A Hearty Holiday Season

First: Apologies for the mysterious and sudden disappearance. I’d like very much to be able to attribute it to the craziness of the season, the parties, the cleaning in preparation for Christmas guests, the endless shopping, the crowds, the decorating of the tree, the dinner planning, the latke making. But I can’t.

The short version: a few weeks ago, I had my annual physical. Everything was peachy, except for my blood pressure and my EKG. We know about my blood pressure, so this isn’t much of a surprise. People in their mid-40s who write about and work with food often have this issue. But my EKG? Off we went to a cardiologist. I passed some tests. I failed some others. I was poked and prodded to within an inch of my life. Heads have been scratched. Never mind my line of work, my doctor tells me; my genes stink. Scary words have been thrown around. My brain has soared and swooped to stratospheric levels of silent, middle-of-the-night hysteria, bombarded repeatedly by a little gremlin shouting What Ifs in my left ear, and Remember Laurie Colwin in my right. It’s been totally exhausting, and so I’ve done what most Cancerians do at times like this: I crawled under a rock.

And now I’ve come out.

I still know very little except for the fact that I’ve had what they call a “come to Jesus moment” which I guess is a little odd for a Jew with Buddhist leanings. A better translation: I’ve been warned that I’d better stop with the prefabricated stress. I can only control what I can control. Everything else is totally and completely meaningless and impermanent. I have a lot of people to cook with and to break bread with. I have a loving partner and a kind and funny dog and wonderful friends and family and very small cousins whose weddings I must dance at. In twenty or thirty years.

“You also have to stop with the food,” someone said to me. “You probably eat huge amounts of very fatty things, every day. After all, Poor Man’s Feast extols the virtues of eating vast quantities cheaply.”

Screw stress; I was incensed when this person uttered these words. I rose up like Sholom Aleichem‘s Fruma Sarah and my muscles popped out of my shirt sleeves like Lou Ferrigno.

Did this person ever read this blog? Okay, sure–I’ve written articles about thirty things to do with leftover pork, or how to make six dinners from a three pound chicken. But that’s not what PMF is really about. PMF is about understanding that if you’ve got nothing but a bowl of beans and a slab of bread sitting in front of you, it can still be a feast. It’s about taste, for sure. But it’s also experiential. It’s about making each meal–each drop of soup and crumb of cake–somehow more sacred. It’s about understanding that feasting has absolutely nothing to do with vertical food and fancy squiggles on oversized plates. It’s not about seeing and being seen and dining at the spot of the moment, or being seated in the front room as opposed to Siberia. Poor Man’s Feast is not about eating as entertainment; it’s about what sustains us, even if that thing is a pile of cured pork products and a hunk of good cheese.

But I have to be practical, too: there will be some changes, and they will be noticeable. They will not be entirely unBittman-like in that there will be a lot more vegetalia showing up pretty much everywhere. (After all: what’s more parsimonious than a humble vegetable?) There will not, however, be Tofurky; there will be no turkey bacon because it’s a crime against humanity and I haven’t ever found a brand that didn’t taste like a bookmark. There will also not be the confited pork shoulder that sat for three days in my fridge in a container of dork (combination duck and pork) fat before I tossed it on the grill (thank you, Suzanne Goin). No worries there, doc. We will also not be making cassoulet this year the way we did last Christmas; we will therefore not be confiting our own duck. I am sure that I will at some point find a use for its rendered fat that is sitting in my freezer, however, but probably not for a little while.

So, has all the porky fun gone out of Poor Man’s Feast? No. But where there was too much fat, there will now be spice-laden flavor and seasonal freshness. Where there was deep pan-frying and dependence on fat for flavor, there will now be pressure and clay pot cooking. Where there was and always will be Julia Child there will now be Deborah Madison and Elizabeth David, Paula Wolfert and Yamuna Devi, Suvir Saran, David Tanis and Andrea Nguyen, and Judy Rodgers, all of whom take simple dishes with simple ingredients and elevate them to extraordinary. There will likely be a lot of layered flavor and a lot of whole grain bread baking, too, assuming I can manage to turn out something that weighs less than a construction brick. There will be the fresher, cleaner flavors that come with cooking seasonally, knowing where my food comes from, and not buying or eating it if I don’t. (Even in Connecticut, even in the dead of winter. So I’ll eat turnips and celeraic for a few months. Big deal.)

That said, we all know the price of locally-grown, ethically-produced, non-industrial food, and it is breathtaking; this is one of the greatest inequities we face. So where Poor Man’s Feast–which is now almost a year old–has focused, overtly or not, on what it means to eat well and parsimoniously, it will go one step further: it will talk about eating with care, and about making the tough decisions between a $12 pound of grass-fed stew meat that is free from chemicals and hormones and god knows what kind of bad karma, and twice that amount for $3.99 at the local supermarket. That’s the tough part because, even with the best of intentions, things almost always comes down to money, for most of us. What to do in that case? I’ll buy the good stuff, and eat less of it. My heart will thank me, I hope.

Onward to Christmas.