Preserving a tradition
Pickling vegetables and making charcuterie are passions for some local chefs
Sel de la Terre's sous chef, Mike Bolen, takes food preservation seriously. It includes salt, smoke, and whole animals. His menu changes with the seasons. This month Bolen is offering duck prosciutto (the cured meat is usually made with pork); a confit-style pate with the shoulder of the pig, studded with bright green pistachios; and goat rillettes (another riff on the pork classic).
This housemade charcuterie is presented to customers on rustic cutting boards with traditional French cornichons, slices of baguette, and spoonfuls of whole-grain mustard. "The whole point of charcuterie is to use what we have - what may have otherwise been thrown away," says Bolen. These dishes began with scraps, which he turns into good food, some might say gold. "Charcuterie is my passion," says the chef.
With refrigerators, freezers, airtight containers, and overnight shipping, there isn't a need to revert to the age-old practice of preserving food - hang sausages, bury the har vest, pack barrels with salted pork, salt fish, store meat in the chimney, or even make charcuterie. But the sour, salty, sweet, and complex flavors are still irresistible. So while it may not be practical for you to fill the back closet with hanging ham hocks and bubbling crocks of pickled vegetables, it is for chefs. Many in town are pickling and preserving as if their larders depended on it.
At Rocca, Tom Fosnot serves seasonal pickles as part of his antipasti. Plates boast carrots, cauliflower, green beans, onions, celery, and fennel - all slightly vinegary. The South End chef packs the vegetables in jars with red wine vinegar, sugar, bay leaves, mustard seeds, thyme, salt, and peppercorns and sets them in the fridge for a couple of days to get sharp and crunchy. "It's not really preserving," he says. "But it's delicious."
The art of preserving is so much a part of Korean tradition that no meal is complete without kimchi, the fermented cabbage dish. At one time in Korea, giant batches of kimchi were prepared in the fall for the coming winter. Cabbage, and some combination of daikon radishes, turnips, garlic, chilies, ginger, and seaweed were packed into crocks with salt and buried to ferment and sour in the cool ground. The dish fed families during the lean months.
In Somerville at WuChon House, chef and co-owner Jangsup Kim prepares a quicker kimchi year round every day. His customers like the pickled cabbage more for pleasure than sustenance, but it hasn't lost it's meaning. Kim says, "Koreans still feel hungry unless they have had kimchi."
Today, you can buy kimchi at many Asian markets, the way you can buy charcuterie in every village in France. Here, it's harder to find homemade pates and terrines. The Butcher Shop in the South End offers charcuterie in its retail store, and on the menu. Twice a week, cooks produce sausages and hot dogs, and a revolving menu that might include duck liver mousse, a terrine of poached beef tongue layered with sweetbreads, a pork terrine with Moscato gelee, and chicken or rabbit galantines, all elaborate dishes few bother to make anymore.
Chef Greg Reeves says, "If we get a whole pig, we sell the rack and chops as they are, use the fat back for sausages, turn the head into posole, stuff the trotters, and braise the shanks. Some cuts are tender right off the animal. Some need more work. We're not going to make terrines out of rib-eye steak."
Reeves is making enough charcuterie for the shop and the restaurant, which is one reason he can order so much meat. At the tiny Craigie Street Bistrot in Harvard Square, chef and owner Tony Maws makes all the classics, but in smaller batches. He's serving two French sausages - boudin blanc, which is white, and boudin noir, which is dark - along with venison sausages, his own duck prosciutto made with Banyuls, and salmon and sardines he cures himself. "Part of charcuterie is introducing layers of flavor. But the preservation also takes the pressure off of having to sell everything while it's fresh, and we can add value to inexpensive cuts of meat. It's technique oriented - not just salt and pepper."
Maws extends the techniques to the garden. "Fruit and vegetables obviously taste their best in season," he says. "I buy a lot when it's cheap and plentiful." In the walk-in cooler, he stores pickled sea beans, shallots, ramps, Vidalia onions, mushrooms, watermelon rind, preserved lemons, candied citrus, beets, and rhubarb.
"It's not enough to do seared tenderloin and mashed potatoes anymore," says the chef. "Molecular gastronomy is great, but nothing beats a Lyon pork sausage studded with pistachios and poached in red wine."
At T.W. Food, chef and co-owner Tim Wiechmann buys half a veal calf every other week and on the weeks in between, small pigs. "There are plenty of chances to make charcuterie," says the Cambridge chef. "Right now we have a country pork liver pate, ton of sausages, and pork head roulades coated in breadcrumbs and mustard and seared in the pan."
Last November Wiechmann bought 1,000 pounds of vegetables to store in the root cellar he built in the basement of his Marblehead house. In a 20-by-20-foot space, he buried celery root, beets, leeks, dried beans, shallots, and onions, covering it with another 1,000 pounds of dirt. He uses them a little at a time. In the summer he wants to pickle vegetables from the garden.
"The old way is always the good way," he says. 