From the opening of Salumi: The Craft of Italian Dry Curing
Michael and Brian hit the nail on the head, this is what we're all about
Are you ready for some magic ?
Making the Ancient New
Something truly amazing
has been underway in America for more than a decade now. The issue is so vast
that for decades we lost sight of it, maybe even never saw it in this country
until recently: the importance of food. If you’d tried to argue that food was not “important”
to one of our early ancestors, or to someone today who doesn’t have enough of
it, they’d look at you as if you’d been living on another planet. But because
food became so easily attained in the developed world, thanks to shipping,
refrigeration, and infinite-shelf-life processing, we took it for granted. And
we have only recently become aware of its importance on a national scale
because our food supply has become imperiled and food-related illnesses, from
bacterial contamination to diabetes, have begun to make us sick on an epidemic
scale. The ramifications of this relatively new awareness are diverse: the FDA
debates regulating how much salt companies can put in processed foods,
physicians argue about whether or not food is as chemically addictive as
alcohol or nicotine and why children’s food allergies have become as common as
colds, and Congress debates farms subsidies. We’ve turned chefs, once anonymous
tradespeople, into celebrities. Food issues and cooking as sport have become
common entertainment, food bloggers are attracting six-figure book deals, and
farmers’ markets are flourishing throughout the country.
Amid this sturm
und drang, a few truly wonderful changes have moved in like soothing
waves through our culture. Changes so fine and unlikely that Brian and I
believe that there has never been a better time in this country’s history to be
a cook and to take pleasure in the cooking and sharing and eating of food.
America
has always been a culture that embraces the new. But in the case of our food
post World War II, “new” was not good for us. New was in fact bad in a lot of
ways, and we have only in the past decade begun to recognize it. The trans fats
in margarine, a “healthy” alternative to butter, actually made it unhealthy. We
learned that there was high-fructose corn syrup in our bread and that the dyes
added to processed food to make it more appealing were harming our kids. The
antibiotics used to keep our cows healthy created a new bacterium that has
killed and maimed.
But thanks to a few voices in
the food world, “old food” and “slow food” have become new. And America has
embraced this. We can only hope that, as the newness wears to inevitable age,
we still sense the pleasure in the weathered surface and the clean, simple food
that looks on the plate as it did coming out of the ground, that we recognize
the power and importance of a well-made cheese, or a braised beef brisket, or
potatoes mashed with whole milk, butter, and salt.
As ever, chefs have led the
way in our new understanding, and their work and knowledge has filtered down
into home kitchens. Alice Waters fostered a recognition of the value of
naturally raised food we grow ourselves or that is grown by farmers near where
we live when she opened Chez Panisse in 1971. Larry Forgione asked us to pay
attention to our regional cuisines when he opened An American Place in 1983,
celebrating a country so huge that what we grow or catch in one corner is in
the other corner vastly different: grapefruit and grouper in the southeast,
apples and salmon in the northwest, and sour cherries and walleye in between.
In Italy, Carlo Petrini, a
writer and eco-provocateur, appalled by the proliferation of American fast food
outlets in Rome, spearheaded a food movement called Slow Food in 1986. It has
spread its promotion of naturally and sustainably raised and harvested food
worldwide.
In the 1990s, more and more
chefs began demanding excellence in their products and found farmers and
foragers willing to work with them to achieve it. And soon that same search for
excellence filtered down to everyone who liked to cook, and supermarkets worked
to satisfy their customers with once unheard-of ingredients: morel mushrooms,
habanero peppers, and ostrich eggs in the grocery store.
It was
these changes that allowed us to publish Charcuterie: The Craft
of Salting, Smoking, and Curing in 2005 with uncommon success. Yet the
unlikeliness of that has to be underscored. Charcuterie
is a book devoted to the French tradition of preserving meats by curing and
confiting them, with recipes whose two principal ingredients are fat and salt. Fat and salt: villains number one and number two on American
nutritionists’ Most Wanted list. At the same time, America had become obsessed
with the fast and easy meal, and even 30-minute meals took too long. We also
became terrified of germs and bacteria, getting rid of perfectly good wood
cutting boards and buying up all manner of anti-bacterial soaps, dumping
everything in the fridge if the power goes out for more than four hours. Into
this culture, we brought a book not just devoted to animal fat and salt, but
also reflecting a full-on love affair with them, a sweaty, torrid embrace of
them. Moreover, many of the recipes take not 30 minutes, but rather days,
sometimes even months, to prepare—and recipes that ask you to add
bacteria to your food, while telling you that if you don’t do it right,
it can kill you.
And chefs and cooks far and
wide, bless them, embraced the book. Hundreds of readers—and bloggers—took up
the call to cure their own bacon and confit their own duck. This is a food
culture Brian and I are very glad to be a part of. And it encouraged us to
continue our exploration of the powers of salt and the majesty of the hog in salumi, the Italian version of the French craft we came to
adore—the slowest food of all. But salumi and charcuterie are not the same
craft with different names. Salumi is a narrower, more focused, and more
difficult craft, one that should be approached the way one might hunt wild
boar: with knowledge, respect, the proper tools, and the recognition that you
might have a good day and you might not, you might catch something and you
might come up empty-handed—and that is part of the thrill of it. Because when
you find that boar, and you will if you are willing to work for it, you can
turn it into cinghiale sausages, the dry-cured wonders
found throughout Italy, and the result is as thrilling as magic.
Nature is the greatest
artist, we are not the first to say, and this is what salumi is really about:
taking what nature gives us and doing as little as possible to it to make it
the best it can be.
Over the past decade, dozens
of salumerias and charcuteries have opened throughout the country. Marc Buzzio,
whose ancestors hailed from Biella in the Piedmont region of northern Italy,
has kept the family business up and running by curing sausages in New York City
the way his dad and granddad had for decades.
America has a long tradition
of smoked country ham, yet that all but vanished in the wake of factory farming
and factory production. With few exceptions, like Buzzio’s family and Nancy
Newsom’s family, who has been curing small batches of meats—in this case
superlative country hams—in Kentucky since 1917, not only was great salumi
unavailable, most people didn’t even know what decent salami and dry-cured ham
were. In the span of a decade, America went from a country that knew only
cooked salami from Oscar Meyer and Boar’s Head, factory salami, to one where salumi every bit as good as the finest in Italy is available
to all from numerous sources.
•
Let’s Not Get Confused Here:
Important Definitions
Salumi is the Italian word for salted and cured meats. (Salume is the singular form of the word; we almost always use
the plural.) Salumi include pancetta, prosciutto, coppa, and salami.
Salami
are dry-cured sausages. If you have only one of them, technically it’s called a
salame.
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