Toby
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Posts posted by Toby
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I don't think the word is that confusing. As it becomes more and more of a marketing ploy, then it's up to us to make the distinction when we buy/consume.
For example, there was a lot of press this summer about the sausages and other salumi being made in Lupa. This is so clearly artisanal (and I think was called that in the media) -- from what I understand they butcher pork that isn't mass produced (I think from the Berkshires??) and cure it all themselves. I'm sure parts of the process are aided by machines and I don't think that matters. What matters is how it tastes, and these were so apparently, by the taste, texture, appearance, not mass-produced.
A similar word that gets used a lot is "terroir." I was reading that in Italy they have the concept of nostrano, which comes from nostro, "ours." In The Italian Country Table by Lynne Rossetto Kasper, she writes: "Nostrano lays claim to food, saying this is from our land, from our place in the world ... Food is all about microclimates, changing from place to place -- which is why traditional, handmade and local are everything to quality in Italy. The culinary artisan is master...."
Another concept is "campanilismo," referring to the church bell tower in each village; everything within the sound of the bells is identified as nostrano. The third food concept is "si sposa," it marries, meaning that foods from the same region go together. She gives the example of using a Sicilian sheep cheese on a plate of risotto alla milanese; it's a given that these will not taste right together because they come from different food cultures, a northern European-influenced cuisine vs. Sicilian with its Arab, Greek and Mediterranean influences.
My point is that there's a real meaning to terms and we can only stretch it out so far before they become meaningless. We can't all eat food grown and fashioned within the sound of our neighborhood's church bells, but we can learn to distinguish what's real and what's a marketing ploy.
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Gourmet, September 2002, the "Healthy Living" issue, had an article by Merilyn Simonds about Quebec's Eastern Townships (Brome-Missisquoi region), a small area that is the "balmiest in the province, a bit of backcountry where the blossoms break first and the harvest lingers longest. Topography and microclimate and a certain sensibility in those who work the land have combined ... to create a sort of nascent Napa or an eastern version of the Willamette Valley ... a small paradise for the palate." A meal of smoked duck breast, rabbit terrine, confit, gruyere, sheep's milk cheese, chevre, and blue cheese are described as an "artisanal feast."
Saveur has a monthly feature called "Source" that's often about artisanal products. November 2002 Food & Wine has a feature called "artisans" about Leo's Latticini. I don't know if this feature is going to appear regularly or not.
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I'm more of a simpleton than you give me credit for. Schonfeld. I didn't even exactly ask what people think artisanal means. What I asked was:
When somebody calls a product "artisanal" what do you assume it implies, if anything?
As a writer (stop laughing) I'm often thinking in these terms. It's not so much what the word actually means or what people think the definition of the word is, but rather how readers will interpret the word when I use it in my writing. The impetus for me asking this particular question -- though it's not my agenda because the decision isn't mine and at this point I'm just curious -- was a conversation I had with an editor about my use of artisanal to describe a product that's not hand-made, small-production, or farmstead but is nonetheless delicious, nuanced, differentiated, finely crafted, sensitive to natural product characteristics, etc., than the equivalent mass-produced supermarket garbage.
If anybody is reading any current food magazines or newspaper food sections and stumbles across the word used in context by competent writers, I'd love to see those quotes.
The title of the thread was "What do you think 'artisanal' means?".
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"Authentic", food with "roots", "traditional" "ancestral recipes", are all terms in vogue to convey not mass produced and therefore worth a premium price.
The bourbon market exploded in the last 5 years with small batch bourbons selling for very high prices. Bill Samuels started the trend with Makers Mark, which was really a hand made, small batch, "artisinal" spirit. The company was bought by Allied Domeq, and for all the wax on the bottle neck, I'd doubt that it is artisianl any more.
But it sells a lot of bourbon at much higher margins than Jim Beam.
And Makers Mark doesn't taste as good as it used to, either. Neither does Knob Creek -- was that bought up, or was it simply a big increase in production?
Tassajara Bakery in the Bay Area used to make wonderful potato bread when it was a small operation, and then they were bought by Just Desserts (I think) and the taste of the bread went downhill really quickly.
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In my two rants on the dearth of good food stores on the east side in the 20s I forgot to mention Kalustyan's on Lexington. This and the Indian shop next to it are wonderful stores to live near for spices, dried beans, rice, all kinds of grains, dried nuts (they had great pistachios from Iran recently), dates, figs, and lots of Middle Eastern syrups, oils.
