Working with the Jaffe’s, and their Slope Farm Beef, is proving an excellent way to, as Michael Pollan suggests, “shake the hand that feeds you.” We have been fortunate to strike up a relationship with the Jaffes, and to work hand in hand to understand the flow of beef from the pasture to the table. They have a very small herd, and both sides have had to work together to try to figure out exactly how it would work. For this reason we have not had grass fed meat in enough supply to meet the demand of both Bubby’s restaurants.
That changes this week. All the ground beef for the burgers and meatloaf in our Brooklyn location wil now be grass-fed. So, if you are in DUMBO and want a grass fed beef burger, you know where to come… See you there!
June 30, 2008 Issue
Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative
http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_06_30/article.html
Food for Thought
Renewing the culinary culture should be a conservative cause.
by John Schwenkler
Alice Waters might not seem like a conservative. A veteran of Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement, who once cooked a $25,000-a-seat fundraising dinner for Bill Clinton, she eagerly compares her campaign for “edible schoolyards”—where children work with instructors to grow, prepare, and eat fresh produce—to John F. Kennedy’s attempt to improve physical fitness through mandatory exercise. Her dream of organic, locally and sustainably produced food in every school cafeteria, class credit for lunch hour, and required gardening time and cooking classes is as utopian as they come. The name she has given her gastronomic movement, the “Delicious Revolution,” strikes the ear as one part fuzzy-headed Marxism, the other Brooksian bobo-speak. This woman is not, as they say, one of us.
But a closer look tells a different story. In a 1997 talk, Waters quoted from an essay by Francine du Plessix Grey about the film “Kids,” which portrays the sex-, drug-, and violence-crazed lives of a circle of New York teenagers. Du Plessix Grey writes of being haunted by the adolescents’ “feral” and “boorishly gulped” fast-food diet: “we may,” she suggests, “be witnessing the first generation in history that has not been required to participate in that primal rite of socialization, the family meal.” Such an activity “is not only the core curriculum in the school of civilizing discourse; it is also a set of protocols that curb our natural savagery and our animal greed, and cultivate a capacity for sharing and thoughtfulness.” These teenagers “are deprived of the main course of civilized life—the practice of sitting down at the dinner table and observing the attendant conventions.”
Today’s children, Waters goes on to say, “are bombarded with a pop culture which teaches redemption through buying things.” But schoolyard gardens, like the one she helped create at the middle school a few blocks from my home in Berkeley, “turn pop culture upside-down: they teach redemption through a deep appreciation for the real, the authentic, and the lasting—for the things that money can’t buy: the very things that matter most of all if we are going to lead sane, healthy, and sustainable lives. Kids who learn environmental and nutritional lessons through school gardening—and school cooking and eating—learn ethics.” Good cooking, she writes in the introduction to her 2007 cookbook, The Art of Simple Food, “can reconnect our families and communities with the most basic human values, provide the deepest delight for all our senses, and assure our well-being for a lifetime.”
The proposal, put slightly differently, is that our attitudes toward food—which nourishes and sustains us, which binds us most fundamentally to place, family, market, and community—provide a measure of our respect for what Russell Kirk called the “Permanent Things.” We are not just what we eat but how we eat. The cultivation and consumption of our meals are activities as distinctively human as walking, talking, loving, and praying. Learning to regard the meal not merely as something that fills our bellies and helps us grow, but as the consummate exercise of beings carnal and earthbound yet upwardly and outwardly drawn, is a crucial step in the restoration of culture. The suggestion that the inculcation of such values might be an essential part of an adequate education ought to resonate beyond the confines of the doctrinaire Left.
Adopting an alternative view of food does not require rejecting the possibility of a free and prosperous market economy. Indeed, the rise of the New American Diet—meals eaten in a rush and very often alone, made from processed and prepackaged ingredients—was not solely or even primarily the product of Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Historian Harvey Levenstein has argued that the spate of government regulations in the wake of early 20th-century food-safety scares played a crucial role in the rise of industrialized agriculture and centralized food processors. Early nutritionists and home economists, many distinctly of the quack variety, found a key ally in their attempts to reform American cuisine in Herbert Hoover’s Food Administration. The goal of reducing consumption of scarce foods and eating in accordance with “scientific” principles was tied to the cause of Allied victory in the First World War.
