is “to supply with sustainance, or to nourish,” and the tertiary definition is “to keep up or prolong.”

While the primary and secondary definitions are tangentially applicable (particularly the secondary meaning), it is in the tertiary definition that we find the crux of the matter. Something which is sustainable is something which can be kept up or prolonged over a period of time.

When you return to the entry for the word “sustainable,” you find that the secondary meaning is an explication of how the word relates to agriculture: “of, relating to, or being a method of harvesting or using a resource so that the resource is not depleted or permanently damaged.”

So, when I talk about “sustainable agriculture,” I am not necessarily talking about only organic farming, and when I talk about “sustainable foodways,” I do not intrinsically mean only “local, vegetarian, organic, traditionally-farmed, or non-genetically-modified” foods and food systems. To be “sustainable,” a farming practice does not necessarily have to be anti-modern; “sustainability” does not always infer a preference for traditional methods over technology.

Balance

To really understand what sustainability means, one must examine the large picture, and imagine the hundreds of thousands of interactions between human activity and environment and how these interactions impact entire ecosystems. One must look at the balance of benefit and detriment, but not only in a short term view, but also in a longer-term analysis.

The way that I see it, for something to be “sustainable,” it must be in balance.

In short, “sustainable” refers to an environment made up of ecosystems where human, animal, plant, and microbial life work together along with non-organic, non-living components of the biosphere in ways which do not deplete the terrestrial resources necessary to sustain life.

Human beings, because of our ability to reason, build tools and most importantly, our ability to manipulate living systems on large and small scales, are the greatest determining factor over whether or not an agricultural system, society or foodway is sustainable or not. Humanity is an integral part of the environment–we are not apart from it, though much discussion in the popular media and political realms gives the illusory impression that human beings should be seen as separate and distinct from “the environment.” This fallacious line of thinking is part of the worldview that reduces complexity that is “the environment” to simply a set of resources meant to be exploited for human gain, and is intrinsic to the religious idea that humans are somehow above “Nature” which must be subjegated or tamed.

The most basic argument against that worldview is the simple fact that the resources on this planet are finite, that there are historic and prehistoric examples of societies which have risen to great heights only to fall due to the practice of unsustainable food production techniques, and that while our current level of technological ability has given humanity the ability to feed every human on this planet adequately, there are still those who starve to death while others eat so much that they die of diseases related to the ingestion of too many calories.

The world is out of balance.

Adoption of sustainable methods of agriculture may help humanity take few steps toward creating a healthier balance within the various ecosystems that make up the entire biosphere of this planet.

Resources

The basic resources necessary to sustain life on this planet are air, water, soil and sunlight. Extensive damage to any one of these resources can compromise the ability of this planet to continue to teem with living beings.

Air, which is made up gaseous oxygen, carbon dioxide and various other gases, is a basic building block in all organic proceses. Of course, we know that all living animal species, and most microbial species must have oxygen to survive, while carbon dioxide is necessary for plants to carry on photosynthesis, which is the chemical process of converting sunlight into stored energy which can be used by plants and animals as food.

Air pollution can interfere with these basic life-giving processes in many ways. One of the most elemental ways is in the reduction of available oxygen, which depletes oxygen levels in the bloodstream of mammals, for example. Or, if a great deal of carbon particles are present in the air, they can be breathed into lungs and cause irritation and illness, reducing the lung’s ability to dissolve oxygen into the bloodstream, which gives the net result of depleting the avialable oxygen in a given organism. An increase in carbon dioxide paradoxically helps plants grow lushly, yet is tied in part to a depletion in the plants’ ability to store nutrients which are consumed by other life forms.

Water is even more necessary to life than food; a human, depending on how much fat reserves they possess, can live for about sixty days without food, but without water, one can only live for a maximum of about three days.