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I've been reading Treasures of the Italian Table -- Italy's Celebrated Foods and the Artisans Who Make Them, by Burton Anderson (published 1994). In the Introduction, he writes, "They [artisans] include butchers, bakers, cheesemakers, vintners, coffee roasters, millers, farmers, and cooks, among others .... Yet everywhere, as I've come to know these masters of taste, I've been struck by how much skill, devotion, and just plain hard work distinguish a bona fide original from a slick copy." Anderson includes such people as the trifolau (and their dogs, cani da tartufo, as well) as artisans, as well as growers of rice (for risotto). He quotes a rice farmer and teacher of risicoltura: "Rice is a little world of its own ... but not much has been written aobut it, probably because to outsiders it all looks so monotonous. I mean, who would imagine that rice has vintage years, much as wine does, though they're never publicized, or that certain growing areas produce superior quality and could be considered crus?"
Besides truffles and rice, the book profiles artisan producers of pane toscano (miller and baker), pasta, olive oil, pizza napoletana, parmigiano reggiano, wine, culatello (a prosciutto-like meat made from the pig's butt), Florentine beefsteak and balsamic vinegar. All of these products begin with a careful cultivating of crops or raising of animals, so it made me think that all the different levels that lead to the end product have to be considered as part of the artisanal process.
While the term artisanal may become commercialized and corrupted, does that mean that we should scoff at the term? Doesn't it make more sense to try to educate our palates to what really differentiates a marketing ploy from real, deep tastes?
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For the last few years I lived in San Francisco I worked three nights a week, from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. My sleep schedule became very skewed, as did my meal schedule. I got into the habit of coming home from work and waiting until 8 a.m. or so when the taqueria around the corner from me opened so that I could have burrito de tripas (or buche) for breakfast before I went to sleep for the day. The guys working in the taqueria thought it was hilarious, but it was very comforting food.
My favorite combination was chopped up pork stomach, yellow rice, black beans, monterrey jack cheese, finely chopped white onion and cilantro, tomatillo-chipotle salsa, and sliced avocado all wrapped up inside a big flour tortilla. The smoothness of the black beans and avocado were so delicious alongside the slightly chewy, but smooth, texture of the pork stomach.
I recently found a recipe for cooking the stomach that sounds authentic. The method is rather like confit. Pork stomachs are sold whole and can usually be found in Chinese butchers. They're football shaped and need to be cleaned carefully. Remove all the excess fat from the stomach, wash, rub with salt and rinse again. Sometimes I rinse it in some white distilled vinegar to get rid of any strong odors. Then melt a lot of lard (enough to cover the stomach) in a big pot. Add a cup of water (or more) in which some salt has been dissolved. Water allows the lard to boil; also, salt won't dissolve in lard. Bring the lard-water mix to a fast boil; try not to get splattered. Add the stomach and simmer over low heat, uncovered, for 2 or 3 hours, until the tripe is very tender but not crisp. Drain well, blot with paper towels and chop the meat.
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Toby's post made me blink. I lived in that neighborhood for a couple of years, and found the food shopping very good. What's wrong with the French butcher apart from his prices? Gramercy Fish a couple of doors away may not be the best in the city, but is pretty good by most standards. Lamazou for cheese; First Avenue Wines for wine; a pretty good Garden of Eden at 23rd and 3rd; the French deli attached to Pitchoune a few blocks down for baguettes and pates.
Wilfrid, most of these placese are mediocre. (I do like First Avenue Wines for wine; I hang out in there a lot.) Since I shop mostly for ingredients to cook, I find these stores not good enough. However, Wild Edibles just opened a store on 35th and 3rd, so that will help. My main complaint is the difficulty in finding really good produce in New York. In the winter it becomes a matter of finding the stores that have the freshest produce from California or Florida. I shop at Whole Foods in Chelsea a lot more in the winter; I think they're opening a store on 14th at Union Square and that will help. There's an organic health food store on 1st Avenue and around 10th Street (Commodity, Commodities??) that sometimes has very fresh tasting greens. While I love meat and fish, more and more it's the vegetables and what I can do with them and how they add color and freshness to a plate that interests me. When a vegetable isn't fresh, it's not even worth cooking it. Garden of Eden is very spotty to begin with, and the one on 3rd Avenue and 23rd must have a terrible turnover; their vegetables have no flavor whatsoever.
