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The
Pleasures of Slow Food: Celebrating Authentic Traditions, Flavors, and
Recipes by Corby Kummer Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Triple Treat I’ve long read and admired Corby Kummer’s
writing in The Atlantic. When his new book, The Pleasures
of Slow Food, came out, I was ready to read. There are three real
pleasures in this book. First, the stories about the participants in the slow
food movement around the globe are fascinating and inspiring. A reaction to
fast food, and a viable alternative, the slow food advocates are doing much
to educate the palate and the behavior of consumers, not just foodies.
Second, the photographs are breathtaking, taking the viewer into scenes.
Finally, the recipes look appealing, and provide a real bonus to readers.
Here’s an excerpt (pp. 46-9): In
the relentless late-summer heat of the Algarve, on the southern coast of
Portugal, shirtless young men bent over shallow rectangular pools of seawater
dense with salt use wooden rakes to draw the wet white salt to the side. The
long, pyramid-shaped salt piles that build up look like miniature alpine
peaks on a blinding winter's day. It's a disorienting image on a sunbeaten
morning. After
a siesta, the young men return to the small salt pans, laid out in a winding
patchwork following the line of a tidal marsh area a few miles from the
Atlantic. They have exchanged their flat-bottomed rakes for long-handled
skimmers that look something like butterfly nets. Again they bend over the
water, looking for irregularly shaped gossamer formations that skitter along
the top—visible only if you catch them at the right angle, glinting in the
sun. This
is fleur de sel, or flor de sal to
the Portuguese. It's the cream of the salt pan, the newly formed crystals
that float on the surface before becoming big and heavy enough to fall to the
bottom. The micalike formations must be harvested quickly, within hours of
forming, before they fall. Fleur de sel is a legend in
the world of gourmet salt—a rare, almost unfindable, extremely expensive
legend. The content and health benefits of fleur de sel
and the hand-harvested traditional sea salt that the young men raked in the
morning—itself rare in an age of bland, mechanically harvested sea salt—are
identical. What's different is the texture. Fleur de sel
crumbles at a touch and melts on the tongue. It has a vibrant, full, almost
sweet flavor that's a world removed from purified salt. The
fleur de sel that has recently excited chefs and
gourmets in many countries is something French chefs have long known about,
because they got it from the coast of Brittany. Fleur de sel
has always been a luxury ingredient, to be sprinkled over a dish at the very
last minute—before it can dissolve into the sauce madere or the filet
a poele, so the diner can have the pleasure of the slight
crackle between the teeth and then the quick, delicious melting on the
tongue. Only
in the 1990s did a salt-harvesting cooperative in Guerande, in Brittany,
begin to export little bags of. fleur de sel to
retail to gourmet shops as a boutique item. Demand for its unique flavor and
especially its texture almost immediately outstripped supply. Few people
willing to pay a royal sum for it know that a beautiful, and many would say
superior, version is being sold in Portugal at a fraction of the price. That's
because the men raking the Portuguese salt pans began doing it only at the
end of the 1990s, when an idealistic group of young marine biologists took an
enforced detour from their plans to make and sell algae through Necton, their
newly formed company. The detour was the result of learning about the ancient
history of their carefully selected site. Their new home was on a part of the
Atlantic coastline long among the world's primary producers of a product man
cannot live without: salt. The
knowledge of how to care for salinas, small salt pans—a whole language of
terms for tools and the cycle of tending and harvesting—was being lost. Marenotos,
salt-pan workers who grew up knowing it, were aging and disappearing as their
children looked to other businesses to survive. With the salt pans and the
workers went a fragile ecosystem already at risk in a heavily touristed part
of Portugal. Its
unplanned role in the revival of an ancient trade won Necton a special Slow
Food Award in 2001. The award will be of great help in allowing the company
to do what it must: make the beautiful, pristine white, delicious,
environment-conserving but labor-intensive salt pay for itself, so the
idealistic group can get back to its original plans. A
driving force of Necton is the energetic Joao Navalho, who was born in
Mozambique in 1965 of Portuguese parents and moved to Lisbon as a child.
While earning a graduate degree in aquaculture, he and Vitor Verdelho, a
friend studying biotechnology, won a grant to look for new ways to harness
Portugal's natural resources. Portugal needed to take advantage of the
Algarve's sun and sea, the graduate students thought, beyond bargain-rate
planeloads of German and English tourists. These visitors didn't help the
environment, and neither did the big hotels built speedily and carelessly to
house them. The
students wanted to use new technology to make large quantities of algae that
produce beta-carotene, which is valuable to food producers who want a
healthful, nonchemical orange dye. In 1994, they began looking for a part of
the coastline with maximal sunlight and plentiful clean seawater. After years
of searching, they found the perfect spot: twelve hectares (about thirty
acres) of salt marshes in the protected National Park of Ria Formosa, in the
tidal flats near the tourist centers of Olhao and Faro. Seville is just
ninety miles away, and Lisbon one-hundred-eighty. The constantly beating sun
and the continual flow of seawater, free of polluting effluents from the
industries that mar much of the Atlantic coastline, would be ideal for the
cutting-edge technology they planned to use. A few grants and their own
educations would be their capital, and they would run the company on
socialist ideals: all workers, whatever their position, would be stockholders
and share profits. Then the recent graduates found out about salt. For
thousands of years, salt was the reason people came to this particular part
of the world. The Egyptians were probably the first civilization to evaporate
seawater methodically to extract salt, and the Phoenicians probably
brought their early
technology to the Portuguese Atlantic coast. The
presence of Roman ruins in the Algarve suggests that the Romans produced salt
there, as they did on much of the coastline. By the year 1000, the Algarve
was sending salt to the rest of Europe, and in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, the Age of Exploration, salt helped Portugal consolidate its
position as a world power. A payment of salt enabled the Portuguese to regain
Brazil from the Dutch. But
the countries of northern and eastern Europe learned to mine rock salt in
caves, and in the mid-twentieth century, mechanization in the mines and cheap
transport and better roads across the Continent made sea salt relatively
expensive. Mechanization arrived for the production and harvest of sea salt,
too, including in the Algarve. After World War II, the marenotos found
they could not withstand price competition from dirt-cheap rock salt, and
abandoned their work tending salinas to find jobs in factories and cities.