One of the reasons that the Earth is abundantly covered in a myriad of life forms is because of the large amount of water present in the biosphere. However, most of that water (around 92.7%) is saline, which cannot be consumed by most animal life and is deadly to most terrestrial plants as well. The remaining 7.3% of the Earth’s water is fresh water, and it is upon that small percentage that all terrestrial (land-based) life depends.

Soil is a general term for the mineral and organic-based substance which covers much of the earth’s surface in which plants grow. Soil is made up from ground up rocks, decaying organic matter from plants and animals, and microorganisms which facilitate the physical and chemical breakdown of organic materials. Naturally stratified into layers, with the uppermost layers (called, strangely enough, topsoil), being the richest in organic materials, soil provides the supplementary nutrients and minerals needed by plants to live; these materials are also stored by the plant in leaves, roots and stems and thus can be ingested and utilized by animals as well. Any sort of depletion or loss of fertile topsoil has the potential to jeopardize the ability of humans and animals to live in any given ecosystem.

Topsoil depletion can occur through the physical action of water in the form of runoff carrying particles downstream. The wind, too, can blow fine soil particles which are not covered by vegetation far away; one of the most famous historical occurances of massive topsoil depletion took place in the Great Plains region of the United States during the 1930’s, in a period of severe drought that is commonly called “The Dust Bowl.” In that period, agricultural practices combined with weather conditions to detrimentally affect soil retention, and helped lead to widespread hunger and economic instablity for a great many rural Americans, while separate economic factors including a crash in the stock market created similar circumstances for urban dwellers, leading to a decade-long economic collapse known as “The Great Depression.”

Sunlight is a final basic natural resource for life. It is the major source of heat on Earth; in addition, it is the basic energy component upon which all life is based. Without adequate sunlight, plants cannot photosynthesize and convert sunlight into stored chemical energy or convert carbon dioxide and water into carbohydrates. The results of these proceses are the backbone upon which all other life rests. In essence, without sunlight, almost every physical and chemical process that supports life on this planet ceases.

Sustainable Models of Agriculture

Sustainable models of agriculture take into account the effects of any given agricultural practice on the health and balance of the ecosystem in which the farming is taking place, with emphasis placed not only on the short term economic advantages which may occur as a result of the practice, but also on the long-term economic, social, and environmental advantages. In taking this sort of holistic view of agriculture and putting methods of plant production and livestock managment into the context of the interconnected nature of the biosphere, sustainable agriculture is based in large part upon scientific observation of the effects of human activity upon natural resources and the environment. Although many of its techniques and precepts are based on traditionally practiced methods of agriculture, the ideals of sustainablity are not simply a nostalgia-driven harkening back to a mythic “Golden Age” when farmers worked their fields in harmony with Nature, which is often personified and anthropomorphized in the form of an Earth Goddess.

It is, however, a clear indictment of the opposing model of agriculture, which is based upon centralized economic control of natural resources such as water, the use of large amounts of unrenewable petroleum in the form of fuel to run mechanical planting, tilling and harvesting equipment and in the form of pesticides and fertilizers which are often derived from petrochemical sources, and the consolidation of farmland far from the urban centers which rely upon food produced in ever-more-distant areas. This corporate controlled, mechanical model of agriculture relies upon government subsidies of fresh water and petroleum in order to continue working; if either of those subsidies should cease to function, the abundance of cheap foodstuffs produced in this way will either cease to exist altogether, or, more likely, rise precipitously in price.

With crude oil prices recently soaring to the price of $64.00 per barrel, and the looming spectre of peak oil production imminent (or already reached), it is likely that the currently dominant, petroleum-based model of agriculture will cease to be economically viable, and instead of realizing its promise of a well-fed world, result in widespread food shortages and famine.

In addition to the decline of the economic feasiblility of petroleum-based agriculture, various troubling ecological consequences of modern factory farming models have arisen. The decline of underwater aquafers, contamination of groundwater with pesticide and fertilizer residues, and waste runoff from livestock feedlots, the increased production of greenhouse gases in the form of methane from increased numbers of meat animals, the rise of incidents of “dead zones” of de-oxygenated water in oceans attributed to agricultural runoff–all of these negatively impact the quality of the natural resources which sustain the life of every human being on this planet.