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On our way downtown to look at the World Trade Center site a few weeks ago, my friend (visiting from San Francisco) and I happened to walk into Pino's butcher shop on Sullivan Street. Newport steaks were displayed and I remembered reading this thread, so we bought two steaks. When we got home, I did a search on egullet for this thread, which directed me to the Saveur article. We followed the recipe for cooking the steaks, minus the tarragon mustard butter. Two minutes per side on a cast iron grille pan over medium-high heat, and then 4-1/2 minutes in the oven at 400 degrees. The steaks were perfect; a beautiful deep pink color, very tender and flavorful. We ate them with smashed la ratte potatoes, and zucchini that had been boiled along with chopped shallots and butter, then sliced and dressed with a little balsamic vinegar. It was very gratifying to be able to find this thread and get the information I needed, so thanks to all, especially Nina.
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I was extremely fortunate as a child. I was so extremely stubborn and willful that my mother caved almost from the minute I was born. I always ate only what I wanted to eat, and have continued to do so. No one ever forced me to eat anything I didn't like. I always knew what was good food and what wasn't. I was lucky to eat very pure foods as a child, and have always tried to seek out the most alive and clear flavors possible. As a result, I never eat overly processed foods and really only dislike two foods that I know of -- celery and cucumber pickles. Being by far the youngest person in my family, I was allowed to read at the table from the time I could read -- no one else really wanted to hear about my adventures in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd grades and so on.
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I found that I'm enjoying the book much more than I thought I would; my first feeling about it was that he wouldn't know much about food and this would just be a miscellany of things he'd come across researching his Civilizations, but the preface and the first chapter have been full of delightful pieces of information.
(Yvonne, does his idea that cooking made us social beings come from Levi-Strauss at all? I've always thought I wanted to read his Introduction to a Science of Mythology, but never wanted to enough. Maybe I'll try this time.)
Several things I found very applicable to us food-obsessed people were:
"The great press baron Lord Northcliffe used to tell his journalists that four subjects could be relied on for abiding public interest: crime, love, money and food. Only the last of these is fundamental and universal. Crime is a minority interest, even in the worst-regulated societies. It is possible to imagine an economy without money and reproduction without love but not life without food. Food, moreover, has a good claim to be considered the world's most important subject. It is what matters most to most people for most of the time." (Preface, p. xi)
I know many people who have little interest in food and none in cooking. Their attitude toward my interest in food is very weird, and very condescending -- that I'm wasting my time in something they think is unimportant -- I should be writing, or making money or saving the world. (These same people are, of course, annoyed by my participation in egullet, which they think is a further magnification of a trivial interest.) So I was very charmed when I read the first paragraph of the preface. Food always matters.
On page 11 of Chapter 1, he writes: "When fire and food combined, however, an almost irresistible focus was created for communal life. Eating became social in a unique way: communal but uncollaborative. The enhanced value cooking imparts to food elevates it above nourishment and opens up new imaginative possibilities: meals can become sacrifical sharings, love feasts, ritual acts, occasions for the magical transformations wrought by fire -- one of which is the transformation of competitors into a community."
I'm not sure what he means by "communal but uncollaborative." I once worked with a woman from an extremely dysfunctional family where they never ate together. They just got their food from the kitchen and went off to eat alone. We worked together in an office at night. She only ate food from McDonalds. I started cooking food and bringing it to work to share with her. She actually liked my cooking, but wouldn't eat with me. She sat in a corner and ate with a napkin over her plate, pulling pieces of food out from under the napkin with her fork. This was so weird to me. She explained that she thought eating in front of other people was disgusting and that people should have stalls that they could go into to eat when they had to eat in a public place.
He also seems to be saying that cooking can be seen as an index of our humanity, and since I've always thought cooking is an art form (although transient, but then isn't music really?), I liked this idea.
Also, interesting notes on various innards (offal) being used as very early vessels in which to cook other parts of the animal, still seen today in all forms of sausage.
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I live in a terrible neighborhood for food shopping -- 23rd and 1st. Todaro's is about the closest Italian ingredient store, and they are pretty terrible. The Garden of Eden on 23rd and 3rd is disgusting; although they do have ok ricotta cheese. The French Butcher on 2nd Avenue between 23rd and 22nd is not very good. For produce, I go to the Union Square Greenmarket in the spring, summer and fall; also can get chicken, some fish and some meat there. Otherwise, I have to get over to Chelsea for produce at Whole Foods in the winter and Chelsea Market for fish and some Italian foods (they have good-tasting pancetta if it's freshly cut); the produce store there seemed to have gone downhill the last time I was there. I won't even go near Balducci's anymore; shop at Faicco's on Bleecker Street for Di Nola pasta, cotecchino, sausages. Otherwise, Chinatown for pork, DiPalo's for cheese. Sullilvan Street Bakery, Pino's when I'm in the village. Shopping for food in New York is extremely time consuming.
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I'd forgotten the pagoda, also dark and mysterious because I was there at night.
