Blog Archives

SUMMER FOOD BLOG SERIES: Remembering Through Food

7/30/2016

Much of the year, I am in the country where I was born, exploring Italy’s less-traveled roads and recipes with my guests, who mostly come from my adopted country, the United States.

For me, Food.Stories.Travel allows me to connect with the heart of the matter when it comes to food: Time spent with my grandma Letizia in her kitchen, and my desire to remember her through her recipes, like the one for anchovies with green sauce, which I have written in her own hand. My grandmother is no longer here but I feel her with me again through her food—an onion frittata, insalata russa, bagna cauda, and stuffed cabbage.

Food is a window into the culture and any chance I get, I want to hold this window up and share the view with those in the country I call home now. Rachel, my wife, wrote in May about how you can visit Italy even without a passport based on what we do in Boston to recreate Italian conviviality and atmosphere through cooking classes and dinner parties with my Naples-born colleague Angelo Guida, a professional chef based here in Massachusetts.

One of my favorite aspects of America is how richly mixed the culture is and the fact that you can travel, in a way, to another place right from where you are. In the last five years, I have met plenty of incredible Italian food makers and chefs – like Angelo – who lives right around me here in Boston!

Just as we would on our tours in Italy before the cooking classes, we like to emphasize Know Thy Farmer, as Dan Barber of Blue Hill Farm calls it. This has been the Italian way for centuries and we are excited to offer this close connection to the farmers and the land by featuring their local and organic ingredients whenever possible in our authentic, traditional Italian recipes.

Many Americans know Italian food, but there are many lesser-known, regionally-specific recipes to be tried—with more opportunities to use fresh New England produce and products! For instance, I love to feature zucchine alla scapece, green savory torte, or green sauce.

Some of our cooking classes are in people’s homes, others are in beautiful venues like the Dedee Shattuck gallery in Westport. This summer, Angelo and I are offering two cooking classes in the gallery and will be stopping by Round the Bend Farm and Eva’s Garden beforehand to collect rich stories and ingredients for the kitchen. From the farms of Massachusetts, we will then “travel” to Italy.

Stories, conviviality, and tasty foods and wines are the three components I look for when enjoying a meal. I have found eating together is the best way to connect with the people who grow or make your food with the ones around the table—now or in the past—and with yourself.

I cannot imagine anything more enriching than this. Blending flavors, cultures, traditions and the people who care about them forms a bridge that connects me straight from the heart of my old country to my new one. It inspires me and helps me try to be a better person— all through the simple but profound act of sharing edible gestures of love.

In addition to being an official Slow Food Small Business Supporter, Cristiano Bonino has enjoyed cycling for twenty-five years and in 2001 started to guide, sell and design cycling tours, mostly in Italy, with an American company, sharing his passion with fellow travelers and helping them discover local foods, wines, culture and history from the vantage point of the saddle! Across many miles, Cristiano has honed his understanding of the cultural and traditional distinctions among regions of Italy, the importance of conviviality at the table, and the value of sharing our stories of lives. In November 2013, Cristiano pursued his passion for meeting people and learning their stories by founding Food.Stories.Travel, a small tour operator offering educational guided journeys in Italy (by foot or by bicycle). Food.Stories.Travel. focuses on local traditions, culture, history, and meeting food makers while tasting and supporting their works.

He still sees the bicycle as a great (and healthy!) vehicle for travel and, whenever possible, also scouts new tours this way. Currently he also works with PuntoTours consulting and leading cycling vacations in Europe.

This post "Remembering Through Food" is also featured on Cristiano's tour blog; to read more about his culinary adventures, discover authentic Italian recipes, or to embark on a food tour guided by Cristiano himself, visit Food.Stories.Travels.

SUMMER FOOD BLOG SERIES: Seeds of Place ~ Rooted in Tradition

7/24/2016

Heirloom seeds are a cultural inheritance gifted to us, and worthy of our stewardship. The lives of our ancestors are reflected each time we sow a seed, and every time we gather around a table. Connections to our shoreline, fields and waterways remind us daily of our reliance upon our landscapes for food cultivated from a sense of place.