In imagining and utilizing alternative methods of plant and production and livestock management which take into account local differences in microclimates on available plots of land, and advocating for more localized food production and the growing of food closer to and within urban centers, sustainable models of agriculture may present some solutions to the problems created by petroleum-based factory farming. However, switching over from unsustainable agricultural practices to sustainable ones is a process which takes time, money, and consumer support.

Current research shows more Americans than ever before are interested in eating organically produced food. According to the Organic Trade Association, the U.S. organic foods industry grew 20 percent in 2003 and accounted for nearly $10.4 billion in consumer sales. The OTA also reports in their 2004 manufacturer survey that organic foods sales have grown between 17% to 21% each year since 1997. According to the USDA, the number of farmers markets in the United States has dramatically increased by 111% from 1994 to 2004. According to the 2004 National Farmers Market Directory, there are over 3,700 farmers markets operating in the United States.

These statistics clearly show an increased interest among American consumers in the development of alternative food sources that go beyond the factory farm/corporate grocery store model. Another sign that interest in sustainable agricultural models is increasing is the number of professional associations, consumer groups, and educational institutes which have formed in order to provide support, education and assistance to farmers and consumers who have a vested interest in more sustainable models of food production. A Google search on “sustainable agriculture” produces 1,260,000 links to websites pertaining to the issue, including links to these very active educational organizations.

As small farmers, many of whom are not eligible for the government subsidies that support giants like ConAgra, discover that they can make more profit by marketing directly to the home cooks and chefs, more and more will turn to producing food by sustainable methods. Studies have shown that even though sustainable methods are more labor intensive and require more extensive knowledge and understanding of the local environment than the equipment-heavy petrochemical model of agriculture, small farmers who practice these principles have managed to not only survive, but thrive and prosper.

In short, sustainable agriculture appears to be here to stay, if for no other reason than the simple fact that petrochemical based farming is simply not going to be able to survive the declining oil supply. This gives an unexpected advantage to small family farmers who perhaps are more able to switch to sustainable methods, and who can more easily diversify thier operations in order to meet consumer demands. Consumers also stand to benefit, though perhaps not necessarily in the short term; as oil prices rise and subsidies dwindle, factory farmed foods will no longer have the artificially low pricetag that Americans have come to expect. In response to consumer demand for less expensive organically produced foods, more farmers will step up to fill the demand, eventually leading to lowered consumer costs.

For more information about sustainable agriculture, here is a list of Web sources:

Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education
National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service
Alternative Farming Systems Information Center

In future posts, I will write more about specific sustainable agricultural practices, and muse further on the meaning of the word, “sustainable.”

Right now, however, I have to run and make dinner!

Hillbilly Farmgirl Supper

Yesterday, we did pretty well with eating locally. For brunch, we had some quesadillas made from Holmes County, Ohio cheddar and smoked cheddar, with Organic Valley sour cream and the Calico Salsa I made last week. The tortillas were godawful–I would have done better making my own. Whatever healthy brand they were, I am not buying again–they had the texture of cardboard. Ugh.

But, the rest of it was good. I just thought it was an affront to the good Amish cheese to pair it with tortillas which tasted like they were made from cedar shavings. I found the cheeses, along with Walnut Creek butter, also from Holmes County, at Curds and Whey at the North Market in Columbus.

We had errands to run in Columbus, so I figured I would see what local dairy products I could find while I was out.

I was thrilled to discover that Wild Oats in Columbus (we had to stop so Zak could get his cologne–WO is the only place he knows of where he can buy it without ordering it off the Internet) is now carrying Hartzler’s Family Dairy milk. It comes in great glass containers–which you can return for a deposit, though, I think I will keep mine as it reminds me of the glass milk bottle my Gram kept in her fridge full of ice water in the summer.

