How to Cook A Wolf

Sourdough bread: yes. Sourdough waffles: yes, Dry cured bacon: yes. Sauerkraut: yes. Pressure-cooker chana masala: yes. Air fryer chicken wings: yes. Borne out of circumstance, we've baked, cooked, preserved, and experimented in our own kitchen, like so many others have this past year or so. It's not the Depression-era or wartime creative-out-of-necessity cooking, as described by MFK Fisher in her book How To Cook a Wolf. (Although there was that run on flour all over the country: remember that a year ago spring? Friends shared their flour supply with me, and one day my bread-baking neighbor discovered some precious rye and grabbed an extra bag for me.) It's also not the same world as Fisher's: she would be surprised by the grocery online ordering and delivery, the elaborate restaurant take-out, even to-go cocktails. But somehow there is something familiar there in Fisher's account. (She has figured prominently in my observations about food rituals earlier too, see Provence, 2013.)

I don't even think it's about the eating of the meals, although Fisher's wider works certainly celebrate the pleasures of eating. Maybe it's just the idea that meals--the planning of them and making them--in times of scarcity or in times of lockdowns, become especially pronounced in our daily lives and center firmly on where we make our homes. Meal-planning and preparation during the pandemic feel more painstaking, maybe more thoughtful, definitely slower. While my household is not looking into how to cook wolves, we read the At Home section in the NY Times each Sunday, looking for new takes on roasted chicken or one pan-meals, or we watch Samin Nosrat on Netflix or Kenji Lopez-Alt on Youtube, for ideas about how to use ingredients, or try new cooking techniques with basic kitchen tools. We confer during our work 'breaks' at home about the next meal. Even if we opt for takeout, there's a similar quality; we ponder the options and look over the online menus carefully before making our orders. And we consult cookbooks, on our shelves or online. Just last weekend, I was able to visit my in-laws (thank you Pfizer vax #2!), and I gathered and steamed clams from their beach, digging through my mother-in-law's cookbooks for the right recipe. While I'm no Kenji, I recorded the results on my own 'cooking video' last week to show some friends. You can call it my How to Cook Clams contribution to Youtube (below, or here Part 1 and Part 2). This is all to say, meals have become a central focus in many folks' day to day lives during the pandemic. That won't change soon, or ever, but it will shift. To mark the two weeks following our COVID vaccines, my spouse and I enjoyed a celebratory dinner the other night, at a real restaurant, with wine, with appetizers, with dessert, for the first time since 3/11/2020! We sat in the enclosed outdoor dining area at Ethan Stowell's How To Cook a Wolf restaurant in Seattle's Madison Park neighborhood, and while I did enjoy my meal, very much, I especially enjoyed eating it in someone else's dining room. 

Provence, 2013

While not as macabre as the gory scenes in the horror movie my sons watched with their friends last night in honor of Halloween, my local boucherie (butcher shop) is featuring brains, hearts, kidneys, necks, and intestines right now.  All parts of the lamb are available, including cervelle d'agneau (lamb's brain), coeur d'agneau (heart of lamb), rognons d'agneau (kidneys), as are pale legs of veal and filet mignon porc (what we call pork tenderloin in the U.S.).  The clerk at the butcher explained to me that it is butchering time. Some of the foods associated with this time are regional specialties from here in the South, such as pieds paquets (lamb's legs and tripe).  And not only this, it is also hunting season in France (last year at this time I first tasted wild boar, see Les plats traditionnels, Nov. 2012).  Sciolino of The New York Times Paris bureau describes the culinary excitement in Paris that comes with the annual start of this wild game season (see "Turning the Hunt into a Trip to the Market," The New York Times, Oct. 28, 2013).

At the Boucherie du Palais, Oct. 2013

Because of my family's sojourn in France where food and the eating of it are considered quintessential to the French way of life, food has been a topic more than once on my blog (see À table, May 2013, Où est le boeuf? February 2013, La cuisine fusion January 2013)  However, I haven't fully explained that there is a sociological specialty that considers how food and eating are intertwined with our social experiences, institutions, and structures. Food and its consumption is highly sociological because food has meaning not only on the personal level, but socially and culturally too.  What we eat, how we produce the food and process it for consumption, and how we eat it are all closely tied to who we are as individual and social beings and what we represent as societies.  The connections between society and food happen to be especially evident in France, with its tight seasonal and regional following of food and wine traditions, as represented by the autumnal dining focus on organ meats and wild game described above, and the myriad specialties associated with the different regions in France.  This week, I discovered in Marseille another specialty, this one associated with the Mediterranean part of France, a pan bagnat.   It's an excellent version of a tuna sandwich that comes from Nice, and it typically features bread moistened with olive oil, and olives, anchovies, and capers.  (Here's a recipe from the New York Times, "Pan Bagnat" by Melissa Clark, June 12, 2013.)

