This & that: A Snowy Day

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks. Rage!

It’s another Big Snow Day on the coast of Maine where I’m spending the winter. “Oh, how come you’re not in Tuscany?” ask the people I meet downtown, at least the ones who don’t know me very well.

There’s a simple answer. Basically, I’m much more comfortable in my well-insulated Yankee homestead with a super-efficient Vermont Castings wood-burning stove in the kitchen, heat pumps in the kitchen and the upstairs study, and a back-up oil burner in the basement for when things get really, really cold. In Tuscany, on the contrary, I’ve tried and failed over the years to be comfortable in a farmhouse with stone walls that are two feet thick and never quite warm, plus a barely adequate wood-burning cucina economica in the kitchen, lots of very old sweaters, and fireplaces throughout the house that, when lit, suck up all the minimal heat in the room and blow it straight out the chimneys.

So I’m warmer and happier in Maine. At least until spring.

With all the warmth available to me, I sometimes wonder about my Maine forebears and how they survived back then when winters were much colder and lasted much longer than they do today. Pardon me if I repeat myself, but I always remember the tale of Roberta Randlett’s mother, who walked on the ice across Penobscot Bay from Islesboro to the mainland when she was pregnant with Roberta. That would have been, by my reckoning, around 1915 or so. We don’t get ice like that anymore.

My mother grew up on a farm in Thomaston that was a classic New England structure, big house, little house, back house, barn. (The big house and a part of the little house are all that remains today.) That meant they could get to the barn to tend the animals—the cow, the pigs, the chickens, the horses—without actually going outside. Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks as much as you want, but the animals still had to be fed and, more importantly, watered, the ice broken in their water troughs so thirsty beasts could get at it. The cow had to be milked, the pigs slopped, the eggs pulled out from the nests where the chickens hid them. And wood brought in, constantly, all day and night, to keep the fires going.

That was work, exhausting. By the time night fell, the old folks welcomed the opportunity to sit by the woodstove, the oven door open to push out more warmth, and sip from a pot of tea, maybe with a little whiskey added to warm the insides as much as the outsides.

Harvesting ice

Thompson Pond ice harvest, South Bristol, Maine

Another job that came along around late February/beginning of March was ice harvesting, a community activity that required lots of hands, a team of draft horses, and some major equipment to saw the ice into blocks and haul it into the ice house where it would be packed in sawdust to keep it sound until warm weather. Up until the mid-century, there were still households with an ice box. I remember the ice man who came once a week in his truck that leaked ice water out the back. He swung a block of ice from a mean-looking set of iron grippers and hoisted it into the top part of Mrs. Burgess’s ice box where it kept her butter and cream cool throughout the week as it slowly melted away.

Ice harvesting nowadays is pure nostalgia. Down on Thompson Pond in South Bristol a group of volunteers gathers to cut big blocks of ice that they float onto a heavy sledge. Big-muscled draft horses strain in unison to pull the sledge up to the ice house, and a block-and-tackle maneuvers the ice into place. It’s nostalgia, yes, but it’s also a way of keeping in touch with the past when that ice meant both money in the bank for harvesters and a welcome chilling device for home cooks long before electric refrigerators became common. If you missed the ice harvesting (it happened in February), you can still join in the Ice Cream Festival on Sunday, July 2, at the Thompson Pond Ice House Museum (http://thompsonicehouse.com) – mark your calendars!

Cucina povera or cucina popolare?

Cucina povera is a term that’s become familiar in Italy to describe the foods and the cooking of people who were or are poor, in cash, perhaps, but rich in tradition.

In an earlier post last week I described this magnificent Sicilian salad as an

Lagniappe: Sicilian orange salad

insalata povera, a salad of the poor, because most of the ingredients would be available, in season in Sicily, even in very humble kitchens.

But I confess that I don’t like the term, even though it’s widespread. To me, it calls up a diminished, pinched, deficient world where people simply make do, nothing more. Lord knows, there’s plenty of that and not just in Italy.

In today’s world, however, I think cucina povera, no matter where it’s to be found, means an unhappy reliance on cheap, industrialized, fast food and ultra-processed food that lacks true nutrition and is divorced from any sense of where you are in the world. But it has its own place: Remember the movie “Super Size Me”? In a telling scene, producer-director-star Morgan Spurlock points out that if you’re trying to fill five empty bellies, mother, father, and three children, on a restricted income, you probably can’t get more bang for your buck, more calories for your dollars (or your euros), than at McDonald’s.