Portuguese sea salt, even if mechanically harvested, maintained its high
reputation: large conglomerates sell Portuguese sea salt to the French, for
table use, and ship inferior salt back to Portugal. But the small salt pans
that had kept alive local economies and agricultural artisans vanished. Navalho
and his coworkers were upset to find that small salt pans on their own and
adjoining property had been abandoned to become communal dumping grounds. The
only businesses they saw around them were standard fish farms and huge salt
pans regulated by computers and harvested annually by machines with almost no
help from workmen. (Private land ownership is allowed within the large
national park, as long as it is for nonpolluting agricultural use.) The rest,
the honeycomb of small rectangular salt pans that followed the sluices of the
intertidal shores, were falling out of use. "The
place was like a desert," Navalho tells visitors touring Necton. "I
like to see flamingos and birds. If you don't fill the pans with water every
year and you're not taking care of them every day, they'll be dirty, dry, and
ugly. And the birds will be gone—not just flamingos but avocets, plovers,
egrets, dozens of others." The
collaborators faced an urgent, and large, change of plan. Their first
commitment was to the environment. That meant keeping the wetlands—a rare
survival in a highly populated region of the world's most productive
ecosystem after rain forests—wet. They already employed a marenoto,
Maximino Guerreiro, to take care of the industrial-sized salt pan on Necton's
property. Guerreiro, who grew up tending small salinas, warned the new owners
that they'd better take care of the smaller pans, too, if they didn't want
them to turn into dumps. Besides, he said, the salt from the the summer
rather than once at the end, ahead of the fall rains—tasted much better and
was much healthier, too. He could find the tools, and show young apprentices
how it was done. Through
the spring and summer of 1998, the year after Necton began, the regular
Necton workers tended the pans. They were helped by a few young men Guerreiro
trained during the busy salt harvest, which happens every five to seven
weeks, depending on the heat of the sun and the force of the drying north
winds. At summer's end, Necton had a crop of dazzlingly white salt. The
young directors were thrilled. They had made a magnificent product. Then they
tried to sell it, and quickly realized why they saw so much trash instead of
salt on their way to and from work. According
to Portuguese law, Necton can't even sell its salt for the table. In 1973,
the government set new standards defining three categories of salt. The
highest was pure sodium chloride, the product that industry wants. Sodium
chloride is a primary ingredient in the making of glass, paints, batteries,
explosives, and glues; plastics makers need it for polyvinylchioride (PVC),
the polymer in plastic wrap and many other products. It is also the salt most
people buy for the table. Additives such as iodine and fluoride are allowed
for table salt, as are the anticaking agents potassium cyanide and aluminum
silicate. The second category is 96 percent sodium chloride, and the third is
anything below 96 percent—Fit only for trucks to dump onto the road, not for
the table. This seeming last choice is really the first: the world's chief
use of salt is to prevent freezing. Necton's
salt, incredibly, falls into this third category. Hand-harvested, sun-dried
sea salt has a far greater variety of mineral salts than plain, purified
sodium chloride. Some of these mineral salts, like magnesium, iron, and
calcium, are particularly good for health, and occur in high quantity in
unpurified sea salt. Unprocessed sea salt also contains many micronutrients
that are washed out of mechanical salt along with all the other impurities
that machines introduce. But Portuguese authorities consider unwashed,
unpurified sea salt to be unfit for human consumption. The best Necton could
do that first year was to sell its salt at the same price as the mechanically
harvested crop from their one large salt pan—even though the hand-harvested
salt required ten times as much labor. The mixed salt would be washed and
"purified" in a processing plant. Necton
found a way around its status problems through the guidance of a neighboring
natural reserve where another marenoto was still producing traditional
sea salt. An administrator of the reserve brought together a few marenotoi
in a group called TradiSal, and helped several of its ten members obtain
what is likely the world's only certification of unrefined organic sea salt.
The certificate, issued by a French group called Nature et Progres,
guarantees that salt has been found free of eighty-two possible contaminants.
including pesticides, radioactivity, various bacteria, and the heavy metals
that often appear in trace quantities in industrial salt because of the
machinery that rolls across salt beds. For Necton, winning the certification
has the extra benefit of demonstrating that the algae it plans to sell will
be produced in a pure environment. But
it won't change antiquated Portuguese law. TradiSal is petitioning Lisbon to
exclude two categories from the restrictions of the infamous third class:
traditional sea salt and flor de sal. It also wants to create
an internationally recognized logo that will appear on each bag of salt, and
to create a market that will appreciate, and pay for, it. "We don't want to
be the salt kings," Navalho says. Necton just wants to preserve an
endangered tradition and the endangered environment that goes along with it,
before turning back to real work – making algae. The Farmer’s Market returns to Oak Park
this Saturday, and I think I’ll head over to see what locally produced, fresh
food I can buy to prepare slowly over the next week. In the meantime, I’ll
take another look at Kummer’s The
Pleasures of Slow Food. Steve Hopkins, May 27, 2003 |
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ã 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the June 2003
issue of Executive
Times URL
for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Pleasures of Slow Food.htm For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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