Dinnerblogging: Pasta with Corn, Pancetta, Butter, and Sage (or, How to redeem the culture by teaching good cooking)

Before I get down to business, let me say that Will makes an excellent point in this interesting and deeply thoughtful post:

My biggest problem with John’s superb cover-story in TAC is that the kind of social and cultural regeneration which both he and Weaver seek to accomplish will be extremely difficult given the raw, human material with which they have to work. To use the cooking example, in nearly every generation before my own, children were taught to cook and to have an appreciation for food by their parents. The current-generation of 20-somethings, however, has much less in the way of basic cooking skills than any of our forebears. Something really enormous in the way of information loss occurred in the 80’s and 90’s, and the result is that people my age are much more likely to run screaming to the frozen-food section of a supermarket, with all the consequences (ably documented by John and by Michael Pollan) which that entails.

All of this is sadly and painfully true, though the cultural-economic conditions that keep those (these?) 20-somethings unmarried and working long hours for much of their (our?) young adulthood, and then leave married couples, and in particular married couples with children, unable – or, more precisely, feeling unable – to share out or minimize their work hours in ways that allow good cooking and family-centered meals may contribute even more to this loss of knowledge and know-how than anything else. But the progression Will describes – where it used to be that Mom (this is how Pollan puts it, so please don’t call me sexist) knew how to cook and passed that knowledge on down, but then a combination of changing economics, shift in attitudes toward gender and family life, and – crucially – the rise of an industrial-governmental nutritionist technocracy insistent on crushing traditional knowledge and rebuilding our diets along faux-scientific lines, undermined this practice and left us where we are today. (That the situation is far worse with respect to non-industrial farming and backyard gardening should go without saying.) And there is no doubt that regenerating our culinary culture is going to be a tremendous task.

This is, however, exactly the challenge that I meant my essay to speak to, and I do hope that the sorts of things I think we can and should do to remedy it were made clear enough when, e.g., I wrote:

Efforts to realize this [decentralized and traditionalist vision of cuisine and culinary economies] ought to figure centrally in the projects of social and cultural renewal that traditional conservatives see as essential precedents to meaningful political reform. Neighborhood gardens, cooking classes in schools and church basements, and the promotion of local and co-operative markets are the kinds of projects that will build community; revitalize regional economies; encourage stable, healthy families; and instill the kinds of civic attitudes that make centralized government appear burdensome. These are not merely aesthetic or gustatory concerns, nor are they essentially private or familial ones: eating is part of our politics, too.

(I should note at this point, and in response to one of Prof. Fox’s remarks, that state-sponsored projects like Alice Waters’s Edible Schoolyard, which as I mentioned in the piece was started at a public middle school just down the road from me, are exactly the sort of thing I meant to be suggesting here, and that I decidedly do not think that such programs are in any way “Marxist” – all that I was gesturing at with that perhaps unfortunate remark was the tendency go to in for (admittedly very cool and shiver-inducing) slogans like this:

 
 

(I hope I have not done a horrible thing by swiping these images.) That there may be some marked differences in the political and economic structures of the revolutions that Ms. Waters and I would like to bring about does not show that we do not have quite a lot in common.)

In my own case, it was actually the April discussion among the TAC folks about the future of traditional conservatism that provided the intellectual background to remarks like these and indeed to the essay as a whole. I found myself particularly struck by these words of Daniel Larison’s:

It is difficult to grow good fruit in rocky or sandy soil, and likewise it is difficult to imagine a significantly large body of Americans with the kind of temperament that would find paleo answers attractive unless there is a culture that instills restraint, virtue and attachment to one’s people, history and place.  These seem unrelated to the policy agenda we’ve been discussing, but, to take one example, these things lay the foundation for nurturing an instinctive aversion to intervention overseas.  If we started to build up social institutions and work within existing institutions that foster such a culture, slowly we would begin to create intermediate institutions and centers of resistance to the center that become the constituencies that paleo policies will serve.  That is one of the long-term goals of the proposal I made to decentralize conservative institutions and have people go or stay at home.  More to the point, the goal is to begin doing work in existing social institutions and building up the cultural capital without which all the talk of constitutionalism in the world will change nothing.  Unless the people’s habits are suitable to limited and republican government and what James Poulos calls the responsibilities of citizenship, conservative political projects are more or less destined to be rejected or to be unsustainable beyond one or two election cycles.