With the resurgence of farmers markets, we are once again able to enjoy the freshness and flavor of locally grown food. New generations of local farmers and fishermen are rebuilding age old systems which fed us from the waters and soils of the seacoast. In the process, we have created vibrant new communities, healthier environments and strong local economies.

We are once again learning to live with respect for our ecosystem. When we eat seasonally, we are reminded of a time when we lived closer to the land, and in greater harmony with the rhythms of place, and the time of year. In winter, we ate foods that we had carefully stored and preserved to insure our survival during the cold months. In spring, we knew thousands of perennial plants and cold tolerant annuals that could sustain us before warm weather crops came in. During the summer, our diet was rich in produce. In autumn, our household traditions were deeply rooted in preserving the harvest and putting by the abundance for winter.

Eating from the land is not new for New Englanders. Once the glaciers receded along our coastal landscape we foraged, hunted and fished. Well over 1,000 years ago, Native Americans in Massachusetts took up the practice of agriculture. Archeobotanical evidence, historical documentation, and living collections help us understand how these communities fed and nourished their families. The early agricultural pattern of planting corn, beans and squash/pumpkin together, known as 3 sisters planting, is widely recognized as one which offers the highest yield pound for pound of any other method known in the world today. Together they create a nutritionally balanced diet that can be eaten fresh or stored throughout the winter. Today, strains of the varieties which back yard gardeners and local farmers have kept alive include cranberry bean, long pie pumpkin/Algonquian squash and Roy’s Calais Flint corn.

Like the beans we understood to provide valuable protein in our diet, generations found free harvest and winter sustenance in the black walnuts, chestnuts and, hickory nuts that dropped from the trees. We added spice to life, and medicinal attributes through plants like wintergreen, teaberry, bee balm, mint, rose, sassafras, sumac, spruce and sarsaparilla.

From these first nations, we learned how to make local sweetener by tapping trees for syrup in spring and gathering watercress from springs in the mid-winter. We learned to forage for spring fiddleheads, summer fruits like strawberry, raspberry, blackberry, blueberry, elderberry, currants, gooseberry, wild cherry, beach plum, grape, and cranberry to accompany the fall harvest.

The centuries have taught us the best seasons to harvest wild foods like wild allium (garlic, leeks, onions, chives), and the right times of year to harvest roots like Jerusalem artichokes and ground nuts. We even foraged for sea vegetables, like kelp, laver, dulse and saltwort.

By the 17th Century, the first immigrants to the region began to plant the seeds of their European cultural inheritance. They quickly adopted the native crops of the region, and made regular attempts to grow old world field corns like peas, wheat, barley, wheat and rye for making the familiar bread, beer and pottages that they consumed in Europe.

They brought orchard fruits like apples, pears and a range of small summer fruits like currants, gooseberry, cherry, plum and quince to sweeten life until the fall harvest. They brought perennial crops like skirret, salsify, sorrel and asparagus. Hardy crops like cabbage, onion, parsnip, turnip, beet, leek, collards, kale, and cauliflower and heirloom varieties of greens like orach, purslane, corn sallet (mache), sorrel, chive, endive, chicory, and good King Henry. They also carried seeds of familiar greens like lettuce, spinach, chard and arugula (which they called rocket or roquette). All told, over 170 documented culinary and medicinal were plants introduced within the first 100 years of colonization.

Historically we knew nearly 20,000 food plants that we relied upon around the world. For the ease and profit of agribusiness distribution channels, we have reduced our staple crops to fewer than 2 dozen. This does not mean that we are eating the best or most delicious, it means that it is easier to ship a head of iceberg lettuce, a stone hard tomato, unripe green peppers and bananas that we can market year round.

With the resurgence of back yard gardening and local farming, we are once again getting to enjoy seasonal, local produce which achieved full ripeness and nutritional value in the field.
Our tax-dollars provide massive subsidies to agribusiness. These corporations are built on a consolidation model that finds it more advantageous to ship food an average of 1500 miles, than to invest in local agriculture. We are finally coming to understand that all of this comes at a cost to our health and environment.

