The Local Table

We are spending part of tomorrow helping a friend complete some fencing. So, in keeping with last week’s local theme, as well as not having written a new post… here is one from the archives.

We cook with lard

We were sitting around last night during the lightning storm. Our neighbor Tim was playing the banjo while we talked. We were eating bowls of chili verde and gently arguing the merits of what a local food culture means. There were six of us for our monthly discussion, as much a convivial outing as it was a chance to exercise the gray matter.

In an era of global food distribution what is a local cuisine? I remember the awkward first outing by the Knoxville Slow Food chapter when they hosted a kimchi workshop. One can certainly use local ingredients to make kimchi, and we do. But hosting that workshop highlighted the difficulty of defining a local cuisine in this global economy and era of global migration.

When the current epoch declines, as it surely will, and we are left to pick up the pieces, what will our local table look like? All the various peoples will certainly add a mixture to that table. But the table will be influenced by what is producible in the local food shed. Your post-global cooking culture will probably still have access to imported foods. But, if coming from any distance then they will be expensive and used more for special celebratory events.

Waverly Root, in his excellent The Food of France, organizes the culinary regions based on the fat used in cooking. Which I always thought was a marvelous way to view local cooking: butter, lard, goose fat or oil. It made sense to me. All of our cooking begins with the base fat used to add flavor. The fat used in non-global cuisines is a product of your land base. A nice Mediterranean climate and you will use olive oil in your cooking. A more mountainous land or one composed of poorer soils and you are more likely to use lard or goose fat, a land composed of rich pasture land and the cooking will be based on butter. The fat used in cooking seems as convenient a way as any to explore the local table.

But for many regions of this country what could be or what was a local table is now buried beneath so many Costco’s, Trader Jo’s and Walmart’s at the intersection of an interstate commerce. That table, if glimpsed, has a museum like quality.  Like a carefully curated exhibit of old cookbooks to remind us what our table may look like again in the future.

I’m fortunate to have come from a cuisine in south Louisiana that is still vibrant and has survived the global march, largely intact. But after thirty years in Tennessee I only catch rare sightings of what an indigenous cooking culture here would look like. But that table, when it does emerge, will consist of what we raise in this, our particular food-shed. My guess is that lard and butter will once again reign supreme and define the table. And olive oil will be a mere Mary Celeste of the imagination, ghosting along the coast in search of a port.

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Reading this weekend: the Oedipus plays.

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13 thoughts on “The Local Table

  1. Your food shed may well be positioned to grow peanut and soybean. Both legumes and both very good sources of plant oils. Sunflower could also be a plant oil source in your neck of the woods. The technology to squeeze the oil out of these seeds is no more complicated than grinding grains for feed. There’s no cholesterol in plant based oils and fats, but recent evidence suggests this latter claim to wholesomeness is less important than once reckoned (this assumes the use of animal fats is not overdone).

    Can you keep lard on the shelf? We always kept it refrigerated at home. We had lard for a while after butchering, and bought margarine or butter in between. All three of the oilseed grains mentioned above are easily kept whole for very long periods – allowing one to press oil as needed. The residues left from oil pressing are also edible or useful as feed ingredients. Vegetable oils need no refrigeration and have a pretty decent shelf life.

    Flavors? Ok, this is more complicated. Smoked bacon yields one of the tastiest fat drippings I know of. Not sure I can breed a soybean with oil to compete at that level…

    • Ah, the old canola and soybean advocate rears on his hind-quarters (Rumpole reference) to the defense.

      We buy an unfiltered peanut oil that tastes pretty marvelous. And my buttermilk fried chicken Saturday night, fried in refined peanut oil, was pretty dang marvelous. For me, the main difference between soybeans and peanuts vs. lard, butter, goose fat, and olive oil is that of annual vs. perennial or livestock by-product. The self-sufficing farm (different than the self-sufficient farm) would keep all cash-purchases to a minimum. And they would have less desire to allocate land for the production of an oil if their needs could be met easily by using one of those four.

      Meanwhile, the larger observation I was hoping to make is that the land shapes the cuisine in ways we have forgotten within a global market.

      Hmm, smoked oils, shouldn’t be hard to do. Just a few years ago a bacon flavored Old-Fashioned was all the rage.

  2. I toil on a chalky outcrop. Lots of rain (except, of course, right now); butter it is.
    Generally however, this surely is tallow country.

    You can even buy it at the butcher’s. If you preorder it. And content yourself with whatever the factory farm machine spits out.

      • I tried smoking a cheap cigar two times.
        The first time and the last time. [As I recall, it smelled, spit and sputtered too. Perhaps it was really a tallow candle]

        • Your tallow burns (at) both ends.
          Smoke gets in you eye.
          Herbaceous life meets small birds at the forest’s edge.
          I’ve seen it.

          • Hickory with squirrel along my path
            The critter chirps some sort of wrath
            A walnut shares its fragrant scent
            Now wondering where this great time went
            And counting up the blessings math

            Observing nature makes my day
            Through thickish clouds shines one lone ray
            Birdsong floats throughout the air
            Peacefully still I truck no care
            Just thankful for this wondrous way

          • One should have known that a son of the soil from Indiana would learn at the knee of the bard of Greenfield. Mr. Riley rides again! Well done, sir.

  3. Getting out of hand

    There was a young man
    born from Stamboul
    dy-ed his hair
    thought that was cool
    poet came by
    played on his sax
    listen she did
    and spitted his wax

    • Indeed. But ’tis no reason to quit…

      When the limericks they get out of hand
      And we get huddled and set in a band
      When our rhymes go untested
      We’re eventually bested
      By the better angels across this land.

      Or we could go this way:

      Upon rhyming you’ve no reason to quit
      If your purpose is to be legit
      For a good rhyme a day
      Is like baling hay
      It’s work, but it keeps your mind fit

  4. Chauvinistic British&Irish Lions Supporter Getting Ahead Of Himself

    I’ve no doubt that the first game is won
    Little Bryn won’t have even come on
    if he did he’ll have lasted
    not much longer than an aster
    underfoot of our boys rumblin’ on

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