Unfortunately, I picked up skim milk instead of two percent–because the glass bottles all look the same. From the appearance on the website, they usually have cardboard hangtags over the bottleneck to label thier products clearly so that ditzy folks like myself don’t go and buy the wrong milk, but these tags were not in evidence at Wild Oats. So, when Morganna and I tasted the milk and said, “Ick. Tastes like skim,” there was a reason.

It was skim.

Duh.

So, maybe I will make ice cream out of it!

Supper, however, was an unqualified success. We had ribeyes from Bluescreek Farms that Zak cooked out on the grill, grilled corn on the cob from Cowdery Farms, Green Zebra sliced tomatoes from Athens Hills CSA, and my very own country style green beans, which featured ingredients from all over the Athens Farmer’s Market. Dessert was blackberry-raspberry pie; the fruit came from the farmer’s market, the lard from Bluescreek, the butter from Holmes County, and the flour from King Arthur flour, which means it is from somewhere. I mean, I have no clue where it was grown, but it is great flour nonetheless. (I still haven’t heard back from the farmer in Licking County on the issue of whether or not he can ship me some of his homegrown hard and soft wheat flour.)

Now, let me talk a bit about supper.

It took me way back to my childhood–because it was very much a typical summer menu in my growing up days, whether I was in town with my parents or Gram and Pappa, or in the country with Grandma, Grandpa and Uncle John. In the summer, there were certain things that were nearly always on the table, and I want to talk a little bit about them.

First of all, there were always sliced tomatoes. At Grandma’s house, they were apt to be on the table three meals a day, and we always ate them up, and never got tired of them. At Gram’s house, they were always there for supper, but at lunch, tomatoes appeared on BLT’s or on cheese ‘n’ mater sammitches. (That’s how Pappa said it, so that is how I am writing it.) Those were made with thin sliced Pepperidge Farms white sammitch bread, homemade pimento cheese spread from Pearl Damus’ Market down on Washington Street, and thick slices of ripe beefsteak tomato sprinkled with black pepper.

Man, alive, those were good. Pearl could throw down and whip up a batch of pimento cheese that would make your head spin and your eyes pop out it was so good.

At my parent’s house, we had sliced tomatoes every dinner once tomatoes were in season, along with the usual meat, two vegetables and a starch. On a good night, we had sliced cucumbers or quick pickles, too. (Quick pickles, for those who are not hillbillies, are sliced fresh cukes, diluted white vinegar or cider vinegar, sliced onions, salt and pepper, and sometimes sugar. I didn’t like them with sugar, but I did like that my Mom always put ice cubes in them to make them crispy-cold and almost frozen. Boy were they refreshing.)

So, I ate a lot of tomatoes growing up.

(And I was really depressed to discover I was allergic to them–not that it stopped me from eating them. Apparently, the allergy wasn’t so bad as all of that, because I yet live and I still eat large amounts of tomatoes.)

Corn on the cob appeared at least three times a week in the season, except at Grandma’s house. Then, it appeared nearly every night, and when it didn’t, that was because it showed up at lunchtime. It was my job to go pick the corn and shuck it. Grandma would wait until the water was about to break into a dancing boil, and would send me out “quick like a bunny” to pick a big old basket of corn and shuck it as fast as my hands could tear. I hated the silk, and Grandpa was particular about it, so I had to be careful and pluck each bit up with shaking fingers, as I bounced in anticipation of the three to five ears I was fixin’ to eat when we sat down.

Green beans were another favorite, and they were only fixed one way–long cooked.

Hillbillies don’t know from crunchy green beans. I liked to eat them raw, myself, but I was looked upon as some sort of mutant life form from another planet because of that. I think my cousins thought I was half lagomorph or something because I ate every vegetable God made raw, including green beans. (I am also supposed to be allergic to green beans. You notice I am still eating them and am still alive. I think maybe my allergist was full of…well, beans.)