Fortunately, local knowledge often reinforces the most sustainable place-based practices.
Food miles and our reliance on petroleum based chemicals and shipping are reduced when we harvest kale from our own back yard or purchase melons from a local farmer. Nutritional value and food safety are improved when our crops are ripened to full maturity in the sun and soil. And above all, the freshness and flavor of a back yard tomato fully ripened in the sun, is unparalleled by anything that can be purchased.

Whether by a Thanksgiving feast, a can of baked beans, a local brew, or a family excursion to forage for blueberries, we are reminded of our historical roots each day at the table. Just as your parents taught you that there was nothing as sweet as a strawberry found in nature, we must make an effort to share the wild-side, and cultivate the uncommon in the next generation.

Each time we recreate an old family recipe, we keep these connections to culture and place alive. Each time we opt to plant an heirloom seed, buy a traditional crop from a local farmer, brew our own beer, or throw a fishing line in the water, we keep memories alive. And the roots we tap into may well be those of the Native Americans who cultivated the land before us, or those our grandparents brought from their homeland.

Today, as we are confronted by unlabeled GMO’s, chemically infused “food-like substances” and unsustainable agricultural practices, we are all empowered to make a difference. By reconnecting to our roots, imbibing a sense of place, and performing an important role as environmental stewards. With the littlest seed that we can hold in the palm of our hand, we can sow the seeds of change.

Wendell Berry suggests that “eating is an agricultural act. What seeds will you plant with your family this year? What traditions will you keep alive? And how will you help others in this region sustain themselves long into the future?

In our work locally and globally with Slow Food, we like to say “eat it to preserve it”. In my life experience, I find that life is more digestible when we savor the fruits of our own labor, when we invest in our own communities, and when we remember that the quality of our food and water is only as good as the environment that we safeguard.

It all begins with a seed. Throughout our history, community has been built and celebrated from the landscape and around the table. Our local food movement today has sustainable roots. Through food culture we have crafted a regional quality of life that has helped our vibrant, edible community spring back from its roots.

John Forti is a nationally recognized lecturer, garden historian, ethnobotanist and garden writer. He is the Director of Horticulture for the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, the oldest horticultural society in the nation. Before taking on this new position, he was the Curator/Director of Historic Landscapes at Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth, NH. He previously served as the Director of Horticulture at Plimoth Plantation Museum where the gardens and seed program he created brought international attention to the preservation of Pilgrim and Wampanoag heirloom crops.

John co-founded and served as the board chair for Slow Food Seacoast. He serves on the bio-diversity committee for Slow Food USA and is a governor for Slow Food Massachusetts. He also serves as chair of the board for the Herb Society of America’s New England Unit. Thousands on Facebook follow his posts where he blogs as The Heirloom Gardener - John Forti.

SUMMER FOOD BLOG SERIES: Let Us Potluck Together

7/15/2016

Which came first, the community potluck or the community cookbook?

When I think about it, I imagine one community’s potluck led to sharing handwritten recipes on note cards and scrap bits of paper that were later kept in a recipe box. I imagine that recipe box filled with collected bits of flotsam and jetsam was later transformed into a meticulously organized and handwritten notebook of favorite recipes. Then, I imagine some enterprising housewife carefully reproducing her own notebook multiple times to hand out to friends and family at future potlucks. Although the first known publishing of a community cookbook came from a group of women raising money during the Civil War, I imagine community cookbooks had a humbler beginning at the table of a potluck.

From those humble beginnings, a whole industry arose. Community cookbooks were the source for sharing cherished recipes and secret cooking tips. These later gave way to curated and edited formal cooking ‘instruction manuals’ that guided readers in producing repeatable dishes through standards and instructions. Now, with entire sections dedicated to cooking and food, bookstore shelves are adorned with celebrity cookbooks that come with memoirs, the food adventure novel and the behind-the-scenes celebrity tell-all. All books laced with a few select recipes to support the story.

With this evolution, selling cookbooks has become a thriving industry, especially when compared to the sales of other printed books. At the same time, the fact that cooking at home is on the decline is in sharp contrast to our obsession with buying cookbooks. Although I regularly cook all my meals in a week at home, I know I am guilty of buying the hottest, new cookbook only to leaf through it while sitting on the couch watching a rerun of SVU as I absently gaze at the glossy photos of beautifully plated dishes. I will survey recipe ingredients and add a few promising dishes to the ‘must make that’ file of my mental archives – a place filled with lots of great ideas that will never surface again. Then, as I ponder purchasing yet another enticing cookbook, I will hesitate for a moment to consider the many others on my shelf that I have yet to cook a single dish from.

