I usually think of cooking as ingredients + techniques. Recipes are supplements. It’s a little dishonest, because I often start with recipes, even if I don’t follow them. Recipes are how I first started cooking. But logically I think of them as secondary phenomena.
When I’m thinking this way, I think that no quality – not daring, not experience, not knowledge, not equipment, certainly not instructions – is more important in the kitchen than humility. Because no matter what I do, how many steps I follow, or how accurately I measure the stupid flour, I am never, ever going to make anything that is anywhere near as complex, as nuanced, or as delicious as a (good) peach. Or, you know, a fruit you actually like.
That’s the recurring theme of many of my household gods – Elizabeth David, Alice Waters – whose wisdom has become so conventional as to be annoying. Great food is all about great ingredients. Everything else is secondary.
But it leaves out another obvious truth (besides the fact of my laziness): there is wonderful, sometimes rather complicated, food that is made without wonderful ingredients. And that’s what most poor people – i.e. most people – eat when they eat well. Because “simple” “peasant” food is freaking expensive, but expertise can be cheap.
There was an eloquent column about this in the New York Times a couple years ago. I think it must have been a response to Michael Pollan’s magnum opus magazinium and the frenzy of snack-time virtue that ensued.
The article — which I can’t find now, so please comment if you remember the author’s name! — wasn’t dissing the wonders of fresh, local food. But it defended as excellent, and worthy of the greatest respect, the marvelous dishes that people make every day using cheap ingredients from the grocery store like dried beans, canned tomatoes, oil, cheap cuts of cheap meat, and bottled spices.
This is the ancient chowhound vs foodie divide, from the point of view of the home kitchen.
Obviously “cheap” depends on your point of view. Cheap meat is incredibly expensive to the planet, to the animals, eventually to billions world wide. But if you don’t have much money, whose point of view are you going to look at your dinner from? If you do have money, whose point of view should you consider before that of people who don’t? And if you are lucky enough to eat a delicious meal, inexpensively but expertly made, from what point of view should you judge it?
ETA: WordPress suggests that this post is connected to articles about “intelligent design” and Glenn Beck. Welcome to blogging, me!
This is a great post. No one ever really talks about this, but it is something I think about daily.
I’ve been everything from “overspending vegan” to “unemployed” in the last ten years. I have done quite a bit of flip-flopping.
I’ve never been much with the judging (unless it is on television. OMG Ina Garten just spent $60 on lobster FOR SANDWICHES!) but now that I’m employed full time and therefore lazy at home, yet still on a pretty strict budget, I’m struggling to find a balance that is neither too expensive, too time consuming, nor too void in nutrition nor taste. The irony is that I’m spending a lot of money and time in the creation of this routine, ha.
A couple things I’ve notice are good/better/better value when bought the cheap way, depending what you are using them for:
Frozen spinach. Awesome. The fresh spinach in my area looks like crap and is full of E. Coli probably, and even if it was decent I would spend like six times as much plus a bunch of labor to chop it down and cook it down to what I could get frozen for 75 cents. The frozen stuff is chopped fresh and flash frozen, so it is arguably better off than the “fresh” stuff which has been sitting wherever for weeks.
Any canned tomato product, about the same thing. Unless you got a garden. And if you did, I’d be advising to make tomato products and can or freeze them.
Canned beans. They are not for everything, but the alternative is dried anyhow, usually. The difference is sodium and heat used in the canning process, but if it wasn’t there I would probably salt and cook my bean dish anyway.
I’m not always in favor of saving time and money above quality, but for certain ingredients, I think the trade-off is totally worth it, if not nonexistent.
Thanks so much for visiting, and for your comment.
OMG Ina Garten just spent $60 on lobster FOR SANDWICHES!
Maybe that’s why she can’t afford shoes *g*
Sarah, I have belated realized which Sarah you are. Actually the HDGF figured it out – I was wondering if you could be my sister, and thinking not. /o\ Hello!
I am actually getting absolutely gorgeous spinach right now from the farmers’ market that’s 2 blocks from my house. Lucky me. But I agree that it’s one of the better bets for frozen veg, and there are times when that’s worth it. I can’t say it tastes the same, though.
I read a rule of thumb many years ago which I think can apply to almost anything humans come in contact with, and certainly food:
There are three ways you can have things: cheap, fast, and good. Most of the time, however, you can only have two of the three. Thus, if it’s cheap and good, it probably won’t be fast. If it’s good and fast, it probably won’t be cheap. And if it’s cheap and fast, chances are it won’t be good.
There are exceptions to the rule, of course. But, operating on that premise, I can pick which is the most important to me in any given situation, and proceed accordingly.
I’ve heard that one, and it does apply to the kitchen, doesn’t it!
A customer at my grocery store was lamenting the cost of vegetables and said, with a wry smile, “That’s why Obama wants us to grow our own vegetables.”
Lots of my customers are gardeners. Before planting season started people were clamoring for vegetable seeds, and when they finally arrived they flew off the shelf.
Rice is not cheap, especially for families with a rice-based diet. 10 years ago a 20-lb bag of rice is like, $8.99. Now it’s $16.99. Prices inflate a lot faster than wages.
I had heard about the inflation in the price of rice in Asia, but not here. I remember reading a year or two ago that rice cultivation was being pushed out by the demand for ethanol, among other problems (such as the cost of shipping).
Thanks for bringing it to my attention, and for your perspective on the upsurge in gardening. Gardening isn’t all that much of an option in NYC as a rule, though I was reading today about an enormous rooftop garden in Brooklyn. Where you live people must be able to harvest a ton, if they have space and time to cultivate.
I’ve heard all kinds of theories about the rice inflation, though not the one you mentioned. Some say it’s the rise in oil price which increases the cost of shippping, some say it’s hoarding.
Some of my store’s vegetables is supplied by a little old Vietnamese lady. I don’t know if she’s local or she’s from further outside city limits. The co-worker that I like the least–a real know-it-all once told me to tell my customers that the Vietnamese lady’s vegetables are organic should anyone asked. I can’t say that!
Cheap also depends on your timeframe, doesn’t it? I mean, getting the vegetable beds going was pretty expensive, both in money (that pear tree cost $70!) and labor. And some of those expenses will recur every year – all those bags of sheep manure add up, you know? and peas have to be replanted every year, and so on. But we spend less and less every spring, as some of what we grow is perennial (like the pear tree, we hope) and some reseeds itself, like the lettuces and some herbs, and some tomatoes. So I’m hoping that over time we actually save money on fruit and veg by gardening, even though right now we’re probably not paying much less per tomato than we would at the organic produce section of the good local supermarket.
I do believe that some people (like the customers that Auden mentions at her store) can save money/enhance their diet on the cheap by growing their own. Maybe even where you live, though where Auden lives the growing season must be twice as long, so you may not have to work it as hard. And as you say investment over time – but that’s part of that “peasant” thing. And if you don’t have access to land to garden, especially not year after year, then it’s a whole different economy./chain of free association.
There was actually a wonderful article in the Washington Post last month -saying things we knew, but really well – about the high cost of being poor, both in the premium you pay for everyday goods and services and in time (e.g. the time it takes to take the bus or to use the laundromat). Which comes back to that initial initial question of the high cost of simple food.
PS I thought you didn’t like pears?