Official dietary guidelines inevitably became the product of collaboration between government agencies and representatives of the industries that stand to benefit. The substitution of state-sponsored nutritionist technocracy for the collective wisdom of taste, instinct, common sense, and tradition is a perfect example of the triumph of Tocqueville’s feared “immense tutelary power” (“absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild”). The same goes for the extraordinary industrialization and global “flattening” of our culinary economy, which Waters’s focus on community gardening, seasonal eating, and local markets is meant to combat.
Heavily concentrated industries demand expansive and centralized government. The converse is also true: bigger businesses are easier to regulate than smaller ones, and economies of scale are good for economic growth. “Get big or get out,” Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture told American farmers—a directive updated to “bigger” by Earl Butz, the infamous Nixon agriculture secretary who instructed farmers to abandon crop rotation and plant “from fencerow to fencerow.”
Price controls and multibillion-dollar farm subsidies prop up corporate agribusiness and discourage smaller producers from trying to find alternative market niches. Real local autonomy—setting regulatory standards that do not conform to national or international ones, restriction or taxation of imports or exports, and preservation of place-specific forms of agriculture and animal husbandry—is undermined because it makes for economic inefficiency. The natural capacities of location, season, and culture to link people together and shape the ways they farm and eat are countered by artificial measures designed to maximize yield.
But it is exactly these social and cultural dimensions of our culinary economy—the centralization of processing and production into an ever shrinking number of multinational corporations, the incredible distances over which food travels before it reaches our tables (an average of 1,500 miles in the United States), the loss of idiosyncratic foods and food cultures, and so on—that should raise the greatest concerns for traditional conservatives. “Eating is an agricultural act,” writes Wendell Berry. But Slow Food International founder Carlo Petrini argues that it is also a political one—a deed no less significant than the ways we cast our votes. Hence even the smallest acts of resistance to the hegemony of the present system, where corporate representatives and industry-funded scientists at public universities collaborate with government officials on regulatory policies and nutritional guidelines, are crucial steps in recovering local culture and reconstituting our “little platoons.” This will nurture the ability to govern—or resist being governed.
The seeds of change are already being sown. Many American cities are transforming blighted urban districts with neighborhood farms that raise food not just for consumption by those who grow it but for sale in local markets. In 2007, a group of teenagers at a community farm in Brooklyn brought in $25,000, and a nonprofit organization that runs a one-acre plot in Milwaukee grossed over $220,000 in local sales.
The website LocalHarvest.org lists over 3,600 farmers markets in the U.S., and the number of Community Supported Agriculture programs, in which supporters pay a set fee in exchange for regular shares of the produce from a local farm, grew from 50 nationwide to over 1,500 between 1990 and 2005. Such efforts give growers and buyers the opportunity to relate to one another—one study showed that shoppers at farmers markets have 10 times as many conversations as those at supermarkets. These local ventures also provide families with fresh produce and allow farmers to diversify their crops and receive a far greater rate of return than when they deal with corporate middlemen.
Many of our best food writers are in full-throated rebellion against the corporate-industrial-governmental nutrition establishment. Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food deconstructs the pretensions of “food science” in often hilarious fashion and distills all you need to know about eating into three directives: Eat food (as opposed to things with unfamiliar or unpronounceable ingredients, packaged “food products” that make government-sanctioned health claims, and pretty much anything from the middle aisles of the grocery store); Not too much (go for quality over quantity, and eat at a table, with others); Mostly plants (in unprocessed form when possible). Nina Planck’s Real Food takes the traditionalist counterculture to the extreme by denouncing veganism and extolling the health benefits of everything from cheese, lard, butter, and raw milk to eggs, beef, chocolate, and wine. And Waters’s wonderful new cookbook offers a step-by-step course in keeping a kitchen and preparing a range of dishes that, though simple, require time and effort to put together and are a joy to eat.