The taqueria must be in the North 6th Street quadrant. It was sort of old and rundown, lots of Mexican groceries, restaurants.
How was Reading defined geographically before outlets?
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porchetta.
As described by the server, a small organic, nicely killed pig is de-boned, then laid out "flat." The arms and legs are then removed, ground and made into sausage. The sausage is then stuffed back into the pig, which is then roasted and served in slices. Each round slice is sausage, and pieces of the rest of the pig, fat, tenderloin, crispy skin, etc.
The pork they get at Lupa is so delicious, and the meat guy there is doing wonderful things with it. What did they serve with the porchetta?
There's a recipe for "pork loin alla porchetta" in Batali's Simple Italian Food that sounds like it simplifies what they did at Lupa -- just stuff a butterflied pork loin with sausage meat made from the ground pork shoulder, herbs, garlic, eggs, fennel.
In Nancy Harmon Jenkins' Flavors of Tuscany, there's a recipe for porchetta made by stuffing fresh pork belly with fennel seeds, rosemary garlic and a little chopped pork liver.
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I can definitely say that any farmed variety is quite bland-tasting compared to any wild variety though; that's an easy one, and I suspect the reason is also obvious: wild fish eat a variety of 'real' food that gives extra character to the meat; farmed fish eat Purina salmon chow.
See, you just did it. I'd never thought about food on the level you're talking about either; I found I just had to stop and think a little deeper about how something tasted, or why I liked/didn't like a food, or thought a dish worked/didn't worked. You don't have to get too complicated about it, either.
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There was also a kind of dark and unattractive Mexican taqueria place on a block in back of the smaller outlet shops that had very good chicken tacos. (Sorry to be so imprecise. I haven't been in Reading for four years and even then it seemed a dark and mysterious place to me with a great hill somewhere in it, but I have no idea where anything is in it.)
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There's an excellent Vietnamese restaurant in Reading. I'm sorry, I've forgotten the name, it has two words, one of which might be Houng, or something like that. I think they might be on North 6th Street. They have excellent duck, mussels, and wonderful French-influenced desserts.
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jaybee, thank you for the information on the delicious wine.
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Yes, thank you Suvir, for a lovely evening and wonderful food, especially the cauliflower which was extraordinarily good. Hope to be able to say more tomorrow, can barely see right now.
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Great idea for a thread. I'm getting ready to go to the Indian dinner, but I do agree with you. One thing that drives me nuts is when non-cooks or people who dislike cooking say "don't go to any trouble," when I invite them to dinner. It's like we're speaking a different language.
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Well, when I saw the reference to sheep, it struck me that this may have been one of the main reasons for all the unhappiness over the past few days, and it made me wonder if there was some way to make communication about our intentions/perceptions of each other better.
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Toby - Why is this point on this thread when it is so apropos to the other thread? I know you said the threads are similar, but it really is germane to the other thread.
Well, that was my point. I think someone (Nick?) should start a new thread about it, because it really seems to lurk around underneath many of the arguments we have. I have to go run errands though.
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I was thinking about the contempt or appreciation (perceived and/or real) either (or both participants = supplier/consumer) feels for the other.
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I just laid out a possible case why it might make sense Steve--and all this stuff is chef-driven, not customer-driven, anyway. Customers--and I consider the media a customer--are sheep.
Quite a provocative statement. Perhaps deserving of its own thread. Not necessarily invalid, but provocative all the same. Worth expanding upon.
Nick
Isn't this (i.e., who gets to drive) very close to the arguments going on over in the wringing out and pissed off threads?
What do you think "artisanal" means?
in Food Traditions & Culture
Posted
Further in response to Steven's question --
Today's NY Times food section, p. 2 -- in piece about Murray's Cheese Shop opening in the Grand Central Market -- "The new shop specializes in farmhouse and artisanal cheeses...." The article then mentions that Peter Kindel, who used to run the cheese department at Artisanal is working with Murray's owner to refine the selection of cheeses.
Today's NY Times food section, p. 5 - an article entitled "124-Year-Old Bread, Baked Fresh Today." I didn't find the words "artisan" or "artisanal" used but "... especially these days, when most people would sooner pick up an industrially produced Danish at the supermarket than drive out of their way for the more perishable handmade kind." The interesting thing about this bakery in Staten Island is that their output has declined significantly from the days when they made 5,000 Pullman loaves a day; today they make fewer than 100 a day, almost entirely by hand.
(A note on NY Times' inaccuracy -- a small article on [house-made] rillettes says "After pate and foie gras, New York diners seem receptive to this unctuous new treat." Are rillettes really new to people?)