I always said, “But they taste so -green- raw.”

And they would blink at me and say, “That’s because they are green, ya dumb ole girl.”

Well, be that as it may, everyone else, including me, ate them cooked in only one way–to death.
Now, let me qualify this. Green beans do taste lovely and fresh and green when they are raw. And when they are lightly cooked, such as sauteed or stir fried or steamed, and seasoned properly, they are perky and crisp and delicious.

But let me tell you–if you cook ’em up right when you are cooking them to death, they melt in your mouth and make you want to sing. They turn a deep olive green and start to break down into the cooking water, but that is okay, because that juice turns into something magical–it becomes pot likker, which is ambrosia to a hillbilly.

But there is a secret to long-cooking your green beans. You can’t just stick them in a pot with water and salt and pepper and boil them until they expire into a huddled mass and expect them to taste like something. All that does is waste beans, water and time.

No, no, no. You must not do that.

You have to do what generations of Applachian cooks have done for centuries.

You have to put pork fat of some sort into the pot.

Smoked, preferably.

I bet you could see that coming. Smoked pig bits make everything better.

And, you can throw in some tiny new potatoes, too–because they will soak up that pot likker and turn all melty delicious.

And onion–onions are classic in the dish.

And, if you are me–you have to throw in some garlic and a chile pepper, just because to not do it is a wasted opportunity for goodness.

But, you know, you don’t have to cook them all day. Naw, not at all. My grandma did cook them all day when she wanted them for supper, meaning the evening meal, but if she cooked them for dinner, meaning the noon meal, she never cooked them all day, yet they still came out all melty-smoky-wonderful with gold-green pot likker that I would drink in a cup.

She was a clever woman, and employed technology–she used a pressure cooker.

Which is what I did last night when I made my very own rendition of the dish, which I call

Hillbilly Nouveau Haricots Verts

Ingredients:

2 thick slices bacon cut into 1″ square pieces
1 medium onion, sliced thinly
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 jalapeno chile, sliced (you can leave it out, but I’d rather you didn’t)
1 pound strung, snapped, washed and drained fresh green beans (half-runners are the best)
6-10 tiny new potatoes, scrubbed and quartered
1 1/2 cups chicken broth
salt and pepper to taste

Method:

In the bottom of your pressure cooker, spread out your bacon, and cook on medium heat until crispy-chewy. Remove bacon and drain on paper towels and reserve. If there isn’t enough fat, add some bacon drippings (y’all do save those don’t you?) or some olive oil.

Add onions, and cook until they are golden and smelling really good. Add garlic and chile, and keep stirring until the onions are a nice brown color and everything smells delicious.

Throw in the beans and the potatoes, then the chicken broth, salt and pepper. (Be careful with the salt–how much you add depends on how salty your bacon is.)

Bring to a boil. Put the lid on your cooker, lock it down, bring to full pressure, turn down the heat to low and cook on full pressure for 12 minutes. Remove from heat, release pressure, open cooker and take a look. If the beans are dark olive green and starting to fall apart, and the potatoes are starting to break down and it all smells really good, it is done.

If the beans look too green and healthy, put the lid back on, bring the pressure up and cook for another couple of minutes.

Check for salt and pepper and serve with the bacon sprinkled on top.

Note:

If you don’t have a pressure cooker, be prepared to cook the beans all day. Put them on the back of the stove, bring them to a boil, turn the heat down and simmer until they are dead and gone. Then, they are good. You will need more broth to do this–like maybe a quart or so, to make up for all that will simmer away. The pressure cooker is blessed in that it uses much less liquid.

Now, you will note that in all this recitation and talk about my childhood meals, I haven’t mentioned the meat. Well, there is a reason.

I don’t much remember it. There was no typical meat of my childhood suppers. It was the vegetables that every table had in common.

But right here–I do want to say–David and Cheryl at Bluescreek grow some mighty fine ribeyes, and Zak cooks ’em up right fine and dandy.