Read Online Best Food Writing 2013 by Holly Hughes - Free Book Online Page B

for quality in all foods, even if such products are scarce and most of the “artisanal” cheeses that we buy are really made by industrial techniques. When I speak of “proof that good work takes time,” I mean that the market generally rewards good traditional products much higher prices. Sticking to the example of cheese, some of the best farm cheese makers, to make more profit from a better product, are going backwards: rejecting silage in favor of pasture and hay, creating “clean” raw milk without the use of sterilizing chemicals on teats and equipment. (The milk contains microorganisms but predominately good ones, enough of them to overwhelm the bad.)
    I live in northeastern Vermont, where the view is mostly fields and woods, but my work can be as intense as anyone’s and mostly I look at a computer screen. During the warm months, when I’m done for the day, I go outdoors and immediately I relax. In a cliché, I breathe deeply, and I feel my chest expand and relax. I walk into the garden: I hoe, kneel down and pull weeds, maybe thin some seedlings, eat a leaf of lettuce, a carrot, some berries. I may accomplish something, but there’s no goal or focus. These are acts of appreciation and pleasure, nothing at all to do with speed or efficiency. They’re the slowest.
    Some of the most delicious food, including some of the greatestdishes, is made using cooking techniques that by nature are slow. Most of these involve liquid—braising, poaching, stewing, soup making. But proper roasting, too, takes time, whether on a spit or in an oven (though the latter is really baking). Some examples of excellent results from slow tactics are a French navarin (braised lamb shoulder with spring vegetables, including turnips), oxtail soup (which starts as a braise), braised lamb shanks with whole garlic cloves and bulb fennel, pieds et pacquets from Marseille (sheep’s feet with packages of sheep stomach), osso buco from Milan, and the beef brasato made in different regions of northern Italy.
    Of course, those who believe in slow food don’t really oppose fast cooking techniques. What’s wrong with toast? Or call it bruschetta. Certain techniques are inherently fast—sautéing, frying in deep fat, grilling. They apply high heat directly to relatively thin or small pieces of food, and if the cooking goes on too long the food burns. A lamb chop grilled medium rare takes just two or three minutes per side. A classic French omelette takes less than five minutes from cracking the eggs to sliding the cooked omelette onto a plate. Spinach, with the washing water still clinging, can take just a minute to cook through in a wide covered pot, stirred once or twice, a hybrid of boiling and steaming. Peas, green beans, cut-up carrots, turnips, or broccoli put into a big pot of boiling water don’t take more than a few minutes. (You can boil spinach, too, but if it’s young and delicate, it loses too much flavor to the water.) Then, to have all the good qualities of this quickly cooked food, you have to eat it quickly, before the vegetables lose their utterly fresh taste, before the grilled meat or fish loses juice and the bit of outer crispness.
    Slowness really means living at the right speed for whatever you are doing, living more in the present moment, rather than looking always ahead to the next thing: deadlines, bills, future plans. It’s not about being inefficient or taking too much time. It’s about moving at the right speed.
    â€œSlow” has all the connotations of the words ecological, small-scale, human, just as “organic” used to have for many people. Yet for all that “slow food” is a wonderful phrase, “slow” doesn’t have quite the right literal meaning. Better words might be “real,” “authentic,” “genuine,” “decent,” “honest,” “ethical,” all of them difficult to