…and erroneous besides. Yes that’s quite true, reader Cynthia. All that really needs to be said is “chile.” It’s thought that Christopher Columbus himself was the first to start calling chiles “peppers” since he had no other frame of reference. Chiles certainly didn’t look like peppercorns to him (chiles are large berries and peppercorns are tiny drupes), but the effect they had on his taste buds was similar.
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We modern foodie types are used to doing a lot of Continental cooking: French and Italian especially. So when we see a red or red-brown sauce we automatically assume there’s tomato in it. But in fact a lot of deep red and rust-colored Mexican sauces don’t have any tomato in them at all, just puréed chile pepper. Reconstituted dried chile pepper to be more exact.
READ ONAs anticipated, I received quite a few lengthy emails over the weekend from folks taking me to task for my failure to understand that it really, really was the greedy, soulless mega-corporations and their evil genius marketers that deprived our society of nutritious lard, lo these many years ago. What was particularly interesting about them is that they all pretty much used the same set of arguments (even vocabulary), which makes me think there’s some big piece out there somewhere in the MSM that they’re all getting their info from.
READ ONLots of readers are writing in asking the same basic question: how is it that fat — and especially lard — has come to be seen as such a good thing all of a sudden? A year or so ago I was in the checkout line at my local Whole Foods. There I noticed a health magazine cover that featured a piece of bread slathered with what appeared to be…lard. The headline exclaimed something along the lines of: fat is good for you! The bullet copy proceeded to run down all the ways fat aids the metabolism. I’m not going to disagree with any of it, though like everyone I get whiplash reading health mags.
So what happened? How did fat — especially pig fat — go from anathema to all-but-health-food status? Sure you had Tom Colicchio serving his famous braised pork belly at Gramercy Tavern seven years ago. Yes Mario Batali always sang the praises of guanciale and, later, lardo. But such elite indulgences would never have captured the public imagination were tectonic shifts not already occurring in the realm of food and health.
READ ONWhat a weird headline, but apropos given what Reader Lee wrote yesterday:
READ ONThere is something about lard that is bothering me, Joe, and I was wondering if you could help. I am beginning to detect a kind of lard snobbery in some foodie circles; you hear things like “the only lard worth using is leaf lard from the kidneys of heirloom pigs that have been raised in Alice Waters’ back yard.” The problem is that lots of us don’t have any access to fancy-schmancy pig fat, and are stuck with whatever our local Mexican butcher has on hand. For those of us using these less prestigious fats — should we still bother making our own lard? How big is the difference between what we’ll end up with, and the high-end, three-star lard that prominent food bloggers get to use every day?
I certainly do, reader Lynn! I’ve been rendering my own lard since at least 10:05 A.M. on the 24th of June, 2009, when this post was put up.
READ ONWell now my cold is in my lungs and I have bronchitis I think. Serves me right for not taking very good care of myself. What’s that I normally write about the male ego? I thought I was all but done until 5 or so when my fever shot up and I felt chilly.
You know you’re not yourself when you step out of a warmer-upper shower, your four-year-old daughter compares your anatomy to her naked Ken Doll, and you take it personally. I know it’s just the fever talking, but my eyes aren’t brown, dangit.
READ ONReader Bill writes in with three interesting questions. In order, they are:
READ ON1) Why does cream last so long in the fridge? It smells and tastes fine weeks after its expiration date. Am I crazy for using it?
2) I have a chocolate chocolate chip cookie recipe that doesn’t spread enough, the opposite of what people usually complain about with cookies. How do I get more, ahem, spread? More butter, more sugar? I’ve already tried cooler and hotter temps with little effect.
3) I reread your Neopolitan pizza piece and wondered whether you dock your pizza dough at some point. When I’ve made pizza I get too many giant bubbles that ruin the texture of the crust. I’ve skulked around several pizza sites and some dock, some don’t. What’s your opinion?
As I mentioned on Friday, the totality of American pig history can be traced back to a single man: Spanish explorer and so-called “Father of the American Pork Industry”, Hernando de Soto. Pigs as I mentioned aren’t from this neck of the global woods. They’re native to Eurasia, where they were domesticated some 15,000 years ago. Hogs had to be imported into America — and were, somewhere near Tampa Bay, Florida in 1539. Hernando de Soto landed there with thirteen of them, and in just three years’ time they multiplied into a herd of some 700. Just to add a little perspective to that number, that total did not include the swine he and his men ate, the ones they sold, they ones that ran away, that died, or were stolen in Indian raids.
READ ONThat’s a tough question. Probably it makes more sense to ask where corn comes from, since it’s a sure bet that tamales came along quite soon after corn became a staple crop among Mesoamericans, around 10,000 years ago. There’s no way to know who came up with the idea of wrapping up small portions of cooked corn gruel in husks or banana leaves, though it seems clear that originally the tamal was a proto-fast food idea, a sort of Mesamerican meal-on-the-run type of affair. It might have been developed for travelers or traders, maybe for military purposes. One guess is really as good as another here.
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