Sunday Cookbook Review Vol. 2

Inspired by the oh so very literary focus of Substack, I’ve decided to do a new series of posts in which I review cookbooks (or books about food and cooking).

The idea is I’m going to start posting them on Sundays.

Because Sunday is a good day for leafing through cookbooks, it feels like. To me, at least. I also think Sunday is well-suited to longer, slower contemplations about smaller, perhaps less vital subjects than the ones we grapple with all week.

Giving our full attention to the more mundane daily actions we perform can be an act of self care. A meditation, even. —Me, being right

So slow down with me today, this second official Sunday of the newly-minted era of The Sunday Cookbook Review. Long may it run!

kick in a buck or two for Ed's 5G bill

Settle in, grab yourself a gussied-up coffee drink in a proper glass or mug, and read a blog post about reading a book. Then maybe you’ll be in the mindset to grab a cookbook of your own and make a lovely Sunday dinner for you and yours. Or maybe not, but regardless, you’ll surely benefit just from slowing down and contemplating.

That’s the idea, at least. Come join me!

"It is of course entirely owing to the Sculptor's appetite for marble and stone," she writes, "that this work came into existence in the first place, and that I am held in the mysterious grip of olive, lentisk, fig, and vine".

Gray is British and the book chronicles her experiences eating and cooking while mostly living in very rustic areas during the 60's and 70's, far from any sign of tourism or modernity. She often cooks over open fire, without the benefit of refrigeration, and describes some very challenging situations.

The food, therefore, is unrefined and typical. It's the everyday fare of the peasants, farmers, fishermen, and others who she encounters, and, for this reason, the book is not only a cookbook, but a reminiscence of the people she meets and gets to know.

Even moreso, it’s a document of their culture, the more traditional lifestyle, which, even 30-40 years ago, Gray was insightful enough to recognize was in danger of being forgotten as more and more harbingers of modern, industrial life crept in.

Poverty rather than wealth gives the good things of life their true significance. Home-made bread rubbed with garlic and sprinkled with olive oil, shared--with a flask of wine--between working people, can be more convivial than any feast. My ambition in drawing in the background to what is being cooked is to restore the meaning. I also celebrate the limestone wilderness.

If I stress the rustic source of culinary inspiration, it is not in opposition to the scientific...

In my experience it is the countryman who is the real gourmet and for good reason; it is he who has cultivated, raised, hunted, or fished the raw materials and has made the wine himself. The preoccupation of his wife is to do justice to his labours and bring the outcome triumphantly to table.

In this an emotional element is involved. Perhaps this very old approach is beginning to once again inspire those who cook in more urban situations.
In my view it was not necessarily the chefs of prelates and princes who invented dishes. Country people and fishermen created them, great chefs refined them and wrote them down.

This book is way ahead of its time.

Gray presages recent trends of nose-to-tail eating, seasonal cooking, foraging, locavoreism, and pickling/preserving. Of course, that's because these "trends" aren't really new or trendy at all, but are simply an indication that within our modern urban enclaves, we've become so removed from normal, centuries-old building blocks of food preparation, that the re-introduction of them by current chefs within the context of contemporary restaurants appears novel or trendy.

Classic French provincial cuisine, Tuscan cooking, Catalan cuisine--these culinary traditions all came directly from centuries of people living and working in these regions, harvesting their natural bounty.

Patience Gray lived and worked among these folk and relished in their customs and traditions. She somehow intuited that these were dwindling endeavors in a modernizing world and that someone needed to document it all for the ages.

Gray writes about Mantua in the Lombardy region of Northern Italy:

The princely life of the Mantuans has been obliterated by time, malaria, and the Austrian occupation, leaving only its shell.

Oblivious to this, farmers from the countryside come into town and are found imbibing a dense bean soup at ten in the morning in the trattorie underneath the arcades of the Palazzo della Ragione which towers over the marketplace.

The shops are stuffed with gigantic hams; every kind of smoked and fresh sausage; coppa, smoked loin of pork in the form of a large sausage closely bound with string; bondiola, a smoked boiling sausage round in shape; musetti con lingua, made from pig's snout and tongue; lardo, salted pig's fat cut from its rump; capelli dei preti also called triangoli, small triangles of stitched pork skin stuffed with sausage meat, then smoked, for boiling; and nuggets of smoked pork strung together to be flung into the soup.

In agricultural areas where communications are spasmodic, the pig figures as the winter saviour of mankind. Its products can be kept at hand without deterioration, and, if not of domestic manufacture, can be acquired on weekly trips to town.

The fact that pork is indigestible gives a greater significance here to game in autumn. It also throws vegetables into a relief, the green leafy ones, spinach, spinach beet, cicoria 'Catalogna'; the astringent artichoke and cardoon; and most particularly, those root vegetables whose virtue lies in a certain bitterness--root chicory, salsify, scorzonera, and black radishes. All are ritually prepared to offset the ill effects of the delicious products of the pig. One can cultivate a better acquaintance with these roots by growing them.

Tossin’ a little homespun folk wisdom into the stew as well! This is the long-held belief that tempering the rich fattiness of pork products with astringent bitter greens aids digestion.

Bitterness is often thought to stimulate bile or gastric enzyme production which many believe helps the body more easily break down heavy, fatty meats. This is why Italians often drink a bitter aperitivo or digestivo before or after the meal.

At its heart, this book is a more of a monument to a simpler lifestyle than it is a condemnation of our modern, current-day lives crammed with our everything-all-the-time excess.

Visitors coming to summer in Spigolizzi can be heard to exclaim:
'Qui c'e un vero paradiso' (Here is a real paradise)

And the locals reply 'Ma l'inferno purtroppo e tanto piu comodo!' (Yes, but Hell is so much more convenient!)

Classic, wry pastoral vs. urban humor. Takes you a minute, right?

Patience Gray died in 2005, but she left behind an amazing and timeless memoir, cookbook, and treatise on food in the form of Honey from a Weed. Buy it instead of that Rachael Ray book you might impulsively grab the next time you're at the bookstore.