When Serious Eats delivered the idea of a cookbook club to my inbox, it was that pile of underutilized cookbooks that I had in mind. So, I accessed my mental ‘must make that’ archive and created the Boston Area Cookbook Club. The idea is to combine aspects of a traditional book club with aspects of a potluck to help us cookbook lovers cook, share and taste the dishes from our impulse cookbook buys. Like a traditional book club, each meeting focuses on a cookbook selection (or in our case, a cookbook theme). Unlike a traditional book club, the guided dialogue is replaced with filling our plates with recreations of dishes from the selected book as made by our fellow attendees. The discourse on the literary prowess of the author is replaced with a discussion on how well we liked the recipes and whether we felt we succeeded in bringing the author's vision to life.

At each meeting, there are always several dishes that never made it into my ‘must make that’ file. Inevitably, I find myself enjoying every bit of it, marveling at the thought that I dismissed such a tasty recipe during my own casual browsing. I often pick up tips on where to find ingredients, what make good substitutes or how to improve the recipe or instructions. And like those potlucks of our parents and grandparents, we also find ourselves connected with other people who love all aspects of food from selecting their ingredients, to browsing for recipes, to cooking, cooking again and cooking again for perfection, to eating and sharing and breaking bread together, to telling our stories about our food. No, not every dish is a success and no, not every book is a keeper, but the sense of community I get from the cookbook club is both.

My grandmother would tell me this isn’t anything new. She did this every weekend in her hometown. Nonetheless, it is fun to think how the cookbook club brings the community potluck full circle: From a book made of a collection of recipes shared at a community gathering, to a community gathering that shares a curated collection of recipes in a book.

Kimi is an engineer and chef, two disciplines that are natural partners. With both a MS Mechanical Engineering from MIT and a MA in Gastronomy from Boston University, she focuses on creating innovative food experience design and educational programming for a diverse Boston metro audience including hands-on culinary classes, gardening and homesteading workshops, and do-it-yourself demonstrations. Additionally, she has led talks, workshops, brainstorms and discussions on food, local food engagement, food system issues, food technology and sustainability, adding cooking demonstrations and hands on components. She has spoken at conferences including the Aspen Ideas Festival and for programs at Brandeis University and Sloan School of Management.

Kimi is also a Culinary Consultant & Cooking Instructor. Follow her blog No Return Ticket or find Cooking with Kimi on Facebook and Instagram.

Get Ready for the Slow Food Summer Blog!

7/12/2016

Slow Food Boston is excited to kick off its first food blog series with an impressive line-up of special guest writers who have made a name in Boston's local food and agricultural scene.

Throughout the summer, we'll share an original blog post from selected, well-known guest writers who will offer unique insights around eating and growing locally, along with many other interesting stories on a variety of food topics. Hear from renowned local food experts from Boston, ranging from a former local food editor, a local cookbook club organizer, and the founder of a popular culinary tour company. You'll discover a personal, inside look on what one guest blogger misses eating the most from New England when traveling, how another is building community around potlucks, and what it's like for one writer to run a successful online food business.

Be on the lookout for the first installment of our summer series this week and check back here on our blog page to see who we will feature next among our favorite food writers!

SUMMER FOOD BLOG SERIES: Remembering Through Food

SUMMER FOOD BLOG SERIES: Seeds of Place ~ Rooted in Tradition

SUMMER FOOD BLOG SERIES: Let Us Potluck Together

Get Ready for the Slow Food Summer Blog!

Author

Archives

Categories

SUMMER FOOD BLOG SERIES: Remembering Through Food

SUMMER FOOD BLOG SERIES: Seeds of Place ~ Rooted in Tradition

SUMMER FOOD BLOG SERIES: Let Us Potluck Together

​Get Ready for the Slow Food Summer Blog!

Author

Archives

Categories

Get Ready for the Slow Food Summer Blog!