If you can avert your eyes from the outstanding view, the sandwich on the left tray is a pan bagnat

As we know, the French food culture has had foodies from elsewhere gushing and writing about it for decades.  Yet, France is not alone, nor is its culture frozen in place.  All societies have intimate connections to food, and they all have their food moments, when new processes, ideas and even new practices come about.  Just as societies evolve while retaining traditional elements, so do their foods and the rituals associated with them.  I've just picked up Luke Barr's Provence, 1970: M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard and the Reinvention of American Taste where he writes about a seminal moment in the evolution of the U.S. food culture, and in a more contemporary vein, I've casually been following the popular New York Times' food writer Mark Bittman's growing emphasis of vegetarian and vegan recipes over the past 2 1/2 years.  As it turns out, my family's French food moment, let's call it Provence, 2013, is ending soon, as we are returning to the U.S.  Bittersweet as that may be, it doesn't mark an end to my sociological observations of daily life. It just means that now I will see for myself if a vegetable-based food revolution is taking place in the U.S., and how that may be reflected in social terms.

Une pendaison de crémaillère

We had a lovely crémaillère (housewarming party) last weekend, and we decided that we would stay in this elegant apartment on rue Papassaudi at least through June.  The apartment is very comfortable and is beginning to feel like a home.  (A pendaison is the chain that holds the crémaillère over the fire, and cooking dinner over a fire like that warms up the house, doesn't it?)  Much of the comfort stems from the fact that we can control the heat inside the apartment, during the summer and even now, as we have air conditioning, which is quite a luxury here. 

Unfortunately, our propriétaire (landlady) has other plans for our appartement (apartment), and we must be out by January at the latest!  This means I am now having to plunge into the world of real estate, something I was able to avoid because this furnished apartment was recommended to us by an acquaintance and we made the agreement privately.   Without personal connections though, finding an apartment is a challenging and expensive endeavor in France.  Real estate agencies work for the landlord, so the renter must pay the agency a finder's fee (usually one month's rent or more) and the renter's deposit also is often held by the agency (and not easily refunded).  The agencies post their listing together on the Internet, but are slow to respond to email queries (they don't really work for the renter!).  Phone calls work much better, but require a little more fortitude especially with one's poor French skills.  I THINK I have an appointment to view one apartment à vendredi à quatorze heure (Friday at 2 pm), and we'll see tomorrow if I got that right.  Today, I came upon a service that connects landlords to potential renters directly for a much lower fee and visited the spartan office and found no suitable listings at the moment.  Even with this organization, you get shafted as the renter, because the fee is not contingent on whether you find a suitable property and sign an agreement, but merely gives you the right to connect with the landlords of properties you are interested in over a six month period. 

Renters also have many upfront costs.  Many apartments do not come with the fully-equipped kitchens.  Renters may have to buy refrigerators, stoves, ovens, dishwashers and microwaves.  Likewise, laundry is not a given.  So, those items add to the cost for renters significantly, as does the renter's tax that we just found out about, that must be paid if one is renting at the end or beginning of a calendar year.

Then there are the considerations about where to live.  We are in an elegant apartment on the deuxième étage (3rd floor, but the French call it the second floor because the ground floor is not the first floor but the ground floor), with 3 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms, high ceilings, a nice floor plan, a full kitchen and laundry, and even a tiny balcony in the center of the building where the sky is visible if one looks upward.  And we are right in the middle of the old town.  Our street is quaintly narrow so we can easily see into the apartments of the college students across the street (if my neighbor in Seattle lived here, we wouldn't even need a phone to call each other to wave from our respective living rooms.  We could just open the windows and say bonjour!)  I wouldn't want to drive up in my car, although delivery cars use this street every morning.  Allen parks our car in one of the nearby city parking garages, of which there are several around the périphérique (the ring road that circles Aix).  Monoprix, my grocery store, is just around the corner, the barber is in the other direction, the boys' school is 5 minutes away, and at least 5 bakeries, 2 wine shops, and as many lingerie shops are all within a very short walking distance, for those last minute hankerings.   There are some lovely and affordable villas and maisons à la campagne (in the countryside) surrounding Aix, but this shifts the lifestyle considerably.  Some come with piscines (pools), but may require more furnishings, and would almost certainly require an additional car, and more time management.  And, I do so enjoy the foodie M.F.K. Fisher's chronicle of her time in old Aix many years ago (see Two Towns in Provence), living not far from where we do now.  She too was captivated by the energy here.  

So, while I have now completed most of the boys' school and sports-related paperwork, and my fall quarter community college course is underway, a new fall project is upon me, one that will surely expand my French skills, as I deal with agents, and potential landlords, and who knows who else.  In addition, we think our shipping container has or is about to arrive in port, so we will have to deal with local moving agents here, to pay storage of the contents for a few months or arrange to have our 39 boxes sent here, and then schlep them all ourselves to wherever we end up living.  All of this is beginning to make the atmosphere in our current home feel a little warm!


(ps. Aixoise friends, let us know if you hear of any apartments in the vicinity, T4, 3 chambres, 95-100 m2 minimum!)

picture credit: http://prunelle.skynetblogs.be/archive/2004/08/18/pendaison-de-cremaillere.html