There are, of course, elements of leftism and elitism here. Pollan, for example, has a puzzling line in which he condemns as “shameful” the fact that not all Americans “can afford to eat high-quality food.” It is sad, to be sure, and we should strive to remedy it, but life’s inevitabilities do not warrant our shame. And while Bill McKibben, in his brilliant communitarian manifesto, Deep Economy, takes care to insist that his program is not one that can be driven by top-down governance, Petrini very often rails against free markets, suggesting at one point in his Slow Food Nation that contemporary China’s “political homogeneity” and exploitation of labor and the environment are “the embodiment of perfect capitalism.” (The Chinese economic system, he says, is only “nominally communist.” One wonders what he made of the agricultural policies of the Soviet Union.) But that doesn’t alter the value of the Slow Food vision of a world of “gastronomes,” attentive to taste and cognizant of the sources of their food, and of thriving local markets driven by “economies of place.”
Proponents of a new way of eating are on shakier ground when they claim that a widespread turn toward small-scale and deindustrialized agriculture would not affect crop yields. McKibben proudly cites a study in which sustainable farming methods were found to lead, on average, to a near doubling of food production per hectare. He does not mention the many cases in which results have been less impressive. A much discussed study published in the journal Science in 2002 found that switching to organic farming reduced yields by 20 percent, though the possibility of lessening our reliance on petroleum may be worth the investment of some extra land. Reincorporating into the human food chain some of the millions of acres where corn and sorghum are now grown for ethanol production would also make a great difference.
But no reasonable person wants to remake the world or do away with modern agricultural technologies all together. The best solutions will come through honest, case-by-case engagement with the subtle demands of specific situations. As the UC Berkeley agroecologist Miguel Altieri puts it, a sound approach to agriculture “does not seek to formulate solutions that will be valid for everyone but encourages people to choose the technologies best suited to the requirements of each particular situation, without imposing them.” (That this could just as well be the summary of the ideal domestic or foreign policy ought to argue in its favor.) Respect for tradition and social and ecological responsibility can work together with technological innovation and capitalist resourcefulness to respect the ridges and valleys of regionalism in an increasingly flattened world.
Efforts to realize this vision 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.
But things will have to take root in our kitchens first. It is here that Waters’s cookbook, which begins with the basics and consistently 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.
John Schwenkler is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: grass fed pastrami, homemade pastrami, no saltpetre
We had dinner at Marlow and Sons the other night. They were serving grass fed homemade pastrami, which seemed like a great idea. So, we are making it today. It will take a couple weeks to make, so here is the recipe, and the report will follow.
THe first thing you have to do is corn the beef. Many recipes call for saltpeter, which scares me. They give it to prisoners so they won’t have properly functioning wienies. No one wants that, probably not even a prisoner.
So, to corn the beef, you make a pretty simple brine, making sure the brine is cold before putting the brisket in to sit for a couple weeks. Also, with the grass fed briskets, there is very little fat. We are removing the deckle, which is the fatty piece on the butt end of the brisket. One more thing: you don’t want refrigerator smell getting into your brisket. We are going to marinate in doubled oven bags, aka turkey bags.
For the marinade:
4 quarts water
1 cup kosher salt
12 cloves garlic, crushed
3 tablespoons pickling spices
8 bay leaves
2 TBL Juniper Berries
1 TBL Black Peppercorns
Bring water to a simmer with the spices and salt. Off the heat, add the garlic. Cool the brine so the meat doesn’t cook. Cool it down to 45 degrees.
Trim a brisket so there is only 1/4 inch of fat. Remove the deckel. Place trimmed brisket in a doubled oevn bag (turkey bag). Seal very well. Marinate for 2 weeks. (ALWAYS DATE THE BAG)
THEN: To pastrami the corned beef…
Grind together the following spices to make your pastrami rub
5 tablespoons kosher salt
4 tablespoons hot Hungarian paprika
3 tablespoons coriander seeds
3 tablespoons dark brown sugar
3 tablespoons black peppercorns
2 tablespoons mustard seeds
1 tablespoon juniper berries
10 cloves garlic, minced
Rub the corned brisket with your pastrami rub. Allow to sit overnight in a new oven bag. (I mean, don’t use the old one.) Then, smoke the brisket at 200-225 until it reaches an internal temperature of 170. Allow to cool rest for at least ten minutes before slicing.