Will’s laments about the loss of culinary knowledge and the decline of the family meal bring out, I think, exactly the sorts of concerns that Daniel means us to have in mind here, and that in a nutshell is why I came around to pitching my article in the first place. In any case, here I am again:

But things will have to take root in our kitchens first. It is here that Waters’s cookbook, which begins with the basics and constantly encourages the reader to modify recipes and vary ingredients with the seasons, provides as good an introduction as one could hope for.

Each Friday, my wife and I walk with our 1-year-old son to a house down the street where we pick up a box of just picked produce and pastured eggs from a nearby farm. Nigel Walker, who runs the farm and also has a stand at San Francisco’s Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, was involved in a nasty public spat with Carlo Petrini after an essay in Slow Food Nation called the prices at the Ferry Plaza Market “astronomical” and “boutique-y” and its clientele “extremely exclusive.” But at $24.50, my family’s haul this week—lettuce, mixed leafy greens, arugula, potatoes, beets or summer squash, lemon verbena, cherries, peaches, carrots, strawberries, and chard—will cost us about $8.50 less than similar (but non-organic, less fresh, and markedly lower-quality) produce from the local Safeway.

As with many CSA’s, our farm box comes with a newsletter that suggests recipes for some of its more exotic contents. But of late we’ve been making a point to turn to The Art of Simple Food whenever possible. So carrot soup, summer squash gratin with homegrown herbs, marinated beet salad, and wilted chard with onions are likely candidates for the days ahead. Obviously this is especially easy to pull off in the hometown of Alice Waters and Michael Pollan, the birthplace of Chez Panisse and California cuisine. It is, however, increasingly within the reach of anyone who wants to try.

Renewing the culinary culture, and restoring the kinds of values that are necessary for the proper functioning of a healthy republic, is not the sort of thing that can be left to activists, environmentalists, and government bureaucrats. This is a conservative cause if ever there was one, and it is going to have to begin at home. The revolution is coming. And it’s sure to be delicious.

(That wonderful new cookbook is called The Art of Simple Food; you can seek out places to buy it on-line here, or – better – use the form to type in your zip code and find it at a local bookstore.) I do, in other words, think that taking up, and then one day handing down the skill of, real cooking (and also shopping for good and locally-sourced food) isn’t all that hard if you’re willing to invest a little bit of money and a bit more time (and seek out some fellowship, of course – no one should be eating alone). The civilizational rot that Will and Daniel describe runs very deep, but the remedy to at least this particular aspect of it is straightforward enough – cooking, after all, is as naturally human an enterprise as any other, and a good deal more fun than most.

And that is why I have been making a point of late to post recipes, which brings me to one of my favorites. This is from The Zuni Cafe Cookbook, and we made it last night after we got the season’s first yellow corn in Friday’s farm box:

Pasta with Corn, Pancetta, Butter, and Sage

Serves 4-5

Bring 6 quarts of water with 2 tbsp. of salt to a rapid boil in a large pot. In the meantime, heat a few tablespoons of butter in a 12-inch skillet over medium-low heat, mince 2-3 oz. thick-cut pancetta, and then cook the pancetta in the butter, stirring and scraping to make sure it cooks evenly. When the pancetta is sizzling and a bit brown around the edges, turn off the heat, add a few drops of water to cool the pan, and then add another few tablespoons of butter, 6 coarsely chopped leaves of fresh sage, and a few grinds of fresh black pepper. Swirl the pan, and leave things to infuse.

When the water comes to a boil, add 1 lb. fettucini, tagliari, or a similar slender egg pasta. Stir, and cook until it is al dente. Meanwhile, scrape the kernels from 5-10 small, young ears of corn (you want a total of 2-1/2 c. yield). Now turn the heat under the skillet back to medium, add another 6-8 tbsp. sliced butter, and swirl the pan. When the butter is nearly melted, add the corn, stir, and cook until it is heated through. Taste for salt, and add a bit of the pasta water or some more butter if the corn seems dry. Reduce the heat to low. When the pasta is cooked, drain it well and toss it with the rest of the ingredients. Taste for salt again, and serve hot with grated Parmigiano-Reggiano.

(Note that if you’re not up for using so much butter – the recipe calls for up to 2 sticks, which is costly even if very tasty and not at all bad for you – you can substitute some good olive oil instead.)

This is decadent and delicious, and is exactly the sort of dish that will save our culture from the sad straits that Will so ably diagnoses. Now go – get thee to the kitchen.

Filed under: conservatism, family, food