My friend, the Canadian nutritionist Rosie Schwartz frequently talks about this in her smart blog “Enlightened Eater,” which you’ll find at https://rosieschwartz.com. “In Canada,” she wrote recently, “around half of the calories we consume come from ultra-processed food while in the US, the numbers climbed to over 70%.” This is pretty startling but the fact is that fast food and ultra-processed food, for a complex variety of reasons that hark back to government policy in both countries, are quite simply cheaper. A whole lot cheaper.

But it’s made up of those substances that Michael Pollan taught us to avoid—multisyllabic additions to what ought to be a straightforward presentation, ingredients, Pollan said, that your grandmother (or more likely your great-grandmother) wouldn’t recognize—flavor enhancers, texture enhancers, stabilizers, preservatives, binders, artificial sweeteners, and above all high-fructose corn syrup, the truly bad actor in the modern, industrialized diet. Pollan calls it the Western diet. I think that, too, is a mistaken terminology. It’s the junk food diet, to put it bluntly.

And that, for me, is truly cucina povera.

So what to call that Sicilian orange salad? I’d like to introduce the concept of cucina popolare, cuisine of the people, cuisine that ordinary cooks make in their homes or in low-key restaurant kitchens, food that relies on low-cost ingredients, nothing fancy, because it’s local, because it’s in season, and because it’s good for body and soul. It might be as simple as a green salad given some heft with a handful of chickpeas or a grating of cheese and perhaps some chopped almonds added in; or it might be a substantial bean soup, or a stew of loads of seasonal vegetables (right now that would be root vegetables, winter squashes, canned tomatoes, and maybe some herbs snagged from a greenhouse or a sunny kitchen windowsill); it might even be just a piece of grilled meat or fish with a baked potato—nowhere does it say cucina popolare has to be vegetarian, although vegetables have a major role to play. Basically, it’s just using what you have and feeling grateful for it.

refrigerator soup, aka zuppa del frigorifero

On this very snowy day, I searched the refrigerator for whatever I had and could put together. There was kale left from last Friday’s dinner party, chopped and mixed with olive oil, garlic, a little chili pepper, and half a sweet red pepper (the other half had gone into a salad). I warmed it in some canned chicken stock, added a handful of coarse bulgur to bulk it up, chopped a couple of slices of leftover roast pork, and stirred it all together with some of the pork juices.

I wouldn’t dare give a recipe for this because it would have to begin with making a dish of lacinato kale, chopping it up and serving most of it, then putting the rest in the fridge for a few days. I might chop a small onion and brown it lightly in olive oil to add before I serve myself dinner (supper, really) tonight.

But I think you get the idea. This is cucina popolare, simple, tasty, Mediterranean in inspiration, mostly vegetables, and I know it’s going to be good.

In the end, I served it with a dollop of fine olive oil and half a dozen drops of Chip’s Sweet Heat, a local sweet and spicy seasoning made by my friend Chip Dewing.If I really want to get fancy, I’ll put an egg on top!

What I’m Reading

I just got this book, which I’ve been anticipating for some time, Anne Mendelson’s Spoiled: The Myth of Milk as Superfood, published by Columbia University Press. I’ve only begun to read it but I’m as captivated as I expected to be. In the first 52 pages, Mendelson gives a remarkably cogent and clear outline of the science and the history behind milk as a food for humans. And it is revelatory! I think most of us are aware that the ability of northern Europeans (including many North Americans) to digest milk as adults is a cultural and physiological anomaly, but Mendelson explains why, and then goes on to explore the role of milk in imperialist expansion, or perhaps the role of imperialist expansion in the history of milk drinking. It is a fascinating, challenging, and provocative thesis and Mendelson defends it with grace and intelligence. I’m looking forward to spending a good deal of time with the rest of the book, absorbing it all with pleasure. Whoever knew that plain old milk, the most banal item on the American table, could be so riveting?

Incidentally, Anne Mendelson, as well as a fine writer about food and food issues, is one of the best editors on the planet, this at a time when the craft of editing seems to be disappearing, especially from writing about food. That may be why this book reads so gracefully.