I will keep you posted on how this turns out. I’m nervous about it. Catch you in 2 weeks for Pastrami Update
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: grass fed tongue with chimmichurri, tongue and eggs
For brunch we served the Smoked Tongue with Sauteed Leeks and Potatoes. Three non-grimacing customers seemed to enjoy it very much. The waiters were scrunch-faced about trying it. I personally thought it was delicious.
For dinner tonight we have thinly sliced cold tongue with Chimmichurri. Soooo good. And we are pretty damned excited that every part of cow number 1 has been cooked, and received with… enthusiasm, aplomb, and joy. Really, everyone at Bubby’s is so excited to have whole steer.
We are going through nearly a whole cow every week. I can’t even believe it.
Yesterday we finally got our shit together and smoke the tongue from our first steer. I have to admit, all the offal was kind of freaking me out. First, the heart, which I had never eaten before, and which turned out to be really good, tasty, and kind of amazing to eat, putting a whole new spin on the phrase eat your heart out. Then the liver, which I was afraid of because I have always cooked calves livers, or chicken livers. I thought the beef liver would be very gamy, but in fact it is very much like calves liver. The chopped liver tastes almost like chicken chopped livers.
One fear I had was whether or not the offal would sell. This fear was unfounded. The customers at Bubby’s are somewhat sophisticated, and they have embraced the whole steer idea(r).
The tongue, the last, but not least, of the offal, proved to be the best of the best of the offal. Now, we have cooked every part of our first cow with very good result. There is a level of confidence, and enthusiasm for all of it, now that we have seen with our own eyes how it all goes.
Here is our recipe:
1 (about 3 pounds) fresh beef tongue
6 Quarts Water
6 Tbl Salt
1 1/2 cups vinegar
2 cups light brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon whole cloves
2 teaspoons allspice
1 bay leaf
1 stick cinnamon
1 Tsp Ground Ginger
1 teaspoon ground pepper
Cover tongue with water. Add 1 teaspoon salt for each quart of water. Cover tightly and cook slowly until tender, 2 hours.
Drain all but 2 cups of the water from pan. Add the remaining ingredients and return sliced meat to pan. Place in the smoker at 200, uncovered for 2 hours.
Cool the tongue in the liquid in which it is cooked. The cooling should be done under refrigeration or where there is circulation of cool air.
Before serving, remove the skin and cut away the roots. Slice tongue thinly, crosswise. Serve on rye bread with cornichons, russian dressing, and chopped onions.
Ken Jaffe offers his thoughts on liver, which are very interesting. And Linda Jaffe offers us her recipe for Grass Fed Beef Chopped Liver, and it looks really good. We are running it tonight.
Hi Ron,
Since you have braved the heart, I thought you would like Linda’s chopped liver recipe.
First on liver. It ‘s the first item that predators go after, all that muscle meat comes later. But somehow for us humans the liver seems to end up, like in your situation, the last thing in the freezer. Liver is chocked full nutrients—iron, vitamins and a complex array of proteins. My dogs go crazy when I take it out of the freezer and its still solid at minus 15 degrees. Somehow they know.
The liver that has been staring back at you in the freezer has a purity that you cannot really buy in the store. The liver is the “first pass” organ, so all the junk we feed livestock goes directly from the gut through the liver to be removed before entering the general circulation and tends to stay in the liver. Feed lots and grain make the liver accumulate abnormal amounts of toxins and fat. The liver you have to work with has never seen those toxins. Liver purity.
People react one of two ways to chopped liver. Some get the warm faraway look that comes from comfort food. Other have the narrowed eye stare of unfamiliarity mixed with horror.
Hopefully there are enough of the former coming in. With a name like Bubby’s there probably are.
For one pound of liver.
Saute liver in canola oil till cooked thru but still tender.
Carmelize about 4-5 big onions (“cannot have too many onions”) till they are starting to burn a bit.
Hard boil 4 eggs.
Cool everything.
Linda chops by hand in a wooden bowl and a curved chopper from her own Bubby. She adds mayo, salt and pepper to taste.
