Slow Cooking, Slow Eating

The enjoyment of good food and drink in many countries was once the particular preoccupation of the wealthy right wing, of people who had the time and money to indulge in luxuries. Slow Food, whether the organization or the concept, is grittier. In the United States, for instance, there’s an allied new wave of young apprentice farmers and food artisans who have little concern for money. Anyone who follows the news closely these days recognizes food as the highly political topic it always was, from government subsidies to the “externalized” costs of industrial farming (such as water pollution) to the content of school lunches to hunger at home and abroad. Food in all its complexity, including its capacity for deliciousness, is a subject increasingly associated with the left wing.

As the North American interest in food and farms has grown, more people have become familiar with the organization Slow Food, which was started in 1986 by leftwing intellectuals in the gastronomically and vinously rich Italian region of Piedmont. (Right away I have to pause and say that I work with people who do or did work for Slow Food, but I’m not much of a joiner, and a few years ago I let my brief membership lapse.) The immediate cause for starting Slow Food was the opening of the first McDonald’s in Italy, near the Spanish Steps in Rome. A few years later, in 1989, the Slow Food movement went international when delegates from 15 countries met in Paris to sign the Slow Food Manifesto.

This short document is rather wonderful. It says: “We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods.” The manifesto contains a large element of hope: “May suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency.” And the manifesto proposes just that single solution to the problem: “A firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life.”

As slogans go, the meaning of “slow food” is perfectly clear. It’s the opposite of fast food. The Slow Food mother organization in Italy celebrates the country’s traditional regional food, publicizing and arranging support for many individual foods. Those include lardo di Colonnata and alici di menaica. The first is cured fat back, as prepared in marble coffers in a particular quarrying village above Carrara in Tuscany; the second is cured anchovies, caught in an ancient design of net in just one fishing port 100 miles south of Naples. The symbol of Slow Food is the snail. Slow Food opposes mass-production and a high-speed life. It supports what I would call a civilized life.

These days Slow Food talks about Slow everything — even Slow Fish, meaning fish that have been caught in ways that don’t result in overfishing or other damage to the environment. But “slow food” also has a lower-case meaning. And a slow life doesn’t revolve just around food.

You’re living a slow life when you gather seashells along the shore, feed a campfire, visit a nearly empty museum on a weekday morning, talk late into the night, read an ink-on-paper book cover to cover without stopping to do much else, and, I would say, if you take the time to be bored. Part of being civilized is not just being slow but occasionally coming to a stop, establishing a point of reference for the moment when you start moving again. When you stop you aren’t really stopping, of course, because that’s often when good ideas rise to the surface. (...)

Some of the most delicious food, including some of the greatest dishes, 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 looses 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.

by Edward Behr, The Art of Eating |  Read more:

Photo: Kimberly Behr