She also adds some chicken fat skimmed from soup and frozen and saved, or if she doesn’t have that she uses a chicken bullion cube dissolved in a tiny amount of water.
Serve with crackers, or on rye with tomato and/or onion. Or get fancy with cornichons and chopped onion.
Best,
Ken
Offal time. I have been sheepish about the offal. Here at Bubby’s it is not the norm to serve the guts. We’re traditionally a family place. But every time I open the freezer, there are packages of offal: liver, kidney, heart, tongue, staring me in the face. After pulling the heart out yesterday, thereby starting the clock a-ticking, I had some trepidations. I haven’t ever eaten heart. But Ken Jaffe was very encouraging and enthusiastic in his description of it: tastes a little like liver, but has the texture of steak. Delicious, etc… Also, my brother Brandon had genuine enthusiasm for heart, which he had eaten in Columbia, skewered and grilled.
We are serving it grilled, on skewers, with a simple balsamic, lemon, shallot vinaigrette.
Cutting it up was very surgical. There is an encasement of silver skin on the outside that must be removed. Then there are the things you’d generally associate with a bad visit to the doctor: arteries, valves, etc, all of which must be removed. What remains is a beautiful piece of red meat that looks very much like steak. We cut it into thin strips, and marinated them in a little lemon, garlic, rosemary and thyme, and some of the French sea salt, and some black pepper. It looks really good. (But it sounds a little scary!)
One of the difficult things about buying whole steer is being able to plan out how many head of steer we will actually need in a month, quarter, or even trying to see out as far as a year. One issue is our burger sales have gone up 50% since we started serving the Grass Fed Beef. Ken Jaffe has a small herd of 65 animals. And we trust him. Not just because he’s mishpucha (yiddish sp?), and not just because he was a doctor and therefore must have taken the oath of Hippocrates, but because he seems to have trust for us Bubsters. No one wants to deal with someone who lacks trust. Because his herd is so small, it requires very good communication to assure not running out of, at the very least, hamburger meat. So I am trying very hard to get a handle on what we will need, but I cannot predict how our volume of GFB will grow, especially when we hit the autumn and more and more people find out we are serving it. It takes several weeks to process an animal, so if we run out, we are SOL until Ken can arrange an animal to be slaughtered (they can only be killed on Wednesday,) hanged for two weeks, butchered, frozen, and delivered. It’s a lot to keep in mind.
So here is what our best guess is, based on current usage: We will be going through two Prime Finished Steer, and one steer that will be 100% burger every month. It’s hard to believe we will go through three whole cows a month, and we haven’t even started in Brooklyn yet. I am moving ahead with faith that Ken Jaffe will be able to deliver on the goods. From conversations with him it is obvious that a) he is going to do his best to do so, and b) he feels confident about it, and c) that he will be involved with our decision-making process should he fall short. I am convinced that the only way to work with the farmer is to really work with him, like a partner. This takes a lot of the cantankerousness out of buying food. That’s good for me because I have been a chef for a hundred years and I am sick of haggling over the price of hoohaws and widgets all the time. What I mean to say is, this takes away the game of paying one vendor off another (always fun and mean) and makes it so the handshake is the thing that binds.
Here is what it seems like we will use, based on current usage, plus a little padding.
Some years ago, we ventured into the bottled beverage business with a product called Loco Soda. It was the only soda in the world made with fresh juice. Due to many reasons, we got killed in the marketplace. Mostly because a company needs to spend millions on marketing and making doodads like coasters, stickers, point of purchase crap, and other garbage. Also, as one marketer told me, the market does not care about quality. If I could have hired Farah Fawcett to rep the thing…maybe. Or Christey Brinkley, or whoever is hot and modelly, maybe. But, just after 9/11/01 the thing died, all financing dried up, and we could no longer keep up with 34 states worth of plastic stickers and electric nipple clamps and dangling participles and payola and all the superfluous stuff that goes along with marketing products in America.
Loco is back at Bubby’s. Each one is made by hand from scratch. We still have some stickers left from before if you need one to entice you to try it. But, use your head instead, and try it. Loco is the thinking mans cocktail, with no alcohol. It has an amazing chili pepper kick from habanero, jalapeno, and serrano chilis.
